The Desert: a setting by Isaac Grünewald from the opera, Samson and Delilah. A vista of hills and sky, painted and lit in tones of burning orange, is broken at either side by high, leaning walls of harsh gray rock. The director, Harald André, has grouped his players so as to continue the triangular form of the opening through which they are seen. At the Royal Opera in Stockholm.
Now what are the relations that this modern phenomenon has established with the theater through the medium of the director? Ordinarily they differ very much from the attitude that existed between the old-fashioned scenic artist and the director, and the attitude that still exists in the case of most scenic studios. This is the relation of shopkeeper and buyer. The director orders so many settings from the studio. Perhaps he specifies that they are to be arranged in this or that fashion, though usually, if the director hasn’t the intelligence to employ a thoroughly creative designer, he hasn’t the interest to care what the setting is like so long as it has enough doors and windows to satisfy the dramatist. Occasionally you find a keen, modern director who, for one reason or another, has to employ an artist of inferior quality. Then it is the director’s ideas and conceptions and even his rough sketches and plans that are executed, not the artist’s. In Stockholm, for example, Harald André so dominates the official scene painter of the Opera that the settings for Macbeth are largely André’s in design though they are Thorolf Jansson’s in execution. Even in the case of the exceptionally talented artist, Isaac Grünewald, with whom André associated himself for the production of Samson and Delilah, the director’s ideas could dominate in certain scenes. For example, in the beautiful and effective episode of the Jews in the desert which André injected into the first act—a scene for which the director required a symbolic picture of the fall of the walls of Philistia to accompany the orchestral music which he used for this interlude. The brilliance with which Grünewald executed the conception may be judged from the accompanying illustration.
The commonest relationship of the director and the designer has been coöperative. The artist has brought a scheme of production to the director as often, perhaps, as the director has brought such a scheme to the artist. The director has then criticized, revised, even amplified the artist’s designs, and has brought them to realization on the stage. And the artist and the director, arranging lights at the final rehearsals, have come to a last coöperation which may be more important to the play than any that has gone before.
Samson and Delilah: the mill. A remarkable example of an essentially ornamental theatrical setting, designed by Isaac Grünewald for the Royal Opera in Stockholm. Black emptiness. A slanting shaft of light strikes the millstone in a vivid crescent. As the wheel travels in its track this crescent widens to a disk of blinding light, and then shrinks again. The actual forms of this setting are sublimated into an arresting composition of shifting abstract shapes of light.
You find, however, constant evidence of the artist running ahead of the director in the creation of details of production which have a large bearing on the action as well as on the atmosphere of the play. Grünewald brought a setting to the mill scene in Samson and Delilah which was not only strikingly original and dramatic, but which forced the direction into a single course. The usual arrangement is the flat millstone with a long pole, against which Samson pushes, treading out a large circle as the stone revolves. The actor is always more or less visible, and there is no particular impression of a cruel machine dominating a human being. Grünewald changed all this by using a primitive type of vertical millstone. The sketch shows the stage in darkness except for one shaft of light striking sideways across. The great wheel is set well down front within a low circular wall. Along the wall Samson walks, pushing against a short pole that sticks out from the center of one face of the high narrow, millstone. As he pushes, the stone swings about and also revolves. This allows the beam of light to catch first a thin crescent at the top of the curving edge of the wheel, then a wider and wider curve, until suddenly, as Samson comes into view, the light brings out the flat face of the wheel like a full moon. Against this the actor is outlined for his aria. Then, while the orchestra plays, he pushes the wheel once more around. This arrangement is extraordinarily fine as a living picture and as an expression of the mood of the scene. Moreover, it is a triumph for the artist, because it is an idea in direction as well as setting. It dictates the movement of the player and manages it in the best possible way. No other action for Samson is possible in this set, and no other action could be so appropriate and effective.
Examples of similar dictation by the artist—though none so striking—come to mind. In Frankfort Sievert arranged the settings for Strindberg’s Towards Damascus in a way that contributed dramatic significance to the movement of the players. The piece is in seventeen scenes; it proceeds through eight different settings to reach the ninth, a church, and from the ninth the hero passes back through the eight in reverse order until he arrives at the spot where the action began. Sievert saw an opportunity to use the revolving stage, as well as elements of design, in a way interpreting and unifying the play. He placed all nine scenes on the “revolver,” and he made the acting floor of each successive setting a little higher than the last. This results in rather narrow rooms and a sea shore bounded by formal yellow walls, but it permits an obvious unity, it shows visually the path that the hero has to follow, and it symbolizes his progress as a steady upward movement towards the church.
The artist dictating a particular kind of direction is obvious enough in Chout (Le Bouffon), the fantastic comic ballet by Prokofieff which Gontcharova designed for the Ballets Russes. Gontcharova’s settings are not particularly good, but at least they have a definite and individual character. They are expressionist after a fashion related more or less to Cubism. They present Russian scenes in wildly distorted perspective. Log houses and wooden fences shatter the backdrop in a war of serried timbers. A table is painted on a wing, the top tipping up at an alarming angle, one plate drawn securely upon it, and another, of papier-mâché, pinned to it. All this sort of thing enjoined upon the régisseur a kind of direction quite as bizarre, mannered, and comic. Chout seems to have had no direction at all in any creative sense. The régisseur failed to meet the challenge of the artist.
