Continental stagecraft

by Kenneth Macgowan

The ghost scene in Hamlet? Imagine the sentinel’s companions moonlit in the center. Imagine a gallery behind the arches lighted with a dim and ghostly radiance. And imagine Marcellus suddenly and fearfully pointing to the figure of the dead man where it moves above the last row of spectators. No mixing of actors and audience, but what a thrill to see the ghost across a gulf of turned and straining faces, what a horror to see him over your own shoulder! Later Hamlet climbs stone by stone to meet and speak with the ghost from a platform above one of the great entrances.

The Jest—its prison scene? A block in the middle of the ring, a single glaring light from straight above, and the figure of Neri chained to the block.

The Merchant of Venice as it might be given in the Cirque Medrano.

Masse-Mensch? But a mob-play is too easy. The scene of the defeat, for instance; light upon the steps in the middle of the ring, workers piled up on it, messengers and refugees running in from gate after gate, from all four entrances, flinging themselves back on the crowd in the center as the news of fresh disaster comes. The rattle of firearms; lights against the back of the high gallery, and the silhouettes of a score of machine guns trained on the actors and the audience.

It would be foolish to deny that the Medrano is not a theater for every play. It could not hold some that the artificiality of the Redoutensaal would make welcome—Oscar Wilde’s, for instance—along with most of the conversational Realism of the past thirty years. But it could house all that the Grosses Schauspielhaus is fitted for—Greek tragedy and comedy, Shakespeare’s greatest plays, dramas like Florian Geyer, The Weavers, and Danton. Some of the scenes of such pieces, the intimate episodes which Reinhardt’s circus balks at, could be done excellently in the Medrano. It has all the intimacy of Copeau’s theater, and it could bring into its ring many dramas of to-day,—The Emperor Jones, Strife,—which are impossible in the Vieux-Colombier. The Medrano has its limitations, of course, but they are not the limitations of size, emotion, or period. The plays that it could not do would be the plays least worth doing, at their best the plays which give to a reader almost all that they have to give.

If you should try to make a comparison of method, rather than of limitations, between the three active presentational theaters of Europe, and the fourth that might be, it would run, I think something like this: The Grosses Schauspielhaus tries to deceive you in curious ways,—with dome and scenery and cloud machine. The Vieux-Colombier carefully explains to you that this is a theater, and that this is also life. The Redoutensaal asks you to dress up and see something artistic. The Medrano unites you and overwhelms you.

The thing that impresses any one who studies the Medrano from the point of view of play production—it may even impress the reader who tries to understand and sympathize with these attempts to suggest how plays might be produced there—is the great variety which such a theater offers and always the sense of unity which it creates. From every angle relationships center upon the actor, or cut across one another as he moves about, makes entrances or exits, or appears in the back of the audience. All these relationships work to a fine, natural unity. There is the actor in the center with the audience about him; there is the actor on the rim drawing the audience out and across to him. There are three circles of action within one another in a single unity. And there is the sense of all this which the audience has as it looks down, Olympian, from its banks of seats.

Something of the vision of the aeroplane invades the Medrano. We see life anew. We see it cut across on a fresh plane. Patterns appear of which we had no knowledge. Relationships become clear that were once confusion. We catch a sense of the roundness and rightness of life. And in the Medrano, while we win this vision in a new dimension, we do not lose the feel of the old. Such a theater establishes both for us. It gives us the three unities of space in all their fulness. They cut across one another like the planes of a hypercube. And the deeper they cut, the deeper grows the unity.

The Medrano seems to solve two problems of the modern theater. These arise from two desires in the leading directors and artists. One is to throw out the actor into sharp relief, stripped of everything but the essential in setting. This motivates a production like Masse-Mensch, with black curtains blotting out all but the center of the stage, and a theater like the Redoutensaal, with the actor placed amidst a background of formal and permanent beauty. The Medrano supplies a living background, the background of the audience itself. It is the background of life instead of death, a fulness of living things instead of the morbid emptiness of black curtains. It is a background more enveloping and animating than the ballroom of Maria Theresa. It is a background that accords with every mood, and is itself a unity.