The first scene from Othello as staged by Leopold Jessner in Berlin. On long curved steps which remain throughout, and against the neutral background of the cyclorama, the artist, Emil Pirchan, puts the barest indications of place. Here, Brabantio’s house gleams like a moonstone against a background of neutral-tinted distance.
The presence of the artist as director in some future theater without scenery, implies a decided influence on the type of acting.
Such a stage itself, thrust boldly at the spectators, if not actually placed in the midst of them, tends to dictate a frank, direct contact between players and audience. In such a house an actor will be all but forced to desert the purely representational style of to-day, and to present himself and his emotions in an open, assertive, masculine manner as objects of art and of emotion.
The tendency of the artist towards this kind of theater implies, I think, a tendency towards presentational acting. Certainly I have talked with few who were not receptive to it.
Put together a stage that tends towards presentational acting and an artist whose instincts run to the same ends, and the outcome is not difficult to foresee.
The problem at present is, what artist? And where? And how soon?
CHAPTER XI
A NEW ADVENTURE IN DIRECTION
The outstanding director in the German theater to-day is also the most radical director. And the most radical director is at the head of the Prussian State Theater, the Schauspielhaus, in Berlin. His name is Leopold Jessner, and he is the only man who has threatened to fill the place made vacant by Reinhardt’s retirement. Some say that he has already filled it, and—with disarming logic—that Reinhardt was only a mountebank anyhow. Some think Jessner a clever eccentric. Certainly he is the most discussed personality in the German theater, and his methods are the most debated.
One word crops up whenever his name is mentioned—Jessnertreppen. The German language has boiled down into a single word an idea that we would have to phrase as “those crazy steps of Leopold Jessner.” It makes a handy stone for the anti-Jessnerites to throw at the director’s friends. Jessner’s friends are beginning to have the good sense to pick up the stone and throw it back. For the word Jessnertreppen hits off a virtue—perhaps, the main virtue of the man.
