Continental stagecraft

by Kenneth Macgowan

It is hard to know where to begin a description of this curious playhouse. Suppose you had never been to the Vieux-Colombier, but suppose you knew that this was a theater without the illusion of Realism, and suppose you sought for the thing that would tell you this the quickest. What would you see? Probably the steps that lead from the stage to the forestage, and even from the forestage to the seats of the audience. There are no footlights, and so you have the pleasure of seeing the square, firm edge where the stage floor ends. This edge bends into a large curve in the middle, with three curved steps below, and it angles out at the sides to where smaller steps join those of the middle on an ample forestage. These steps and the edge of the stage do more than any one thing in the theater to signal that you are not looking into a picture-frame. Even when they are not used, as in Les Frères Karamazov, these steps keep you warily alive to that fact.

When you examine the theater more closely you discover that there is no proscenium. The nearest thing to it is the last of the arches which hold up the roof of the auditorium. There is a curtain, to be sure, but it does not fall behind pillars, and it does not cover the forestage. It descends at that point where the walls of the auditorium become the walls of the stage, and it merely serves to hide one end of this long room while the stage hands make small changes in the permanent setting.

The permanent setting, like the theater itself, is an experimental product of the attempt to provide what the actors need. It is really no more than a balcony placed against the back wall, with an arched opening in the middle, and with walls at the sides that let the actors, who have gone out through the arch, get off stage unseen. This balcony is so solidly built that it cannot be taken out, but certain portions are alterable. The changes in setting are managed by changing the width of the arch or the line of the top of the balcony, by adding doors, steps at one side, or railings, and particularly by placing significant properties or screens upon the stage. Louis Jouvet, stage director as well as Copeau’s best actor, has done many ingenious things to make his settings varied enough and characteristic enough without losing the permanent thing that is common to them all, and that aids in banishing realistic illusion. A detail that shows the working of his mind is to be found in the screens that he uses to create a room in Les Frères Karamazov; by giving them two or three inches of thickness and a certain amount of molding, he has escaped the impression of the bare, the unsubstantial, and the untheatrical which the screens of other designers produce.

Les Frères Karamazov: the Gypsy Inn. This sketch and the following one show the permanent skeleton-setting of Copeau’s Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in Paris. Here, in an arrangement of paneled screens Louis Jouvet has caught the mood of the scene without reference to details of “atmosphere.”

The balcony is a most useful feature. It was not accident that put a balcony in the Elizabethan theater or made the Greeks use the theologium. It serves a practical purpose, of course, in any scheme of permanent setting, for it makes it unnecessary to build balconies for scenes that especially call for them. A good deal more important to the director is the movement up and down, as well as sideways and back and forth, which it gives him. With the forestage, the main stage, and the balcony, Copeau has almost as useful a base for composing action in three dimensions as Jessner has in the steps which he uses in various productions in Berlin.

Sheldon Cheney has called Copeau’s stage a “naked stage.” It is a happy accident of language that, when you call it a concrete stage, you describe the material of which it is made and the feeling of sharp, definite statement which resides in everything done upon it. The wall at the right of the audience is solid, the wall at the back, too; the ceiling of the stage has some openings between steel girders, but it is more like the floor than the “flies” of the average theater. Only in the left wall of the stage are there any openings. Through these the actors manage to exit into the next building. The floor of the stage, except at the edges, is even more adamant. It will not yield to pleas for atmosphere, illusion or any of the gewgaws of our theater. It is solid concrete. Copeau wanted to give the actor’s feet a sense of support which they cannot get from yielding and resounding wood. At the sides is a small section in timber which permits the use of a stairway to a lower room as in The S. S. Tenacity or Les Frères Karamazov. In the forestage are two other openings, covered by wooden and concrete slabs.

Jouvet’s lighting system is ingenious and philosophically sound, if not altogether perfect. Practically all the light comes from four large lamps hung in the auditorium. They replace footlights, borderlights, and floods from the sides. Illumination from the auditorium itself is essential to good stage lighting; the footlights are an unhappy makeshift. David Belasco very wisely uses a battery of lamps hidden in the face of the first balcony. In German theaters, the huge 6000-candlepower bulbs developed since the war, tempt directors to inefficient and distracting lighting from the ventilator above the main chandelier in the roof of the auditorium. Neither the latter method nor Belasco’s is wholly satisfactory in a theater that forswears representation, a theater like the Grosses Schauspielhaus or the Vieux-Colombier or the Redoutensaal in Vienna. Electric light on the stage begins as an imitation of the real. If a table is illuminated by a large light in the first border, there must be a lamp above the table in such a position as to suggest that it is doing all the work. The next step is to use light for illumination and composition—for beauty, in fact—without bothering to try to make it seem to come from some natural source in the setting. When such light comes from the auditorium we may get composition, but we also get a throw-back to the source of the light itself. The ray carries our eye up to some lens-lamp trying unsuccessfully to hide in the bottom of the dome of the Grosses Schauspielhaus, or in the top of the ceiling of the Burgtheater. A new problem arises. It should be answered by making the source frankly visible. The hoods themselves of large bulbs have a shape that would make them interesting and not without significance in the Grosses Schauspielhaus; or a new shape could be supplied to harmonize with architecture or setting. In the Redoutensaal we find glorious old crystal chandeliers lighting the stage—an accidental result of the fact that the Viennese government converted Maria Theresa’s ballroom into a playhouse. In the Vieux-Colombier Jouvet makes no bones about admitting where his light is coming from. He places the bulbs in octagonal lanterns, which, by revolving on an axis, present different colored sides for the light to pass through; the lanterns may also be moved in such directions as to throw the light upon any desired part of the stage. These lanterns are frankly visible; and, though they are not a pleasing shape, they fit esthetically with the theory of this theater. Here is electric lighting presented at last as the thing it really is, not as an imitation of something else.

The greatest faults of the Vieux-Colombier over which Copeau had control, and which he could easily have avoided, lie in the color and quality of painting on the stage. The concrete and the cream of the auditorium take warm lights; but in portions of the stage itself, Copeau has used a cold gray that is surely unfortunate. Much that you see is shoddy. If the paint chips off a corner, nobody bothers to replace it. Rivet heads and structural iron show when they have no relation to the shapes on the stage. Now it is a good thing not to spend too much energy on the physical side of the theater, but there is a difference between austerity and slovenliness.

Actual productions, animated by the actors and graced with some of Jouvet’s scenic arrangements, do a great deal to make the stage wholly attractive. The S. S. Tenacity, a realistic play with a French café for its setting, makes interesting demands on this non-realistic stage. The demands are met, and met successfully. There is a counter at one side with racks for bottles, a wooden door in the arch at the back, a table in the center, and above it—the mark of Realism—a shaded lamp, from which a great deal of the stage light comes. With the actors giving us the sense of French life which was missing in the New York and Viennese productions, we have here a performance which might almost be enclosed in a proscenium frame. But there is in the acting, as in the setting, much that is non-realistic, much that seems representational only by contrast with the dominating spirit and physique of the theater and its people.