But man’s natural fondness for “humanness” and “recognition” found plenty of opportunity for expression after the passing of the great Greeks. And it was satisfied in almost every case without breaking in too sharply on the heart of the drama, expression of Form. The medieval religious drama was both religious and temporal. The saints were very much of the times in clothes and in habits. The Bible characters lived the lives and wore the garments and exercised the minds of people of the Middle Ages. Shakespeare dipped back into history and into romance, too, but his Italian nobles dressed like Londoners, his Roman “mechanicals” were British workmen, and his Athenian yokels came out of the English countryside. Molière “modernized” the Roman rascal Phormio into the Neapolitan rascal Scapin, and the ordinary Parisian gentleman served him for Alceste. Phèdre and Iphigénie were not so very Greek. In England tragedians played Shakespeare in the costumes of their own day down through Garrick, Siddons, and Kemble. And do you imagine that all this had the slightest effect on the plays, any bearing on their expression of the inner Form rather than the outward shape of life? In spite of the flesh-and-blood actor, clothed in the costumes of the time, the playwright was saved from mere representation, from all this peep-hole business of Realism. Doubtless he was saved because the temper of his time was not corrupted and twisted and tortured by the unholy union of science and capitalism. But it is rather interesting to remember that the actors appeared in theaters so utterly unreal, so essentially theatrical, that nobody could imagine for a moment that he was standing with his eye glued to a chink in the fourth wall.
The theaters of the past united the temporal and the eternal, the passing moment and the permanent Form partly in innocence, and partly from a natural ability to understand things better in their own terms. We, too, can grasp more of the Form of life if we see it derived from the life we know. But this does not mean that the Elizabethans had the slightest interest in the thing that has absorbed our stage—plausibility, representation, resemblance. To-day we are beginning again to desire reality of soul instead of mere reality of body. We want to know about our own time and our own people, but we don’t give a hang to learn how imperfectly, how haltingly, a modern, realistic Hamlet would express his thoughts on suicide.
It is easy enough to see how much Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy would have lost if he had written like a Galsworthy. Poetry of word is not the only thing that would have gone by the board. Poetry of idea would have disappeared, too. More than that, the ability of a character to express himself would have been hideously confined within the formula of plausibility. Perhaps so great an artist could have written his tragedy without permitting a single person to speak an inner thought that time and circumstance could not bring out, but I am a little inclined to doubt it. And I am very much inclined to assert that the vitality and the effectiveness of such a work of unnatural and straining effort would have been nothing beside the vitality and effectiveness of the Hamlet we know.
George Pitoëff’s arrangement of He Who Gets Slapped in Paris. The stage is draped in black curtains. Narrow scarlet ribbons looped from the proscenium arch indicate a circus tent. The actors make their entrances and exists from behind a huge circus poster, which is changed from act to act.
For twenty years the European stage has struggled over the problem of plausibility and resemblance in setting. The thing called the new movement in the theater has spent half the time devising mechanisms and technique for achieving genuine representation instead of the bastard thing that tried to make a dining room out of badly painted and flimsy canvas. And it has spent about half the time trying to get rid of this machinery and this technique in order to escape the Realism which demanded such things. In Stockholm you see the touring company of the Moscow Art Theater playing realistic plays in just the sort of ugly, cheap, old setting that Craig, Reinhardt and Belasco equally set their faces against. In Dresden you see Shaw’s Pygmalion played at the State Schauspielhaus in settings as solid and illusive as stone and wood. In Paris you see the Russian Georges Pitoëff giving Andreyeff’s He Who Gets Slapped in black curtains with four ribbons looped up to indicate the form of a circus tent, and Tchehoff’s The Seagull in settings which go back to the old flapping canvas flats again, admitting that the theater is a place of pretense, and which then attempt—not very successfully—to give these flats, in color and outline, the Form of the play.
Still further along the way from Realism to an expressionist stage, you find Copeau’s naked stage in Paris that unites frankly with the auditorium, and changes very little from The S. S. Tenacity to Les Frères Karamazov. Finally in Vienna, you find, in the Redoutensaal made from the ballroom of Maria Theresa’s palace, a theater without proscenium, machinery or scenery, a theater where the actor is frankly the actor. Here you have the culminating expression of the growing sense in Europe that, because the stage is so close to life in the presence of the living actor, it need not and it must not attempt to create the illusion of reality. Through such a conception the theater is freed once more to seek the Form of life.
CHAPTER III
THE PATH OF THE PLAY
The story of the attempt of the theater to escape from Realism is a curious story. As a deliberate effort of the playwrights to see life in the terms of Form instead of accidental actuality it goes back only half a dozen years through the dramas of the Germans who adopted the word Expressionism to describe their aim and technique. It has hung potential for ten or fifteen years in the work of the more advanced and philosophic designers and directors of the new stagecraft, a waiting stimulus to the playwrights. As an unconscious impulse to reach beyond the limits of Realism its beginnings are to be traced back twenty, thirty, almost forty years in the work of some of Europe’s ablest realists.
The two greatest figures in the modern theater—which is the realistic theater—give the same demonstration of the limitations of Realism, and turn in the same fashion away from actuality and towards an intense spiritual vitality. Both Ibsen and Strindberg come out of Romanticism into Realism, and pass on into a Symbolism that is far on the way towards Expressionism. In Ibsen the new tendency is clearly marked in The Wild Duck (1884) and develops gradually through The Master Builder (1892) to completion in When We Dead Awaken (1899). Strindberg’s Towards Damascus (1898) carries strong hints of the spiritual intensity which threatened the outer reality of so many of Strindberg’s earlier plays; and by 1902, in Swanwhite and The Dream Play, he is well embarked on a type of non-realistic drama which finds a bizarre culmination in The Spook Sonata in 1907.