There are times when you can see him arranging his actors with nothing but the esthetic aim in mind. Take the first scene in which Napoleon himself appears in Grabbe’s drama. It is not a particularly good setting in some ways; it is a rather obvious and ugly silhouette of a bastion and a slanting parapet leading up to it. The scene shows Napoleon receiving reports from an officer and giving orders. Jessner deliberately places Napoleon on top of the bastion against the sky and stands the officer stiffly on the parapet below; the relation of the two men as characters in the play is thus established visually as well as through the text. The relation of the two men as a composition—not as characters—has to be disturbed by the entrance of a second officer. It is obviously impossible for Napoleon and the first officer both to retain their positions if the second officer is to fit into a composition. Accordingly the first moves just enough to establish a new esthetic relation embracing all three.
Jessner is free with his dramatic compositions and occasionally altogether too obvious. He keeps his dominant people at the top of the Jessnertreppen, or brings them down as they lose command. He handles the accession of Richard III as Shakespeare did, and as very few directors have since done. When the burghers come to ask Richard to be king, they find him “aloft, between two bishops,” in compliance with Buckingham’s advice: “Go, go up to the leads.” Jessner has Richard walk upon the platform above the wall; it is his first appearance on high and he maintains his place until the battle at the end. At the close of Napoleon, the emperor, who has appeared hitherto only at the top of the steps, is seen seated, broken and disconsolate, on the lowest step of all, with a sinking sun behind him, and the soldiers above.
Othello: act 4, scene 2. Iago lurks in the shadow of a great black shape distorted like the trunk of some fantastic tree. Cassio pursues Roderigo along a narrow path which skirts the base of the cyclorama; you see their running figures, far away and small.
It would seem safe to infer from all this that Jessner is not a realistic producer. He might, of course, have achieved many of these effects within a natural setting, but only at the cost of a great deal of laborious planning and manœuvering. As a matter of fact, Jessner doesn’t use one ounce of energy trying to be either natural or plausible. His method is openly expressionistic.
Jessner distorts the natural in a hundred ways to achieve something expressive of the drama. The first scene in Napoleon, as he gives it, is supposed according to the text to pass in the arcades of the Palais Royal, lined with booths. Various episodes, dialogues, and harangues take place between different speakers and different knots of the crowd. The usual method of handling such a scene is to turn on and off the speech of the different groups of actors at will, making certain speakers and parts of the crowd obligingly inaudible to the audience. There is little enough of nature in such a business, but Jessner banishes even that. He keeps the stage empty except for small crowds that rush out, along with the speakers or show-barkers, for particular episodes.
Jessner handles crowds even more arbitrarily at times. Later in Napoleon, during a riot preceding the news of Napoleon’s return from exile, a revolutionist kills a tailor. As his body sinks to the steps, the crowd of red-clothed men and women falls upon him, almost as if to devour the corpse, and covers the steps as with a great blood-red stain. In Richard III, when Gloucester appears as king in a red cloak upon the top of the red steps, which are placed for this purpose against the wall, his eight retainers, also in red, sink down in a heap below him like a pile of bloody skulls. In Othello, when the Moor returns in triumph to Cyprus a cheering crowd comes with him up the steps from the back. When he has reached the top and can go no higher, the crowd sinks prostrate. For a moment he seems to grow in stature, and his triumph to tower upward.
The prison scene from Richard III. A triangular patch of light discloses a low arched opening in the nearer wall of the permanent setting where Clarence sits in chains.
CLARENCE: Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl,
Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels....