Approached purely from the point of view of scenic art, or the so-called new stagecraft, the Redoutensaal presents excellent reasons for its existence. Historically it could be defended by a study of the theater from the Greeks, with their day-lit, architectural background, to Georgian times when the stage and the house were both lighted by the same chandeliers, and the wide apron, the boxes, and the proscenium made a sort of permanent setting which was varied by the shifting backcloths. But if we go no further back than the days when Craig and Appia were beginning to write, and before their voices and their pencils had won an audience among theater directors, we shall find the start of an evolutionary development for which the idea of the Redoutensaal provides a plausible climax. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the “flat” was flat indeed, and the painted wing and backdrop ruled. If there was any depth, it was the space between wing and wing, or the false space of painted perspective. Then the ideas of Craig and Appia, making a curious alliance with Realism, forced the plastic upon the stage. The solid, three-dimensional setting dominated. When directors and artists began to discover the physical and spiritual limitations of “real” settings which could present nothing bigger than the actual stage space, many went back to the painted flat. It was a different flat, however, one painted with dynamic and expressive design. The third method is seldom quite satisfactory. The living actor, with his three-dimensional being, clashes with the two-dimensional painting. The result is bad from a realistic or illusionistic point of view; and, as soon as we think of the stage in terms of a frank convention, we find that we want the emphasis thrown upon the actor as the more interesting and the more difficult element. We want a defined and permanent artificiality that shall give the actor scope, serve as a pied-à-terre, not join in a fantastic competition. We can escape plastic and limited reality in the Redoutensaal, while we supply the actor with a background that harmonizes with the living character of his body. At the same time we can secure the vivid indication of mood or time or place which we seek, and achieve it more vividly because of the permanence of the main fabric of the stage, and its contrast with the merely indicated setting.
German scene designers and directors move in theory steadily towards what they call the podium, the platform pure and simple, from which the player addresses the audience openly as a player. In practice they tend steadily to try to approach this by driving out as much of changing scenic background as possible. They place something in the middle of the stage, a table, a flight of steps, a pillar, a bed, and they try to eliminate the rest of the stage. Jessner does this in Berlin by using his cyclorama as a neutral boundary without character in itself. Fehling, the director of Masse-Mensch, uses black curtains, and the artist Krehan by the same means tries to center our attention on small set pieces placed in the middle of the stage and designed to represent corners of rooms or a sofa by a window. Black curtains appear everywhere in Germany—perhaps as an expression of the mood of the beaten nation, but also unquestionably from a desire to drive out both Realism and pretense and to leave as little as possible upon the stage except the actor and the barest and most essential indication of setting. The German uses black curtains to achieve nothingness. Instead he gets desolation, spiritual negation. In the Redoutensaal, the actor is backed up by space. It is a positive presence instead of a negative background. Yet it does not obtrude, this splendid room, with its gold and gray, its mirrors and its tapestries. These things float in the back of consciousness, filling what might be a disquieting void or a depressing darkness. Always the cream walls dominate the gray, and always the living actor, driving his message directly at the spectator, dominates them all.
CHAPTER XVI
THE CIRQUE MEDRANO
Perhaps the gladiators gave it a bad name. At any rate for twenty centuries men have hesitated to put anything more serious than a clown or an athlete in the middle of an audience. The Romans could hardly be called a timorous, a sensitive or a conventional people, yet even they never thought of presenting a play in an amphitheater. C. Curio, rich and reckless, celebrated the death of his father by building two great wooden theaters back to back, giving performances in both at the same time, then whirling the spectators about on turn tables, until they faced each other, and the two semicircles of seats joined and made one huge arena. But, though Curio was reckless of money and of the lives of his guests, he was careful of the esthetic proprieties. The actors performed in the theaters, and the animals in the arena.
So far as the feelings of the Drama can be learned, she did not approve of the way the Romans shoved her actors out of the old Greek orchestra, and crammed them into a shallow little box, which they called a stage. The first chance that the Drama had, she climbed down close to the people again, and played on the stone floor of the medieval churches. Even Shakespeare did not have the temerity to try to put her back in a box. It is said that there were rare times, as in some of the outdoor mysteries of the Middle Ages and while the pageant wagons carried the actors and their scenes into the squares of the English towns, when you might have found the Drama entirely surrounded by the hosts of her admirers. But some curious and perverse power seems to have schemed through the centuries to seize a decadent time like the Roman days or the last fifty years in modern Europe, and clap the Drama in a box. And to-day, when the Drama is bravely insisting on a little air and light, the power is still strong enough to keep the Drama’s liberators from placing her naked and unashamed in the center of her fellows. She is no longer a peepshow lure, but we still hesitate to treat her as a goddess.
Occasionally a theorist, who is as sick as the rest of us of the fourth wall convention, comes forward with some extraordinary proposal to put the audience in the middle of the drama. Furttenbach in the seventeenth century laid out a square theater with a stage in each corner. Oskar Strnad of Vienna wants to place a doughnut stage two thirds round the audience; and some Frenchman has advocated whirling the doughnut. Anything to distract the spectator from the drama; nothing to concentrate him upon it.
In the “Theater of the Five Thousand” devised by Max Reinhardt in Berlin, and in the imitation which Firmin Gémier launched at the Cirque d’Hiver in Paris, the audience and the drama at last met in the circus. But for some curious reason—at which I have only guessed in a more or less absurd fashion—neither Reinhardt nor Gémier was courageous or far-seeing enough to use the circus as a circus. Neither dared put the players in the center, and forget the old stage. At one side there always lingered a palace or a proscenium.
Reinhardt might make the excuse that for such a scheme he needed a round circus, and that a round circus would be far too big for the drama. (He would not be absurd enough to say that Moissi or Pallenberg could not act unless all the audience saw all his face all the time). There are round circuses in Europe, however, and small, round circuses, and if Reinhardt could not find one in Berlin, he could have built one for half the money he put into reconstructing the Circus Schumann into the Grosses Schauspielhaus.
Up on Montmartre, just under the last heights on which perches Sacré Cœur, there is such a circus. An intimate circus, a little circus, just the place to begin the last experiment with the theater. Copeau could go straight there from the Vieux-Colombier, and throw his Scapin into the ring without a second’s hesitation. It would bowl over Paris and half the theatrical world.
Copeau could go straight there, but I think the audience should be required, for a time, to make a detour via the top of Montmartre. Certainly that is the only way to approach the Cirque Medrano to-day. A fiacre to the funicular. The funicular to the base of the cathedral. A stroll all round that boarded-up curiosity. A look-off at Paris swimming in the ebb-tide of the summer sun. Then supper in the Place du Tertre. Not for the food, which is as good as any cuisine bourgeoise; nor for the trees and window-groups out of Manet; nor for the tubby widow of forty-five who sings: