Two other European playwrights of distinction—Tchehoff and Wedekind—show a similar dissatisfaction with pure Realism, though neither passes through the three stages of development to be traced in Ibsen and Strindberg. The work of Tchehoff and the work of Wedekind is all pretty much of a piece. It is never wholly realistic in the narrowest sense. Each has a peculiar quality and method throughout. Tchehoff, beginning in 1896 with The Seagull, keeps to a Realism of such intense spiritual truth that, in a performance of his The Cherry Orchard by the Moscow Art Theater such as I have described, its extraordinary virtues are the virtues of Expressionism. Wedekind’s first play, the thesis-drama The Awakening of Spring, written in 1891, is stamped with his curious and violent intensity, and his sense of the spiritual overtones of life. In 1895 and 1903 he produced in the two parts of Lulu—Erdgeist and Pandora’s Box—dramas horrifically actual in their pictures of sexual aberration and at the same time so intense psychologically and so sharply defined and apt in action that their Realism treads close on the boundaries which Expressionism has over-passed.
There is a curious distinction in end and means between such plays as these of Ibsen, Strindberg, Tchehoff, and Wedekind, and the newer expressionist dramas of Germany and America. The earlier plays indulge in symbolic, fantastic, deeply spiritual ideas, but their language is almost always highly realistic. They are still bound to the past of their authors and to the present of their theater. The newer expressionist dramas, on the other hand, are as free in speech as they are in idea. It is a freedom that often makes a harmonious wedding of end and means. Sometimes, as in plays of Der Sturm group, the language is so completely free from the bonds of actuality that it approaches the onomatopoetic verse of Mallarmé depending on sound for its sense. In Eugene O’Neill’s distinguished piece of Expressionism, The Hairy Ape, the playwright strikes a happy medium with speech which is realistic and characteristic in idiom but which is developed in idea, intensity and length of utterance clean past the possibilities of the people of the play. Occasionally you find a pseudo-expressionist piece like Vatermord, by Arnold Bronnen, whose action is naturalistic—grossly naturalistic—but whose language is often far from natural. This piece was first produced in Berlin in the summer of 1922 when the mind of the German capital could safely be described as neurotic. Its subject matter—the incest and patricide of the Œdipus complex, with a little adventitious homosexuality, all circling about a boy in his ’teens—produced a stormy session between adherents and opponents, a session finally ended by the Schutzpolizei with rifles and the command: “Sei ruhig, meine Herrschaften!” The run which followed at one of the theaters formerly directed by Max Reinhardt may be explained by the notorious subject matter, but there were critics to assert that Bronnen had a style of considerable power as well as novelty. The boy’s final speech, as he staggers onto the stage from an inner room, where he has killed his father, and rebuffs the passionate entreaties of his mother, is translated from the printed version, retaining the one form of punctuation used, the slanting dash to indicate the end of a line, though not necessarily of a sentence:
I’m through with you / I’m through with everything / Go bury
your husband you are old / I am young / I don’t know you /
I am free /
Nobody in front of me nobody next to me nobody over me father’s
dead / Heaven I spring up to you I fly / It pounds shakes groans
complains must rise swells wells up springs up flies must rise must
rise
I
I bloom
Before such an arrangement of words The Spook Sonata seems almost mid-Victorian. The Student speaks to the ghostly Milkmaid in the most matter of fact fashion. Even the old Mummy, the mad woman who always sits in a closet, talks like a most realistic parrot when she is not talking like a most realistic woman. Here it is the ideas that stagger and affright you, the molding minds, the walking Dead, the cook who draws all the nourishment out of the food before she serves it, the terrible relations of young and old; all of them are things having faint patterns in actuality and raised by Strindberg to a horrible clarity.
To follow the banner of Expressionism in playwriting—I say nothing of stage setting, for that is, happily, another matter—requires all three Graces and a strong stomach. The bizarre morbidity, the nauseating sexuality, the lack of any trace of joy or beauty, which characterize the work of most of those who labeled themselves expressionists in Germany during the past few years, match Strindberg at his unhappiest, while the vigor with which they drive their ideas forth in speech far outdoes him. Expressionism, in the narrow sense in which such plays define it, is a violent storm of emotion beating up from the unconscious mind. It is no more than the waves which shatter themselves on the shore of our conscious existence, only a distorted hint of the deep and mysterious sea of the unconscious. Expressionism, as we have so far known it, is a meeting of the fringes of the conscious and the unconscious, and the meeting is startling indeed.
Germany’s reception of the expressionist plays was open-minded, as is Germany’s reception of almost all new effort. The dramas of the best of the expressionists—Georg Kaiser and Walter Hasenclever—were produced in leading theaters, on the official stages of Dresden and of Frankfort, and in Reinhardt’s playhouses, for example. But by the summer of 1922 they had disappeared from the very catholic and long-suffering repertories of these houses, and while Wedekind and Strindberg were produced from Stockholm to Vienna, the simon-pure expressionists, the playwrights of what I think it is fair to call the lesser Expressionism, were hardly to be seen. Only the one-act opera, Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen, a composition by Paul Hindemith on a playlet by the artist-author, Oskar Kokoschka, was being played.
This piece, produced at the City Opera House in Frankfort, points an interesting union and parallel between at least one sort of Expressionism and music. The action, passing in some indefinite olden time, is symbolically very difficult—quite as difficult as its title, Murderer, Hope of Women. The emotion of the scenes, on the other hand, is clear enough, and it receives from the music a background of color, a tonal reinforcement, that is most welcome; at the same time the composer finds in the vigorous and intense, if somewhat arbitrary, feeling of the playwright a provocative challenge.
A setting by Ludwig Sievert for Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen, an expressionistic opera by Kokoschka. Ramps lead from the center of the stage to raised platforms right and left. Dark walls rise at the back, broken by triangular entrances at either side and by a grilled doorway in the center, flanked by tall triangular pylons of red-orange.
Kokoschka himself designed a setting for Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen when it was first produced at the Albert Theater in Dresden as a play. A photograph of the production betrays an uneasy setting, hardly stage-worthy in arrangement and composition, and rather badly executed. The pages of Die Neue Schaubühne have shown several other expressionist stage designs as unsatisfactory, but in the more widely known productions these pieces have been lucky enough to fall into the hands of first-rate men like Adolf Linnebach of Dresden and Ludwig Sievert of Frankfort. Sketches made from Linnebach’s production of Hasenclever’s Jenseits in Dresden show a simple and effective use of light and shadow and of little else, with certain necessary elements of design projected by a sort of magic-lantern technique upon the background of dome or curtain. In actual performance Sievert’s setting for the Kokoschka opera is strong and arresting with dark surfaces massed in triangles symbolic of the feminine element dominant in the piece, and with a successful, if not very subtle, use of red and red-orange on the pylon surfaces guarding the prison door. The direction of the singers and chorus, under the hand of Dr. Ernst Lert, is a thoroughly expressive part of music and setting.