The Inner Stage of the Grosses Schauspielhaus as set for the gates of Holofernes’ palace. Designed by Ernst Schütte.
Judith, however, shows some of the possibilities of such a theater. The beginning strikes in on the imagination with the impact of the shaft of light that beats down on Holofernes, sitting like some idol on his throne. Though he is almost back to the curtain line, instead of out in the midst of the people, he drives home the effect of seeing life in the round which such a theater can give. Here is talking sculpture. The costumer, as well as the actor, is given a new problem: the problem of clothes and the body that, like a statue, must mean something from every angle, must have beauty and significance from the back as much as from the front. The costume of Holofernes, at least, achieved this. The actor has another problem, the problem of a different movement and a different speech, movement slower and grander, or else long and swift, speech that is more sonorous, more elaborately spaced. The actor’s part—in spite of rather second-rate players—is the part best done at the Grosses Schauspielhaus. There is a natural aptitude in the German player for the grand, slow speech, the roaring tempest. It is like the aptitude of the German people for the grand slow play. They like drive, rather than speed. They want to hear dull sonorous platitudes driven out by sheer belly-muscle.
There is one thing very beautiful in Judith and in this theater. It is the way a player can come forward to the edge of the forestage, and stand there alone, stabbed at by a great white light, surrounded first by emptiness, and beyond that by crowds, a brave figure alone in a great dim space. That is something you cannot feel in the chummy confines of a picture-frame.
The Grosses Schauspielhaus is a gigantic failure if you look at it with vision—and also a great portent. The place is ugly, and its purpose now debased, yet it hints at how beautiful a great, formal theater could be, how moving and inspiring its drama. Even in the wreckage, the idea still lives.
And if you try to bring a little of that same vision to the spectacle of the man who made this failure, and who ran away, you cannot deny an admiration for the courage to give up, to admit defeat, and then to go to the church, and to try to do there, in the sanctified birthplace of the modern theater, something to lift the spirit as high as the theater of the five thousand was to have lifted it.
CHAPTER XIV
THE THEATER OF THE THREE HUNDRED
Size is no mania with the French. They do not insist on buildings that are taller than those of any other nation, an empire that is larger, ambitions and dreams mightier and more terrible. So perhaps it was only natural that when a Frenchman wanted to present actors in a new relationship to their audience, he should choose for his theater a little hall in the Street of the Old Dovecot instead of a circus or a park.
Doubtless there were many reasons why Jacques Copeau’s theater had to be small. A potent one may have been economy, a thing that accounts for the little theater movement far more than any theories of intimacy. The question of repertory also may have had weight. There are many sizes of drama, and there are special repertories for special theaters; but many more plays are possible for a theater of five hundred seats than for a theater of five thousand. The Trojan Women can be played to one hundred and twenty-nine people in the Toy Theater of Boston, as Maurice Browne proved; but Le Misanthrope is impossible in the Yale Bowl.
Copeau’s theater had to be small, not only because he had little money and a great love of all sorts of plays, but also because—and this counted more than even the French liking for the moderate and the exact—the thing he was interested in was the actor and not a grandiose idea. He ended by creating the first presentational playhouse in the modern world, by maintaining for a long time the most radical, and by achieving after some years the most successful. But he began by looking for some place for his actors to act. They were to be a company of fresh, sensitive, intelligent spirits bringing an intense and honest art to those who might care for it. Copeau had found his actors in all manner of places besides the routine theaters. He had talked to them about everything but make-up, curtain calls, and how to be natural on the stage. He had played with them and worked with them in the country, rehearsing the first pieces of the repertory in a barn. He did not intend to dump them down into one of the ordinary theaters of Paris. Copeau proposed to take the hall that his resources permitted, and to make it over to suit the spirit of his company. He could build no ideal theater, but he could make one in which his actors would escape the realisms and the pretenses of the modern theater, and would play to and with the audience as their spirit demanded.
And so we have the Théâter du Vieux-Colombier. It is not at all like the hideous theater-hall that was there before. It is not quite as it was when Copeau closed his first season before the war. It is not in the least like the Garrick Theater, which he remade in New York in 1917; as a matter of fact it is not so good. It is not very charming in its shape or its decorations, and Copeau is as careless as Reinhardt about things like good painting and clean walls. But this Vieux-Colombier is a distinguished and a jolly place all the same, the happiest and the healthiest theater west of Vienna.