Continental stagecraft

by Kenneth Macgowan

The war prevented Reinhardt from continuing his experiments in mass-production, and bringing them to fruition in a theater built especially for the purpose. With the coming of peace he was able to remodel and re-open the old Circus Schumann as the Grosses Schauspielhaus. But in less than two years Reinhardt had left it in discouragement, his great dream shattered. By the summer of 1922 it could definitely be stamped an artistic failure—crowded to the doors every night.

An impression of the Grosses Schauspielhaus in Berlin. In the center rises the great dome, dimly lit. At the left of the picture the looming shadow of the hood above the forestage. A shaft of light from the dome strikes across the space to the figure of Judith, standing lonely and brave. Beyond, row after row of faces just visible in the darkness.

It is not easy to trace the cause of failure, but it seems to lie in the curious fact that here Reinhardt was both careless and too careful. Physically the theater was wrong, if the theory was right, and its physical mistakes can be traced to Reinhardt. He was too careful in planning it and not courageous enough. Because he feared for its future as a financial undertaking, he seems to have compromised it in form, in order that it could be used as an ordinary, though huge playhouse if it failed as a new kind of theater. He put in the Greek orchestra surrounded on three sides by spectators. He made the floor flexible in its levels, and led it up by adjustable platforms to a stage at one side of the house. This much was right enough. But then he made the thing a compromise between the Greek theater, a circus, and the modern playhouse, by slapping a proscenium arch into the side wall and installing behind it a huge stage with all the mechanical folderols of the day—great dome, cloud-machine, revolving stage. It was beyond human nature to resist the temptation of playing with the whole gigantic toy. Neither Reinhardt nor the directors who succeeded him could be content, as they should have been, to lower the curtain across the proscenium, to plaster up the fourth wall. Perhaps there were not enough great dramas like Œdipus to draw for months the gigantic audiences needed to support the venture; but this only meant that such a theater must be maintained for festival performances, not that it must be filled with bastard productions requiring a picture stage and largely inaudible across the spaces of the Grosses Schauspielhaus.

Reinhardt was as careless in his selection of an architect as he was careful in compromise. His original conception of the place was excellent. He wanted it primitive and grand. He wanted it to soar. And he thought of early Gothic. Between the pillars that had to be there to support the roof of the old circus, he wanted a dark blue background, a background of emptiness. The dome over the middle was to vanish into a deep presence, lit sometimes by dim stars. Some one got to Reinhardt, and persuaded him that he must be “modern;” he must assume a leadership in architecture; he must give a chance to the greatest of the new architects, Hans Poelzig. Reinhardt consented. And Poelzig produced a very strange affair.

Some of the mistakes of the Grosses Schauspielhaus may be laid to the old building. The banks of seats are rather close against the roof, while the middle of the house is bridged by a gigantic dome. These conditions might have been minimized by giving the low portion lines that seemed to mount, and perhaps by closing in a large part of the dome or darkening it. Instead Poelzig has made the dome the only lovely and aspiring part of the architecture. It is a dream of soaring circles. If the building could only be turned upside down, and the actors could play in this flashing bowl, while the audience looked down upon them—!

The whole house, its innumerable corridors, its foyers and promenades, the walls of the auditorium, the ceiling, the capitals of the columns that support the dome, the dome itself—every inch of the whole is dominated by a single decorative motif, a very shoddy, cheap motif. This is a pendant, stalactite arch, borrowed from the Moorish architecture of Spain, and reduced to the lowest terms of mechanical rudeness. The theater is of concrete and stucco, and this dull shape is repeated endlessly and tediously, as if it had been scalloped out by a machine. Only in the dome, or when it is no more than hinted at in certain wall surfaces, does this shape do anything but bore and depress. On top of this, Poelzig had stained the walls of many corridors and rooms in a yawping red, and turned the main foyer into a ghastly sea-green cavern. The theater is nervous, horrific, clangorous, glowering. There is nothing fountain-like. No spirit wells up in beauty. There is no dignity and no glory.

The fault may not be Poelzig’s, but the lighting of the stage and orchestra seems unfortunately handled. Some of the lights for the inner stage are placed in front of the arch of the proscenium instead of behind it, and thus they illuminate it, and emphasize something that ought not to be there at all, let alone pointed out. The lights for the orchestra originally came wholly from the lower edge of the dome. It was necessary, however, to supply more, and they have been placed in an ugly red hood, which sticks out from the proscenium with no relation to the rest of the house. The lights in the dome stab with a glorious brilliance; the great beams seem to descend unendingly before they reach the tiny figures of the actors, and spot them out of the darkness. But these lights make the first mistake of trying to hide themselves, and the second mistake of not succeeding in doing so. How much better it would be if they were treated frankly as part of the theater; if their source were admitted; if these lamps were hung in great formal chandeliers made a part of the decorative design of the production. For Romain Rolland’s Danton the astute Ernst Stern hung huge lanterns over the scene of the revolutionary tribunal; it was a method that should have been perpetuated.

The productions that Reinhardt made are no longer to be seen in the Grosses Schauspielhaus, for repertory vanished from his theaters along with Reinhardt. You hear, however, of many interesting and beautiful things in Danton, in Œdipus, in Hamlet, in Julius Cæsar, in Hauptmann’s Florian Geyer. But you see no such things now, or at least we did not see them when we were in Berlin. We saw the orchestra filled with seats—perhaps to swell the meager seating capacity of three thousand which was all Poelzig could include after he had wasted front space on rows of boxes and wide-spaced chairs, and perhaps because the new directors feared to use that glorious and terrible playing floor. We saw the forestage shrunk to a platform jutting out perhaps twenty feet. We saw a tedious performance of Die Versunkene Glocke, with the action shoved into the realistic proscenium, with the scenic artist fooling about with sloppily expressionist forms, and with the mountain spirit hopping down the hillside with a resounding wooden thump. We saw Hebbel’s Judith done with much more effectiveness, though without real daring or vision.