These are all compositions in three dimensions, as well as violations of ordinary human conduct. Jessner can also create symbolic action out of unnatural action without any particular aid from the steps. The scene of Napoleon’s entrance into the throne room of Louis XVIII is an interesting example. The steps give prominence to the throne, and enable the audience to see better; but Jessner’s symbolism has nothing to do with the steps. The scene is made up of some curtains masking each side, two wings cut in rococo curves and ornamented with lilies in rococo patterns. A flat backdrop of the same design and colors—not a very good design or very French colors—completes the room. In this room in an earlier scene Louis has held audience, a fat, yellow-and-white egg of a man, like some Humpty-Dumpty caught in a flood of the fierce white light that is supposed to beat about a throne, and all too seldom does anything of the kind. But now Louis is gone, and the lilies of the wall are shadowed by curtains of Napoleonic blue, which have, for some unaccountable reason, got themselves hung in the room. Napoleon enters through the gap in the curtains, reaches up, seizes the edge of one of them, and pulls it down over the glory that was Bourbon. Then he turns and faces the audience while two files of soldiers march stiffly past him to the opposite side from which each entered. The gesture to the curtains, and the staccato march of the soldiers back of Napoleon, set out the drama of his returning power.
Naturally Shakespeare, even more than Grabbe, gives Jessner exceptional opportunities to symbolize and formalize in direction. He is quick to seize them—particularly in the soliloquies. He begins Richard III with Gloucester speaking to the audience as Prologue; he ends it with Richmond as Epilogue. Jessner always flings asides directly at the spectators. When he comes upon soliloquies—as in Brakenbury’s musings after Clarence has fallen asleep in his cell—he cuts them off sharply from the previous action by altering the lighting, and bringing the actor down-stage to speak full at the audience. He places the murderers squatting on the prompter’s box for much of their chatter. He has the scrivener read Hastings’ condemnation to the audience from the same vantage point, and upon this relic, in poses fashioned a little after Rodin’s Burghers of Calais, he places the three citizens who discourse of the old king’s death and the sorry state of the realm.
Jessner is quite as arbitrary in his handling of light as in his handling of people. He does not use light merely to illumine the stage, as directors did thirty years ago. He does not use light and shadow merely to define action by making faces and figures more dynamic, as Appia set modern producers doing. He uses light and shadow as a parallel expression to the play. Light and shadow act the drama almost as much as do the players. The light is not in the least “natural.” It suits the mood of the scene. It waxes and wanes with the progress or the action. When the little princes enter in Richard III the light shines out more brightly. When Othello dies, it grows dim, then a sharp shaft of light shoots out from the prompter’s box, and throws the shadow of Iago over the tragedy he has caused, and the shadow of the great canopied bed spreads out over the cyclorama, which has stood as a sort of limit of space about the play. Jessner is particularly fond of shadows. When one rival meets another and vanquishes him, Jessner will have him literally “throw him into the shade.” Spotlights, flashing on, create meaningful shadows. An amusing example occurs in the soliloquy of Richard ending:
Shine out, fair sun, till I have bought a glass,
That I may see my shadow as I pass.
As Richard says this, the lights on the stage go down, and a spotlight from the prompter’s box throws his humped shadow on the wall.
Richard III: Gloucester and his shadow. A high green-gray wall extends straight across the stage; in front, a lower wall. As Gloucester speaks,
Shine out, fair sun, till I have bought a glass,
That I may see my shadow as I pass,