Two nights later three or four hundred citizens, with bits of bread and meat wrapped in paper and stowed in their pockets, could be seen seated in a great and splendid ballroom of Maria Theresa’s palace, under the light of crystal chandeliers and the glow of priceless Gobelins, watching the first performance, The Marriage of Figaro, in a theater a stride ahead of any in Europe.
They had paid good money at one of the doors of that extraordinary old building, the Hofburg, which rambles from the Opera to the Burgtheater half across the shopping district of Vienna. After they had parted from two or three thousand crowns apiece, they had wound up stone stairways between white walls and twists of old ironwork, passed through cloakrooms where princesses once left their wraps, and a supper room where artists may cheerfully go mad over molding, pediment and mirror, and reached at last the Theater in dem Redoutensaal. They found one of the handsomest baroque rooms in Europe holding within its beauty both a stage and an auditorium. A row of Gobelin tapestries filled the lower reaches of the walls. Above were moldings and pilasters, cornices and pargeting, spandrels and pediments, fillets and panelling, an ordered richness of ornament that held suspended in its gray and golden haze mirrors that echoed beauty, and chandeliers radiant with light. At one end of the room, beneath great doors and a balcony which the architect had planned in 1744, was a new structure; it broke the line of the Gobelins, but continued the panelling, freshened to cream and gold, in a curving wall across a platform and in double stairs leading to the balcony. With man’s unfailing instinct for the essence of life, the audience promptly identified this roofless shell as a stage. There was a platform, of course, but there was no proscenium. There were doors and windows in the curving wall, but no woodwings, borders, flats, or backdrops. There was even a something along the front of the platform which might conceal footlights, but there was nothing to be seen that looked more like scenery than a row of screens.
Such is the room in which the forces of the Austrian State Opera House have been giving The Marriage of Figaro and The Barber of Seville, and in which Reinhardt began late in 1922 the most interesting experiment of his most experimental life—the presentation of plays under a unique condition of theatrical intimacy between actor and audience.
It is an odd spectacle, this of Vienna, the bankrupt, going lightheartedly out on the most advanced experiment in production yet attempted in Europe. One of its oddest angles is that the man who made an empress’s ballroom over into a theater is a socialist—President Vetter of the Staatstheaterverwaltung, the bureau under the republic which controls the State playhouses. The conversion was not an easy matter. Opponents rose up inside the State theaters and outside them. Vienna was engaged for months upon one of those artistic quarrels from which it is always drawing new health and spirit.
The Redoutensaal in Vienna as arranged for the first scene of The Marriage of Figaro. The room called for in the text is indicated by a row of crimson screens set straight across the stage and pierced in the center by a door. In the scheme of production indicated by this unique environment such a mere indication is sufficient to establish setting and mood.
When President Vetter had won his point he plunged briskly ahead at the work of making over the ballroom into a very special kind of theater without marring its beauty. Part of the old balcony came out, mirrors replaced doors and windows down the sides of the hall, and Oberbaurat Sebastien Heinrich set to work on the problem of creating a permanent architectural setting for the stage which should harmonize with the lovely room, yet stand out from it significantly enough to center attention on the acting space. Meantime President Vetter took another look at the Gobelins which had satisfied Maria Theresa, and decided that they weren’t quite good enough; others had to be found. Even now he is a little doubtful about those on the right hand wall.
The work of the Oberbaurat is admirable. He has continued the molding above the Gobelins, and made it the top of the curving wall which is the background for the stage. This shell is broken at each side by a casement, which holds either a door or a window, and two masked openings. Through one of these, close to the front of the stage, a curtain the height of the wall is run out to hide changes in the screens and furniture upon the stage. At the back, where the shell curves close to the old balcony of the ballroom, the State architect has placed a pair of graceful steps, which meet at the top, and provide, underneath, an exit to the rear. For lighting, there are the foots in their unobtrusive trough, and small floods placed in the gap where the curtain moves; but by far the larger part of the illumination comes from the seven chandeliers in the ceiling of the hall. The chandeliers towards the rear are sometimes turned half down or even off, but essentially it is the same light which illumines both players and audience.
This light and the formal and permanent character of the stage stamp the Redoutensaal with a character as old as it is fresh. This theater goes beyond Copeau’s Vieux-Colombier in the attempt to re-establish in our century that active relationship between actor and spectator which existed in the great theaters of other centuries, and towards which the finest minds of the theater have been striving. Here is a stage freed from all the associations of modern stage-setting, innocent of machinery or illusions, essentially theatrical. Actors must be actors upon its boards. They cannot try to represent actual people; they can only present themselves to the audience as artists who will give them a vision of reality.
This is comparatively easy in opera. There is no realistic illusion about a valet who sings a soliloquy on his master’s more intimate habits. People who quarrel in verse to a merry tune are most unlikely to be mistaken for the neighbors next door. With music and the stage of the Redoutensaal to aid them, the singers of the State Opera manage to give a roughly presentational performance. In direction there is nothing notable to be seen, unless it is the wedding scene of Figaro with the Count striding up and down across the front of the stage, opposed in figure and in action to the plaguing women above upon the stairs. The acting possibilities of this stage, however, are very great. Reinhardt saw them vividly in the summer of 1922, while he was making preparations for his five productions in September: Turandot by Gozzi, Stella and Clavigor by Goethe, Le Misanthrope by Molière, and Dame Cobalt by Calderon. He saw the possibilities and the difficulties of acting also, and he rejoiced that he was to have old and tried associates like Moissi, Pallenberg and Krauss with him once more when he began his experiment with a theater far more exacting than the Grosses Schauspielhaus, and a technique of acting very hard to regain after so many years of Realism.