Masse-Mensch: the machine-guns. The black curtains at the back are thrown open. Soldiers and officers are seen enveloped in a thin haze of smoke. The group shrinks back and falls together.
Comparison between Fehling and Jessner is inevitable. They are both working upon the newest problem of production, the problem of escaping from Realism to reality and to the theater. They both throw overboard every shred of actuality that stands in the way of inner emotional truth. Technically, Fehling is as insistent as Jessner on the abstract, the formal production as the means of giving the actor and his emotion vividly and completely to the audience. Fehling realizes as keenly as Jessner does how different playing-levels can help him in deploying and emphasizing his actors. He does not, like Jessner, use the same levels throughout a play. He creates new plastics as he needs them. His production is formal in principle, but he does not rely upon a stage of certain permanent forms. His lighting is abstract, like Jessner’s, paying no attention at all to actuality; but it is not so free or so wilful in changes. The lights make a definite pattern in each scene and stick to it throughout. The only sharp exception is the scene of the dance of the condemned. Fehling does not try to make his lighting a running gloss to the words of the play.
Fehling may be much over-praised by the emotion of Masse-Mensch; perhaps there is a something in the passion of the play which lights up these players and these playgoers of the Volksbühne, and brings forth a unique and unwilled emotion. But there seem to be certain qualities in this production which stamp the director as a man of imagination and power. Certainly Fehling has a large and healthful simpleness. He isn’t finicking over rudimentary explanations with lights and shadows and primary colors. He isn’t missing the quality of the play in an endeavor to create a thing of a single startling or novel tone. He is certainly winning from his actors a spiritual coöperation finer than any that we saw in Germany. He is unmistakably one of the leaders along new paths—a sure and challenging force.
Masse-Mensch: A woman dressed in blue in a dream-prison of twisted scarlet bars, surrounded by motionless dark figures. Behind, gigantic spectral shadow-shapes march across a faintly luminous void.
CHAPTER XIII
“THE THEATER OF THE FIVE THOUSAND”
Over some fifteen years a growing number of minds have been more or less actively seeking a way towards a new type of theater. They have been abusing the picture-frame stage, stamping on the footlights, pulling out the front of the apron, pushing the actors into the loges, down the orchestra pit, onto the prompter’s box, out upon runways or up the aisles. They have even gone clear out of the playhouse and into circuses, open air theaters, and public parks. All to set up a new and mutual relationship between the actor and the audience.
You might almost say to set up any mutual relationship at all; for the players of the peep-hole theater of Realism, the picture-frame theater, the fourth wall theater, can hardly be said to have anything resembling a relationship to the spectator. The thing peeped at can’t be aware of the peeper. A picture does not know that it has an audience. Walls may have ears, but the fourth wall has no eyes. It is the essence of Realism and of realistic acting that they have their justification in the thing they resemble, not in the people who may or may not be able to recognize the resemblance. A perfect realistic performance is a thing so close to life that it cannot permit itself to be aware of even its own existence. Its perfection is so much more related to the thing it imitates than to the audience which looks at it, that it would be no less perfect if there were no one at all to look. The fourth wall is a fourth wall. It might just as well be as real as the other three. Alexander Bakshy wrote of Stanislavsky’s company: “It would have made scarcely an atom of difference to the adequacy and completeness of the Art Theater’s performance if the audience had been entirely removed.”
Such performances can be very interesting in their way, extraordinarily interesting, in fact, when such players as Stanislavsky’s bring spiritual distinction to their Realism. But there is another sort of thing that can be interesting, too. Some think it can be more interesting; at any rate they want to find out what it was that kept the theater contented for the twenty-five centuries before it knew Realism. They want to draw out the actor and the spectator; the actor out of the picture frame and the spectator—if the actor is good enough—out of his seat. They want to make the actor an actor once more. And they think that a new sort of theater—or a very old sort—might have something to do with it.