This is the past of Reinhardt—continued into the present and the future by other men. What of his own continuation of it? Some have thought him finished. Fifteen, twenty years of such accomplishment in the theater are likely to drain any man. And indeed Reinhardt does seem to have run through his work in Berlin, and finished with it. No one will know just how much was personal, how much professional, how much philosophic, in the force that drove him to give up the leadership of his great organization, and see it destroyed. The difficulties of management, with increasing costs and actors lost to the movies, undoubtedly weighed heavily. But it is certain that he felt the failure of his big, pet venture, the Grosses Schauspielhaus. It was to have been the crown of his efforts and beliefs—the “theater of the five thousand,” as he had called it from the days when he astounded the world with Œdipus. In structure and design it was badly handled; it proved a bastard thing and won the severe condemnation of the critics. Added to this was a desire, unquestionably, to shake loose, to get a fresh prospect on the theater, to strike out again if possible towards a final, sure goal. Germans spoke of Reinhardt as vacillating and uncertain in his first years in Salzburg. But is anything but uncertainty to be expected when a man has given up a long line of effort, and is seeking a new one? It is a virtue then to be unsure, to be testing and trying the mind, to be seeking some sort of truth and repeatedly rejecting error.
Certainty began to creep in with Reinhardt’s plan for a Festspielhaus in Salzburg—a Grosses Schauspielhaus of simpler and more conservative pattern built truer on a knowledge of the mistakes of the first. It was to unite Reinhardt, Richard Strauss, the composer, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the playwright. It reached some sort of tentative plan at the hands of Poelzig, who mis-designed the Grosses Schauspielhaus, and Adolf Linnebach, then passed on to Max Hasait, who laid out a stage scheme for some new architect to build his plans around. This scheme called for a semi-circular forestage, with a revolving stage in its center, a traveling cyclorama of the Ars pattern behind this revolving stage, a larger cyclorama taking in still a deeper stage, and another and a larger cyclorama behind that. The proscenium was to be narrowed or widened to suit the size of production and cyclorama. The house itself was to be as adjustable, with a ceiling that let down in such a way as to cut the seating capacity from three or four thousand to fifteen hundred.
While this project waited on capital, an almost hopeless condition in Austria, and hints began to come that the Festspielhaus would have to be built in Geneva instead, a new opportunity came to Reinhardt’s hands through President Vetter, head of the Austrian State theaters, an opportunity of working in a playhouse that agreed with much that Reinhardt had felt about the relations of audience and actor. He was invited to produce five or six plays in the fall of 1922 in the new theater in the Redoutensaal in Vienna. Here, upon a stage practically without setting, and within a room that holds actors and audience in a matrix of baroque richness, Reinhardt will have produced, by the time this book appears, the following plays: Turandot, Gozzi’s Italian comedy, Clavigor and Stella by Goethe, Molière’s Le Misanthrope, and Dame Cobalt by Calderon. Here he will have to work in an absolutely non-realistic vein, he will have to explore to the fullest the possibilities of the new and curious sort of acting which I have called presentational. This adventure in Maria Theresa’s ballroom will measure Reinhardt against the future.
CHAPTER X
THE ARTIST AS DIRECTOR
The director of the future may not be a director of to-day. He may not be a director at all. He may be one of those artists whose appearance has been such a distinctive and interesting phenomenon of the twentieth century theater. While we examine Max Reinhardt to discover if he is likely to be the flux which will fuse the expressionist play and the presentational actor, it may be that the man we seek is his former designer of settings, Ernst Stern.
The relation of artist and director in the modern theater has been a curious one, quite as intimate as that of pilot-fish and shark, and not so dissimilar. Attached to the shark, the pilot-fish has his way through life made easy and secure; he is carried comfortably from one hunting ground to another. Often, however, when the time comes to find food, it is the pilot-fish that seeks out the provender, and prepares the ground, as it were, for the attack of the shark. Then they both feast, and the pilot-fish resumes his subordinate position.
We may shift the figure to pleasanter ground by grace of Samuel Butler, the Erewhonian. This brilliant, odd old gentleman, a bit of a scientist as well as a literary man, had a passion for transferring the terms and conceptions of biology to machinery and to man’s social relationships. Departing from the crustaceans, which grow new legs or tails as fast as the old are cut off, he said:
“What ... can be more distinct from a man than his banker or his solicitor? Yet these are commonly so much parts of him that he can no more cut them off and grow new ones than he can grow new legs or arms; neither must he wound his solicitor; a wound in the solicitor is a very serious thing. As for his bank,—failure of his bank’s action may be as fatal to a man as failure of his heart.... We can, indeed, grow butchers, bakers, and greengrocers, almost ad libitum, but these are low developments and correspond to skin, hair, or finger nails.”
I do not know whether it would be right to say that directors have grown artists with great assiduity in the past twenty years, or that the greatest of the directors have become as closely associated with particular artists as a well-to-do Englishman is with his banker or his solicitor. At any rate the name of Reinhardt is intimately associated with the name of Stern; Jessner has his Pirchan, Fehling his Strohbach; I have spoken of the close relationship of Weichert and Sievert, and I could point out similar identifications in America. An artist of a certain type has come into a very definite, creative connection with the art of production, and he has usually brought his contribution to the theater of a particular director.
The designer is a modern product. He was unknown to Molière or Shakespeare; the tailor was their only artist. Except for incidental music, costume is the one field in which another talent than that of actor or director invaded the theater from Greek days until the last years of the seventeenth century. There were designers of scenery in the Renaissance, but they kept to the court masques. Inigo Jones would have been as astonished and as shocked as Shakespeare if anybody had suggested that he try to work upon the stage of the Globe Theater. The advent of Italian opera—a development easy to trace from the court masques—and the building of elaborate theaters to house its scenery, brought the painter upon the stage. The names of the flamboyant brothers Galli-Bibiena are the first great names to be met with in the annals of scene painting. And they were the last great names until Schinkel, the German architect, began in the early nineteenth century to seek a way of ridding the stage of the dull devices of the current scene painters. Scenery was not an invention of Realism; it was a much older thing. I doubt if any one more talented than a good carpenter or an interior decorator was needed to achieve the actuality which the realists demanded. When artists of distinction, or designers with a flair for the theater appeared at the stage door, it was because they saw Shakespeare or Goethe, von Hofmannsthal or Maeterlinck sending in their cards to Irving or Reinhardt or Stanislavsky.