In the playlet that goes with The S. S. Tenacity, Mérimée’s Le Carrosse du St.-Sacrement, we are back in a piece from the romantic period, a comedy of clear and artificial vigor. A screen and some hangings with a southern flash to them set the stage for eighteenth-century Peru. Copeau himself has the same Punch-like visage that he presents to you in his own study, but now he manages to make you think him a Spanish puppet, an exasperated and wily doll. The same Punch appears in Les Frères Karamazov, but a Punch of the intellect, a tragic marionette dangling on the strings of rationalism. At the end, when Ivan goes mad, you may see most clearly the subtle exaggeration which is at the heart of the acting of Copeau’s company. The whirling body, the legs that beat a crazy tattoo on the floor, the twisting head and the boggling eyes, are none of them copied from a candidate for the asylum. They are all an explanation of what sort of lines in the figure of a crazy man would strike the imagination, what angles and movements would most sharply indicate lunacy.
Karamazov is effectively composed on this stage by a few draperies for the first scene, a line of curtains hiding the whole stage and begging the question in the second scene, a flight of steps for the hall of the Karamazovs, and two heavy screens for the inn. There is nothing so fine as the interminable steps that lead up from the balcony at the Garrick to the wretched room of Smerdiakov; but there is enough improvement in the very excellent acting seen in New York, to make up for this. Jouvet’s father is gigantically good; set beside his Aguecheek, it puts this young man among the most interesting actors of Europe. Paul Œttly, as the eldest brother, plays the striking scene in the inn of the gypsies with uncommon vigor, and the stage direction sweeps the scene along to a burning climax. The intensity of the actors in this play, added to the intensity of the play itself, demonstrates how completely a formal theater of this kind, and a type of acting which is a reasoned sort of explanation, rather than a thing of life or of acting, can stand up beside the Realism of our directors when it is at its best.
La Carrosse du Saint-Sacrement at the Vieux-Colombier: another arrangement of Copeau’s permanent setting.
In Twelfth Night you find the company clear out of the shackles of realistic or semi-realistic plays, and happy in the beautiful playhouse of fantasy. And here the quality of exposition—which you may trace back to Copeau’s profession of critic, and forward through the days given to the reading and study and analysis of each new play—has almost altogether disappeared. The playing is spontaneous, or it is nothing. Suzanne Bing’s Viola is a-quiver with radiance and wonder. Jean Le Goff’s Orsino is no such God-favored performance, but his eyes are lit with an ecstasy of love-sickness. The comedians are far from Englishmen; but their creations are immensely funny: Jouvet’s gently gawking Aguecheek, Romain Bouquet’s shaven-headed, almost Oriental Sir Toby, Robert Allard’s extraordinary clown, the finest either of us had ever seen. It is interesting, for once, to see Malvolio put in his place as a character, and not given the star’s spotlight to preen in; it might be a more satisfactory arrangement if Albert Savry could be funnier in his dry Puritanism.
Twelfth Night triumphs at the Vieux-Colombier by virtue of the spirit of the actors, and the vision of the director. The costuming is bad—an unsuccessful attempt to make Illyria, as it might well be, a land of no time or place but Poetry; and the setting is no more than bright and freakish in a Greenwich Village way. But in the costumes and up and down the setting these players frisk, weaving patterns of beauty and fun that link them into the true spirit of the play. The curtain is there at convenient times to make the forestage into a neutral zone for duke or sea captain, and between this forestage and the balconied space behind there is room for all of Shakespeare’s play to race along just as he wrote it. With the trap door in the forestage to act as cellar, Malvolio can be incarcerated below-stairs and happily out of sight—much as Shakespeare intended.
Copeau is a believer in gymnastics. (He is also a believer in improvisation, a school of playwrights, and other things whose absence makes him grow impatient with his theater). Through months and years of strenuous labor, he is training half a dozen young people of his own school to have bodies that are as well under control as a gymnast’s. The performances of the Vieux-Colombier draw on players not so well trained, but they show what physical command can accomplish. Here you see acting that makes you think again of sculpture and its relation to the new theater.
Copeau’s people can meet the test which the theater with a Greek orchestra, like the Grosses Schauspielhaus, exacts. They can play “in the round.” Their bodies can be seen from all sides, and still keep expressiveness and beauty. They have learned to master their bodies, as well as their voices, and they are able to make the lines of arms and torsos and knees speak directly to the audience. When Jouvet sharply underlines and almost caricatures the salient shape of old Karamazov he is able to escape from ordinary representation, which may or may not make its point, and he is able to push his conception of the wicked, vital old man into almost direct physical contact with the audience. I have often wondered when the actor would learn the lesson of sculpture. There were centuries of almost literal representation, with the inner expression of the artist and the artist’s sense of Form struggling furiously to impose itself upon Reality, and failing more often than succeeding. Then, with Rodin came the sense that sculpture could make representation a distinctly secondary matter. There could be expression first, and resemblance afterwards, if at all. Idea, which is one sort of Form, enters the clay with Stanislas Szukalsky. Expression and idea, poised in the human body, begin to inform acting directly and openly in the company of the Vieux-Colombier. The first presentational theater adds the medium of the body to the medium of the voice.
CHAPTER XV
THE REDOUTENSAAL—A PLAYHOUSE OF PERMANENCE
In Vienna on Christmas Day, 1921, there were no matches in the match-stands of the cafés and no paper in the hotel writing rooms. Some of the well-to-do and the recklessly soft-hearted had begun to feel that they could afford to keep pet dogs again; but there were no silk stockings on those most un-Teuton ankles that paraded the Burgring. You may guess, therefore, that there was no butter on the tables of the middle classes, and no milk in the houses of those who, by a curious clairvoyance of language, are called the working people.