Continental stagecraft

by Kenneth Macgowan

So far as there must be indications of time and place upon this stage, a beginning in experiment has been made. It has not been a particularly good beginning, but it shows the opportunities for the artist, and also the limitations. They are very nearly identical. It is the business of the scene designer who works here to draw from the Redoutensaal itself the motifs and colors which he shall add to the permanent setting. It is his privilege, using only these things, to give the scene just the fillip of interest which the play demands.

Alfred Roller, a veteran of the scenic revolt of fifteen years ago, and, next to Reinhardt’s artist, Ernst Stern, the most distinguished German scenic designer of his time, has made the screens and set pieces for The Marriage of Figaro and The Barber of Seville. There is little or no good to be said of his work in the latter piece. The screens with which he indicates a room in the first act, and the bulky gate which he sets down across the stairs in the second act, are bad as to color, and quite at odds with the Redoutensaal. Obviously he could have made so much more amusing a gate out of the permanent stairs, and given his scene a Spanish stamp by a circle of vivid, tight-packed flowers in the center. The Marriage of Figaro is much better, though here again Roller could have done far better if he had turned his eyes up to the walls above him. The first scene, the servant’s room, is made by a row of antique screens of faded crimson placed well down stage. Through a door in the central one, you see green screens, which, in the second scene are to define the room of the wife. With an excellent sense of climax, Roller proceeds from the shallow stage of the first scene to the deeper stage of the second, and finally sweeps in the whole permanent setting for the wedding in the third scene. More than that, he calls the stairs and balcony into play, and finally opens the great doors above the balcony to let us see beyond to a room of crimson hangings and more crystal. The last scene, the garden, is shoddily conceived, with a few uninteresting potted trees, a bad painting of Schönbrunn in the exit under the steps, and a sickly attempt at moonlight from the floodlights and foots. Why not, you wonder, delicate, artificial, gilded hedges along the walls, and fruit trees flattened on espaliers against the steps?

Unquestionably the lighting problem in the Redoutensaal is not yet solved. Reinhardt looks to solve it with a large light or two concealed in the forward chandeliers. This may make the illumination of the stage a little more flexible and expressive; but it is quite as likely that the way to light the stage is without the least pretense at illusion. At any rate footlights and lights from the side are distressing reminders of the conventional theater.

The first scene of The Barber of Seville as given in the Redoutensaal. A not altogether successful attempt by Professor Roller to create an architectural unit which should suggest a Spanish exterior while harmonizing with the decorations of the ballroom.

Almost as reminiscent is the curtain which slides out between acts while the stage hands move the screens. Why a curtain at all—unless the curtain of darkness? Why not uniformed attendants managing the simple matter of screens or small set pieces with the aplomb of actors? Or if there must be a curtain, why a crimson sheet; why not a hanging whose folds continue the motif of the Gobelins at each side?

Perhaps the most serious question concerned with the physical arrangements of this stage is whether there should not be some scheme of levels other than floor and balcony. A lower forestage would aid the director in composing his people, and getting movement and variety out of this fixed and therefore limited setting. It would also aid an audience that is seated almost on a flat floor.

The sceptic may find other limitations in the Redoutensaal. And he will be right if he points out that its atmosphere is too sharply artificial in its distinction to permit every sort of play to be given here. Gorky’s Night Lodging might be played in the Redoutensaal as a literally tremendous tour de force, but it would be in the face of spiritual war between the background of the stage and the physical horrors of the slums which the play describes. Plays for the Redoutensaal must have some quality of distinction about them, a great, clear emotion free from the bonds of physical detail, a fantasy or a poetry as shining as crystal, some artificiality of mood, or else an agreement in period with the baroque. You can imagine Racine or Corneille done perfectly here, Euripides only by great genius, The Weavers not at all. Nothing could suit Molière better, or Beaumarchais or the Restoration dramatists. Shakespeare could contribute Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, perhaps Romeo and Juliet, but never Hamlet. Here, of course, is a perfect stage for Oscar Wilde, a good stage for Somerset Maugham, A. A. Milne, some of Clare Kummer. The Moscow Art Theater would have no trouble with The Cherry Orchard. More or less at random, you think of Bahr’s Josephine, The School for Scandal, The Sabine Women, Lysistrata, The Mollusc, A Marriage of Convenience, The Truth, Prunella, The Beggar’s Opera. The one impossible barrier to performance in the Redoutensaal is Atmosphere. If a play is drenched in the emotions of firesides, poppy fields, moonlit gardens or natural physical things, it is impossible here.

These are the limitations of the Redoutensaal, not of its idea. The permanent setting and its enclosing hall can take the shapes of other periods and meet almost every demand of the drama except atmosphere. Ideally the hall should have some sober yet arresting architecture common to many periods. A neutral order of this sort might be the blank Roman arches and plain pilasters which are seen so often in modern buildings. The chandeliers might take a form less ornate and less blazing; nuances of lighting, if desirable, might then be achieved. More important, however, would be to have three interchangeable shells and steps. One set of walls should be classical and severe, suited to Greek tragedy, Julius Cæsar, and, with a bit of brightening, to Shaw’s Cæsar and Cleopatra. Another shell should strike the note of artificial distinction with which the Redoutensaal now echoes. The third should be of dark, paneled wood, to suit Shakespearean tragedy, the comedy of Goldsmith, and modern pieces from Rosmersholm to Getting Married and from Alice Sit-by-the-Fire to Magda.

The idea of a permanent room in which to act a related repertory is thoroughly applicable even to our peepshow playhouses with their prosceniums. It would be possible to install a shell or room on the stage of any reasonably presentable theater, such as Henry Miller’s, the Little, the Booth, the Plymouth, the Selwyn in New York, the Künstler in Munich, the Volksbühne, the Kammerspiele in Berlin, the Comédie des Champs-Elysées in Paris, St. Martin’s in London. The room would have to be formal, probably without a ceiling, and certainly far more like a wall than a room. Such a compromise seems the only chance America may have of experimenting with the idea of the Redoutensaal. There is nowhere in this country a room so naturally fitted to the purpose by its beauty as was the ballroom of the Hapsburgs. The building of a fresh structure is a little too much to ask; for we have hardly the directors or actors to launch unpractised upon such a costly and critical test. It might be risked perhaps, as Frank Lloyd Wright proposed risking it, in a theater of a purely artistic nature far from Broadway. Wright designed for Aline Barnsdall a playhouse to be erected in California, with an adjustable proscenium, a stage with a dome that all but continued over the auditorium, and, upon the stage, a plain curving wall some ten feet high, following the shape of the dome. The nearest analogy to the Redoutensaal that has been actually attempted in America is probably the adaptation which Director Sam Hume and the artists Rudolph Schaeffer and Norman Edwards made of the Greek Theater in Berkeley, California, for Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night. There is a certain significance, however, in the pleasure which our scenic artists seem to get out of a play which gives them only one setting to design, but which requires them to wring from it, by means of lights, many moods and a variety of visual impressions. Lee Simonson’s circus greenroom for He Who Gets Slapped and Norman-Bel Geddes’ sitting room for The Truth About Blayds showed how seductive to the artist of the theater may be the game of playing with lights in a permanent setting.