Continental stagecraft

by Kenneth Macgowan

Is there such a man in Europe to-day? Is there already an indication of his coming in the modifications that other men have wrought in acting, in setting, and even in theater?

We may as well begin with Reinhardt. He has been the greatest man of the theater of this century. He fled from his Berlin theaters in 1920, to find in Salzburg a retreat from disillusion and a place of new beginnings. We found him there in the summer of 1922 preparing to issue forth from the baroque beauty of the loveliest palace of this lovely city to the conquest of America, and to an experiment in Vienna which may make him again the one figure of the theater—the director we seek. And here and there about Europe we came on spasmodic signs of his continued activity—extraordinary plans for a Festspielhaus in Salzburg or in Geneva, and productions of Orpheus in the Underworld and Strindberg’s The Dream Play in Stockholm.

It would be better, perhaps, to call Orpheus and The Dream Play efficient pot-boilers, and to let them go at that. They give no true measure of the man whose strength and vision grew from art-cabarets to which Balieff owes the inspiration for his Chauve-Souris, and naturalistic beginnings with Gorky and Wedekind, until he had assembled the most striking company and repertory west of Moscow, and centered about himself the whole theatrical movement which Craig and Appia began. The Swedish productions are worth a moment’s attention only, for they show some of Reinhardt’s faults, and hint at a virtue.

I write of Orpheus alone, because the qualities of the Strindberg drama were only to be guessed at from photographs and reports, all uniting in dispraise. There were lovely things in this performance of Offenbach’s operetta for which neither director nor composer could claim credit—the light, clear, nightingale voices of the women of the Swedish Opera, their superb figures, and the icy beauty of blue eyes and ashen hair. But the things I remember from Orpheus in which Reinhardt had a share are often disappointing things, scenes slighted, episodes badly lit, above all carelessness of detail. It has been Reinhardt’s major fault, this failure to bring every feature of a production to the highest point of perfection within his grasp. He has always been satisfied to slight one part if the whole could be “put over” by emphasis on another part. Those who remember Sumurûn will recall things in this brilliantly exciting pantomime that struck them as impossibly slack—bad painting on the canvas flats, a bald contrast between the flimsy front scenes and the solid structure of the court of the harem behind.

In Orpheus his negligence seems to have begun in the choice of a designer. A Dane, Max Rée, makes a mess of the scene on Olympus, and gets to nothing better elsewhere than a golden gate from a chapel in Nancy set against a blue night; Cupid against a gray sky, and, for the descent into Hades, white rays from out a great cloud, down one of which the company dances against the velvet black of the back drop. Before now, Reinhardt has let himself wander from his first instincts and desires—which are usually the instincts of Ernst Stern, his notable designer; there are the horrors of Poelzig’s decoration of the Grosses Schauspielhaus to testify to this.

The Cathedral Scene from Faust. A Reinhardt production of 1912, designed by Ernst Stern. Two huge columns tower up against black emptiness. Crimson light from the unseen altar at one side streams on the congregation and throws quivering shadows of a cross on the nearer column.

The three moments of Orpheus which electrified Swedish audiences are common enough in conception, but they have something of the simple directness and smash which characterized Reinhardt’s earlier work. The three episodes are closely linked and make the climax of the piece. There again you can see Reinhardt’s method—the expenditure of so much of his care and energy upon the most important action of the play. In Orpheus the place for such emphasis is the revolt on Mt. Olympus, and the descent of Jupiter and the gods to Hades. Reinhardt begins with the carmagnole of the revolutionists, with their red banners upon long poles rioting about in the light blue of the celestial regions. For the beginning of the descent into Hades, Reinhardt sees to it that there shall be a high point at the very back of the stage, and from here, clear down to the footlights and over them on a runway beside the boxes, he sends his gods and goddesses cakewalking two at a time down into the depths of the orchestra pit. After a very brief darkness, while the cloud and its rays of light are installed down stage, Reinhardt sets the gods prancing down this white and black path into the flaming silk mouth of hell. By recognizing an opportunity for an effect at the crucial point of the piece, and concentrating upon it whatever energies he has for Orpheus, he makes the descent of the gods far more memorable than it can have been in any other production. Yet it all seems a trivial and half-hearted effort for the man who made Shakespeare so tremendously vital at the Deutsches Theater, and lifted Sophocles’ Œdipus into crashing popularity at the Circus Schumann.

In his day Reinhardt was all things to all men. He began with the great naturalist director Brahm of the Freie Volksbühne. He made a Night Lodging of utter Realism. He put on A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a forest of papier-mâché. He brought an austere symbolic quality to Hamlet, closing the play with those tall, tall spears that shepherded the body of the Dane upon its shield. He made the story of Sister Beatrice into a gigantic and glorious spectacle in The Miracle. He championed intimacy in the theater, took the actor out upon a runway over the heads of the audience in Sumurûn and finally, at the Grosses Schauspielhaus, he put the spectators half around the players, and thrust the players in among the spectators in the last scene of Rolland’s Danton.

Instinct led him to the heart of plays, as it led him from Realism and the proscenium frame back to the Greek orchestra and the actor as a theatrical figure. He grasped the emotional heart of a drama with almost unerring judgment, and he bent a tremendous energy to the task of making the heart of the audience beat with it. Occasionally he ignored or could not animate some secondary but important phase of a play. In The Merchant of Venice, though he made Shylock rightly the center of the play and built up a court scene of intolerable excitement, his Portia and his Nerissa were tawdry figures. But his successes were far greater and far more significant than his failures. Romeo and Juliet he made into a thing of youthful passion that was almost too deep, too intimate for the eyes of strangers. Hamlet with Moissi was an experience of life itself, asserting again the emotional quality of Reinhardt as against the esthetic quality of Craig.