Continental stagecraft

by Kenneth Macgowan

That is a foolish question from any one who has ever seen Copeau’s players, who has watched Jouvet’s back play the coarse, immense Karamazov, or seen his legs and buttocks send Aguecheek shuffling across the stage, or caught the whole quick poise of Suzanne Bing’s Viola in her shoulders and hips.

It is nothing short of the ravings of a mad man if the questioner has been to the Cirque Medrano, and looked upon the clowns. People have wondered how the actors of the Grosses Schauspielhaus could play to three audiences at once, the one in front, the one at the right, and the one at the left; here are the clowns playing to four. It is not all slapstick either. There is almost no whacking in the clowns’ own turns. In these scenes they work out broad little comedy skits such as Ray and Johnny Dooley, Leon Errol and Walter Catlett, Eddie Cantor and George Le Maire, Willie and Eugene Howard, or Weber & Fields might offer in our revues. The difference at the Medrano is that the actors seem to have consciously developed their gestures and their poses as supplementary expression to their faces. Also they warily work round during their scenes, and give each part of the audience the benefit of both back and face. The comedy of the Medrano is far funnier than the comedy of The Follies or the comedy of the Redoutensaal in Vienna; and not because the turns are broader. It is funnier because it is so intimately alive, because it is made with all the actor’s body, and because it is always directed at an audience. Four audiences at once! It is a priceless advantage. The actor has always some one to press his art upon. In our theater half an actor’s body is dead, or else vainly talking to the scenery. That is an understatement, if anything. The only way the actor can get directly at our audience, register upon it the impact of his art, his personality, his emotion, is to turn away from the scene and make his speech into a monologue. That is the chief difficulty which stands in way of the sort of acting which deals directly and frankly with the audience, which admits that it is art and not reality, which says that the actor is an actor and the audience is an actor, too; the kind of acting, in short, which is called presentational in contrast to the realistic method of representation which rules our theater. On any stage that is surrounded by its audience, the player can speak to his fellow-actor and to his audience at the same time. In the Medrano it is no question of backs or faces. The whole man plays, and every inch of him has an audience.

There remains, however, the question of setting. Clowns need no atmosphere, but Hamlet must speak to a ghost. An acrobat is his own scenery, but Juliet needs a balcony. Can the Medrano manage such things? Can this open ring do what the stage of the Redoutensaal balks at?

The Medrano can do almost anything that our theater can do—and a great many things more—because it can use the three essentials of setting and atmosphere: light, human bodies, and indications of place.

Light.... It is the fifth turn in the Cirque Medrano. Lydia et Henry, “Babies Dancers,” two pitiable little children, who have been taught to do very bad imitations of their elders in the banal dances of the revues. After they have hopped and shaken their way uncertainly through two or three fox trots and shimmies, the great lights in the roof go out. Blackness, then a stain of amber in the center of the ring. The light brightens and the stain lengthens. It might fall upon the stone of an old cistern, if some one had thought to put it there. Then, when the figure of Salome crawls out along the stain, it would be many moments before we could see that it was the body of a four-year-old, whom some one had togged out with breast-plates. Or again darkness, and slowly a blue-green light from on high, and in the midst of it an Apache and a girl. It needs no curb, no lamp-post, no brick corner, to make the ring a moonlit street.

After light, there comes the human body. The Medrano as a circus does nothing to show how the actors themselves can make a setting. Why should it? But I remember the project of an American artist, in 1914, to put The Cenci upon the stage of a prize ring, and I remember how the sketches showed a chorus of human figures in costumes and with staves, circling about the people of Shelley’s play and forming a dozen frames to the drama within.

An impression of the Cirque Medrano in Paris.

After light and a setting of bodies comes just as much of the ordinary plastic scenery of the stage as you need, and just as little as you can get along with. If you care to dig a bit under the ring, and install machinery that will lower the floor in sections, pile up hills in concentric circles or even lift a throne or a well or an altar into the middle of the circus while the lights are out—well, there is nothing to prevent you. Juliet’s balcony may hang above one of the entrances; or in the center of the stage throughout the whole action of Les Fourberies de Scapin may stand the tréteau or block, which Copeau makes the center of the action at the Vieux-Colombier. Scenically the problem of the Medrano is the most fascinating problem of the stage artist, the creation of a single permanent structure, large or small, which can stand throughout a play and give significant aid to the various scenes.

It is no such difficult task to imagine productions in the Medrano as it is to find plays for the Redoutensaal. The accompanying sketch shows an arrangement for The Merchant of Venice. Glowing Venetian lanterns are hung in the spaces between the arches at the top of the theater. The four entrances for the public are made entrances for the players as well. Below each gate is a double stair, railed at the top with Venetian iron. Between the stairs are benches, again in the shape of the period. The railings become the copings of the Rialto. The casket scenes are played in the center of the arena, while Portia and Nerissa watch the proceedings from a bench at one side; another bench seats the judges in the courtroom. Jessica leans out from an entrance to flirt with her lover, and the carnival mob chases old Shylock up and down the little stairs, over the benches, round about and out one of the two lower gates to the ring.