Continental stagecraft

by Kenneth Macgowan

There are plenty of sources of confusion in discussions about art. To begin with, it is not an easy thing to limit a dynamic organism by definition. Creative efforts in drama, fiction or painting run out of one category and into another with distressing ease. More than that, there are apt to be many parts to a whole, many divisions to a category; and the parts or the divisions can be extraordinarily different. Finally, fanatics and tea-table gossips are equally unscrupulous when it comes to “proving” a point. They make the definitions of friends and foes mean what they like. They take the part for the whole, the division for the category. They pin down a lively and meandering work of art at just the place where they want it. Two disputants, bent on exhibiting the more indecent side of human intelligence, can make the twilight of discussion into a pit of black confusion.

Let us bring the thing down to the present quarrel in the theater: the quarrel with Realism, which has moments of clarity; the quarrel with Expressionism, which is murky as hell.

What are we going to mean when we talk about Realism? So far as this book goes, the word Realism means a way of looking at life which came into vogue about fifty years ago. It sees truth as representation. It demands a more or less literal picture of people and happenings. It insists that human beings upon the stage shall say or do only those things that are reasonably plausible in life. Resemblance is not always its end, but resemblance is a test that must be satisfied before any other quality may be admitted. Realism is not, of course, a matter of trousers, silk hats, and machinery. The realistic attitude can invade the sixteenth century, as it does in Hauptmann’s Florian Geyer. Trousers, silk hats, and machinery can be the properties of a non-realistic play like O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape. The test of Realism, as the term is here employed, is the test of plausibility: Would men and women talk in this fashion in real life under the conditions of time, place, and action supplied by the playwright? It is the business of the realistic playwright to draw as much as possible of inner truth to the surface without distorting the resemblance to actuality.

There should not be a great deal to quarrel about in such a definition of Realism, though its adherents may deny hotly the natural assertion that the method of Realism is barren either in whole or in part. At any rate, people generally understand what the row is about, and the disputants can kick up only about so much dust on this battle-field. Non-realism is another matter.

That the thing is the opposite of Realism is obvious in just one respect: It does not admit the test of resemblance. It denies in the theater, as furiously as do the works of Cézanne or Picasso in the picture gallery, the validity of representation. But what will it substitute for the technique of Realism and what will it call the substitute? It will go back to romantic periods for a free technique, but it will look forward for its materials along paths which psychological research has lately opened to men and women outside the ranks of true poetic genius. By this it may arrive at the inner truth of Shelley and Goethe, Shakespeare and Æschylus, while it sacrifices the outer truth of Ibsen and Bataille, Pinero and Galsworthy. The question is both of technique and of materials, for an inner truth is to be found in a study of the unconscious mind which will not brook the obstructions of actuality and resemblance. Inner truth is so much more important than actuality that the new type of drama will not bother itself to achieve both, and if one must infringe on the other—which must happen in almost every case—then it chooses quickly and fearlessly the inner truth.

To give this anti-Realism a name involves confusions dear to the heart of the controversialist. To give it the name Expressionism multiplies these confusions. Yet it is hard to see any alternative at the moment. We must embrace the name—and the confusions.

The chief confusion is due to the fact that there are two kinds of Expressionism, as there are doubtless two kinds of Realism. There is the larger and there is the smaller. Realism can be a mere technique—resemblance; and it can also be a resemblance through which you catch a vision of the soul. Expressionism can be seen by the friends of Realism only as the narrow, neurotic, violent, and formless art which displays itself in the dramas of the new German writers like Georg Kaiser. I should be prepared to defend this sort of Expressionism against the Realism of Augustus Thomas or even of John Galsworthy; but I should not admit that it was the end of the reaction against resemblance. Expressionism may be applied—and for the purposes of this book it shall be applied—to the whole tendency against Realism, just as Romanticism is applied to the whole tendency against Classicism. Many who dislike Realism and neurotic German Expressionism equally, prefer to give the form they seek some such well-worn and inoffensive label as Poetry. This finickiness doesn’t matter—except as it admits new confusions and dodges the issue. This issue is plain and should be kept plain. Realism, in any but a very extraordinary sense, is a cramp upon art. Instinctively artists of the theater are beginning to recognize this and to seek some way out. This involves new qualities in the play. For practical purposes let us call the way of escape Expressionism. Some other term may establish itself in the course of years, but for the moment this is all we have.

It is fairly easy to apply these terms and definitions to the current theater—if you are not too doctrinaire or too partizan. Realism yawningly enfolds ninety-nine out of a hundred playwrights. Maeterlinck and D’Annunzio require a little special attention and Shaw and Barrie raise nice points. But, in general, the distinction holds; resemblance shepherds the realistic plays, emanations of the unconscious guide us to the expressionistic. Even the purely representational performances which most of our actors and directors give do not always succeed in hiding the cleavage.

The most startling and disturbing experience that any friend of Expressionism can have is to sit through a performance of Tchehoff’s The Cherry Orchard by the Moscow Art Theater—even by that portion of Stanislavsky’s celebrated company which was cut off by Wrangel’s army while playing in Southern Russia and compelled to tour Europe for two years before repatriation was possible. Here is a play of a generation ago written by the man whose dramas were the cornerstone of success for the world’s greatest realistic theater. It is a genre study almost without plot: decayed aristocrats, old servants, newly-rich peasants and the incident of the sale for debt of an ancestral property. There is no more violence in it than the violence of life which rots an oak. There is no more distortion than is to be expected in light reflected from the troubled surface of life. And it is played with an almost utter perfection of realistic detail, complete impersonation, and rounded ensemble.

Yet if this is Realism we have never known Realism in our theater. It carries us through life and out on the other side. It drenches us with a mystic sense of existence. And when we read the text of the play and separate it from the extraordinary emotional actuality of the performance, we discover again and again and again speech that drives straight at free expression instead of resemblance, and action and character permeated with an almost religious symbolism. All this fused by playwright and players into what seems a work of the most perfect resemblance, but what is actually only the appearance of appearance.