With the question of taste goes also another fault, not so grave, yet important and perhaps significant. Jessner appears to worship the obvious, to believe that the theater is a place of A. B. C. impressions and reactions. He is daring enough in his technique but not in his ideas. He flings out symbols right and left, but they are the symbols of the primer. He directs in words of one syllable. Richard III is an explanation in black and white, which occasionally ventures to lisp in white and red. Richard begins the play in black against a black curtain, speaking the soliloquy of “Now is the winter of our discontent.” Richmond ends it in white against a white curtain with his speech to Stanley and his soldiers converted into a soliloquy to the audience. The troops of Richard are red-clothed figures crossing the red steps. The troops of Richmond cross it in white. This is symbolism in baby-talk, presentational production in kindergarten terms. It is not impossible that an audience is up to more than that.
Richard III: on the blood-red steps of Richard’s coronation stands Richmond, a white-robed general at the head of an army all in white.
It may be, of course, that Jessner is feeling his way and that to-morrow he will venture upon subtlety—if it is in him. At any rate, here is a presentational director, a man who forswears resemblance and the picture frame, and who sets actors and their movements, the setting and its lights, talking directly to the audience. This is an advance in the methods of production which makes the new movement of twenty years ago look like an afternoon stroll, a revolt which makes that much-hailed revolution seem a pleasant little excursion. It is an advance and a revolt, however, still looking for a leader.
CHAPTER XII
MASSE-MENSCH—MOB-MAN
Prophecy is a risky business in the theater, especially when prophecy concerns itself with personalities rather than tendencies. I find it very difficult to bring myself to say that the man who will become the leader of the new forces in the Continental theater is Jürgen Fehling, director of Masse-Mensch. And yet—on the basis of a single production—the temptation to believe something of the kind is strong indeed.
Fehling’s work is closely associated with two striking phenomena. One is the Volksbühne, the workingman’s theatrical organization of Berlin, which maintains the handsomest and best devised theater in the German capital; and the other is the play which has been given there with such uncommon success, Masse-Mensch, a strange and powerful tragedy of the “social revolution of the twentieth century” written by a communist leader, Ernst Toller.
The first moment of Jessner’s Richard III. Gloucester, a grotesque, twisted figure in black, stands silhouetted against a black curtain. In contrast to this Richmond speaks the final lines of the play dressed in white against a white curtain.
GLOUCESTER: Now is the winter of our discontent