Made glorious summer....
Between these two extremes of black on black and white on white the play takes its course.
The Berlin Volksbühne is interesting enough in itself. As the only organization that has been able to produce successfully this expressionist tragedy of communism, its power and position seem highly significant. This society of proletarian playgoers was founded more than thirty years ago as a sprouting bed for naturalistic drama and the social thesis-play. To-day it still cultivates the best in Realism and in the social drama, but it looks condescendingly on the thesis-play, and it gives the most completely artistic and successful example to be seen in Germany of an expressionist play and an expressionist production.
The Volksbühne has always had a double policy—that of buying out performances of good plays and retailing the seats to its members for much less than the box office prices, and that of producing plays itself. It began with a few Sunday performances of both kinds, and steadily grew in membership to the point where it buys all the Sunday matinees at a number of theaters, has two playhouses of its own, the Volksbühne and the Neues Volkstheater, and is organizing an opera house, the Volksoper. One hundred and eighty thousand men and women of the lower and lower-middle classes subscribed in 1922 for eight productions, either at the society’s theaters or at the playhouses with which it deals.
The Volksbühne itself is rather an extraordinary theater. Its striking front, with the words Die Kunst dem Volke upon its pediment, rises across a street that cuts through the workingmen’s quarter of Berlin, and, after a slight bend, crosses the Spree and becomes Unter den Linden. From above its little triangle of park, the Volksbühne stares ironically and, doubtless, a little proudly down the long street that passes the hideous art galleries of the Prussian government, the palaces once occupied by the Hohenzollerns, the State Opera, where royalty turned its back upon Richard Strauss, and runs on to the Brandenburger Tor of Imperial memories. The theater has the grimly noble air of the best of German architecture. In its auditorium Oskar Kaufmann has turned from the austerity of gray stone to the richness of red mahogany. The working class audiences of the Volksbühne find themselves seated, therefore, in the handsomest and doubtless the most costly auditorium of Berlin when they come to see the play which might almost be the story of their own defeat in the communist risings of 1919.
Masse-Mensch itself is a play, half dream and half reality, in which is pictured the conflict of Masse, the masses, against Mensch, the individual, of violent revolution against passive strike. Its drama pleads piteously for the sacredness of human life and the equal guilt of the State or the revolution that takes it. Because it was written by Ernst Toller, who, as he wrote it, lay in a Munich jail serving a twenty-year sentence for his part as Minister of Justice in the red rebellion which followed the assassination of Kurt Eisner by the reactionaries, Masse-Mensch is pretty generally taboo in German theaters. In the first six months after its première at the Volksbühne (29th September, 1921) it was played about seventy times, a very great number of performances in repertory. But upon its production in Nuremberg riots interrupted the first performance, and it was never repeated.
Richard III: the final moment. White virtue triumphs.
Richmond: Now civil wounds are stopp’d, Peace lives again:
That she may long live here, God say Amen!