Table of Contents
Chapter
Some dull definitions. Realism of the flesh vs. Realism of the spirit. In The Cherry Orchard Tchehoff and the Moscow Art Theater reach reality. A mystic picture of life beyond our Realism.
The art that lies closest to life. Because its materials are living men and women, it should not seek the illusion of reality. Its object is to achieve the Form of life.
From Realism through Expressionism. The attempts of Ibsen, Tchehoff, Wedekind, and Strindberg to reflect the Form of life. The expressionist movement in the German theater; its violence, morbidity and failure. Its arresting significance. Some examples of its vitality. Expressionism and the unconscious Through Form to beauty.
The place of Germany in the theater. Its pioneering past and its natural virtues and failings. A beaten and bruised people that still makes a fine audience. Berlin becomes Broadway-ized and morbid. Economy breeds simplicity. A new day dawns on a black-curtained stage.
Relics of the past which was once the future. The abdication of the designers, Stern and Roller. Reinhardt seeks a new way out. Linnebach, apostle of the machine, turns apostate. “Einfach” and “Podium” the catch-words. Stage machinery sinks into its place. The designer replaces the mechanician.
From Appia’s theories of the ’nineties to the day of projected scenery. Lamps of six thousand candle-power. Color comes under control. The dome no longer a sky; a neutral boundary in Jessner’s Othello, a void in Masse-Mensch, a wall to be painted with light in a Stockholm ballet. Settings projected by Linnebach and Hasait. Light as a dramatic motif.
The effect of the war on the German players. The break-up of Reinhardt’s exceptional company under the pressure of war and the motion picture. The Festspiel brings them together again. Ensemble persists in Vienna and Munich. The S. S. Tenacity as played at the Burgtheater in Vienna and at the Vieux-Colombier. The players of the Munich State theaters. Teutonic vitality and intensity which often become violence.
Four styles of acting: Impersonation by wigs and spirit, as practiced by the Moscow Art Theater. Impersonation by type-casting. The exploitation of personality by great actors. Presentational acting, and the expository performances of the Vieux-Colombier.
In the search for the director who can fuse the new acting and the new play we come first upon Max Reinhardt. His past and his present. His virtues and his faults. Powerful theatricalism in the best sense possible in the old theater. His influence and his followers. His future.
The advent of the artist in the theater, a functionary unknown to Molière or Shakespeare. The designer as an originator of directional ideas. The inevitable union of director and artist, in the sceneryless theater of the future.
The methods of the director of the State Theater in Berlin. The steps and levels upon which he moves his players in three-dimensional compositions. How he creates effective pictures and significant groupings in Richard III, Othello and Napoleon. Distortion of natural action to make points. The motionless actor. Arbitrary lighting. A. B. C. conceptions and limited vision.
Jürgen Fehling of the Volksbühne adds understanding to Jessner’s freedom and vigor. A drama of industrial revolution produced in abstract terms and made immensely moving. Scenery almost disappears and a workmen’s hall becomes a flight of steps surrounded by blackness. Arbitrary light and a chorus that speaks as one. Audience, players and play pass through the black purgatory of revolutionary Germany.
Reinhardt’s Grosses Schauspielhaus, the gigantic compromise between the Greek Theater, the circus and the realistic stage, in which he made his last effort towards a new type of production. The failures of the building architecturally. Its virtues and its possibilities, which the withdrawal of Reinhardt has left unrealized.
Jacques Copeau’s Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in Paris. The naked stone stage with permanent setting which Copeau and Jouvet created in their search for a playhouse that should give the actor full freedom. Three productions: Les Frères Karamazov, Le Paquebot Tenacity, Twelfth Night. The quality of writer or expositor in Copeau’s performances. The future of this theater.
The Redoutensaal of Marie Theresa converted by the Austrian government into a theater without proscenium, machinery or scenery. Audience and actors lit by crystal chandeliers and surrounded by Gobelins and a permanent setting of baroque architecture. Mozart and Reinhardt bring to it an old and a new theatricalism. The principle applied to the stage and the plays of to-day.
The little circus on Montmartre as a presage of a theater in which the audience will surround the players and gain a new relationship with the play. The attempts of Reinhardt and Gémier at the circus-theater. Hamlet or Masse-Mensch in the Medrano.
Seeking both the new theater and the old spirit, Reinhardt invades the church. The Cuckoo Theater. Religion in the terms of the theater a thing of vital and creative spirit in Greek times and in the Middle Ages. Can the artist of the theater bring it out of our material age?