To the significance of the play itself and the proletarian organization which flings it in the face of a Germany where monarchists and republicans, socialists and communists, State and cabals, murder with almost equal recklessness, must be added a truly remarkable type and quality of production. It bears a certain relation to the work of Jessner at the State Schauspielhaus, where, by the way, Fehling is now to be employed. It is absolutely free of Realism and representation—as all expressionist production must be. It reduces setting to less than symbol, to what is hardly more than a convenient platform for the actor. It uses light arbitrarily.
Masse-Mensch is a piece in seven scenes. The first, third, fifth and seventh are actual; the others are dream-pictures. In the first scene Toller’s stage directions call for “The rear room of a workingman’s meeting hall. On the white-washed walls, portraits of leaders of the people and photographs of union delegates. In the center a heavy table, at which a woman and two workmen are seated.” The stage directions for the second scene, or first dream-picture, read: “Indicated: The hall of a stock exchange. At the desk, a clerk; about him, bankers and brokers.”
The playwright felt keenly the possibilities of the modern, subjective methods of productions, or he would not have used the word, “indicated.” He did not feel them clearly enough, however, to risk more than their application to the dream-pictures. But, taking “Indicated” as a key-word, Fehling has boldly ventured to apply abstract and expressionist methods to the whole of this thoroughly expressionist play. In the first scene, for instance, as you see it at the Volksbühne, there is no hall, there is no desk, there are no portraits. There is nothing but a deep box of high black curtains, and in the center a very low, broad platform. Upon this platform, spotted out with three shafts of light, are the two men and the woman in the taut attitudes of wrestlers as they clasp hands, the woman in the middle. For the dream scene, the stage is again in black curtains, but those at the rear are occasionally opened to show a clerk on an impossibly high stool, writing on an impossibly high desk, almost in silhouette against the yellow-lighted dome. A few steps lead down into the darkness of the front stage. Fehling and his stage designer, Hans Strohbach, pursue the same general method in the succeeding scenes. The “real” episodes are set in black curtains and with steps of one sort or another; they are lit by obvious beams of light, and they are given no more color than shows in the woman’s severe blue dress and one glimpse of the yellow dome. The dream-pictures are more elaborately staged, though they seem quite bare by the standard of our productions. The curious part is that the scenes of reality are more expressionistic, considering their purpose, than the dream-pictures. Reality is made of nothing but abstract plastic shapes, harsh, and harshly lit. Dreamland is sometimes painted and shaped in the slightly decorative spirit of Expressionism, and it is lit with beauty and atmosphere.
Masse-Mensch: dream-picture. A courtyard. Towering dark walls lean inward; a green night sky; guards with lanterns seated on the floor at either side. A man stands in the center playing a concertina.
The effective arrangement of Strohbach’s scenes, and the powerful use which Fehling makes of them stamp the physical side of this production with distinction. Spiritually it is even more distinguished because of the rightness of vision with which Fehling interprets the play, and the brilliance with which he handles, not only the individual acting, but a chorus of united voices, which speaks through many scenes with an extraordinary clarity and emotion.
From the beginning of the first scene the actors strike the note of intensity and conviction, both as players and as characters, which they are to carry through the whole performance. Mary Dietrich, once of Reinhardt’s company, plays superbly the woman protagonist of the strike and of humanity. From the moment when her husband comes to her in the name of love to ask her to give up the leadership of the strike, which will begin next day, Dietrich drives with such furious precision at the meaning of this woman that she stands out immediately as a sort of Christ-figure. In the beginning she must give up all; she must leave home and love, to follow her call. In the end she must go to the scaffold rejecting all means of escape. It is one of the distinctions of this play, as well as of Dietrich’s playing, that this reference to Christ is so beautiful and so sure, yet so reticent.
The second scene, the dream-picture of a stock exchange, is a foreboding and dread satire. The bankers and brokers bid up human souls in the war that is under way, and make plans for an international corporation, which, posing as a founder of homes for convalescent soldiers, will open brothels for the troops. The woman appears in her dream, and makes a vain appeal to the humanity of these men. The bankers hear only the announcement of a mine accident and plan a benefit dance, beginning with a fox-trot by the brokers around the stage.
The third scene is the labor meeting at which a decision is to be taken on action to stop the making of munitions and end the war. Here again, Fehling throws the author’s realistic stage directions overboard (much, be it said, to the author’s pleasure). Instead of a hall, there is again blackness, emptiness. Out of the emptiness speaks a marvelous choral voice, the voice of the masses, measured, vibrant, intense:
Wir ewig eingekeilt