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Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
make you tolerant of such speculations as the following on the four
types of acting to be seen in the theater to-day and on what is to
come of them.
The art of acting is a miscellaneous sort of art. I imagine that
types of acting which we think very new and modern were to be
found in every age except the first. Probably some famous Greek
comedian made his entrance in The Frogs looking so amazingly like
the statue of Herakles on the Acropolis that for half a minute nobody
could be sure that this was really the actor whom they had expected
to see. In Shakespeare’s day it is not unlikely that the man who
played Caliban got together a collection of false hair and wooden
tusks which made every one wonder who the new member of the
company could be. And probably among the Greeks and the
Elizabethans there were players so amazingly like servants or kings
in face and carriage that they never played anything else. Yet it is
safe to say, nevertheless, that the actor’s trick of trying to look like a
different human being in each new play and never at all like himself,
and his other trick of never looking like anything but himself and
always playing exactly the same kind of part, are histrionic
symptoms of the disease called Realism. There was never so much
literal and deliberate impersonation as in Europe to-day, and so
much “type casting” as along Broadway.
These are two very different methods of work, but they both
reach the same end—absolute resemblance—and neither has
necessarily anything to do with art. The first—for which the word
“impersonation” is commonly and very loosely used—is pretty
generally esteemed to-day. It is considered to mark off the actor,
even the artist, from the crowd of clever mummers. It is hard to
deny an instant and hearty interest in any player who can look like
and act like a tramp one night, and like a barbaric king the next. The
emotion he creates as a king, or the artist’s vision he displays in
selecting his material and making Form out of it, may be great or
small. But his ingenuity in masquerade will always win admiration. In
fact we are pretty sure to spend our time praising such an actor as
Ben-Ami for looking like a neurotic artist in Samson and Delilah, and
like a husky young horse-thief in The Idle Inn, instead of recognizing
the artistic distinction these impersonations show.
Examined in cold blood, the virtue of this sort of acting is the
virtue of the wig-maker. The difference between a Van Dyke and a
pair of mutton chops; the difference between Flesh Color No. 1 and
Flesh Color No. 3; the difference between a waiter’s dress suit
bought on the Bowery, and a doublet designed by James Reynolds
and made by Mme. Freisinger—that is the secret of this kind of
acting. Not the whole secret, of course, for the pose of the actor’s
body, the grace or awkwardness of his carriage, the lift of an
eyebrow, or the droop of a lip is quite as important. Such things,
however, have no more of art or emotion in them than the tricks of
make-up. They can give us recollections of real persons or figures in
literature, in painting, or in other plays, about whom we have felt
emotion. But it is not until the actor puts Form of his own into this
lay figure, by the movement of his body, and the emotion of his
voice, that anything approaching art can be said to exist.
Stanislavsky may look like a colonel in The Three Sisters, and like
a spineless gentleman in The Cherry Orchard; but that is not the
measure of his art. Stanislavsky might even be a colonel on leave
who took a fancy to acting, or a spineless gentleman who lost his
patrimony and fell back on his university reputation as an amateur
actor; and he would still have to prove himself an artist.
There is an amusing similarity and contrast between the two
varieties of realistic actors. The first impersonates a different
character in every play, and never himself. The second impersonates
the same character in every play and always himself. The first
impersonates by changing; the second by remaining the same.
Provided that there is a large and varied supply of types—military
men, bar-keeps, politicians, artist-neurotics, criminal-neurotics, he-
men, she-men, rabbit-men, not to mention all sorts of women—the
result on a play should not be so very different whichever system of
acting is adopted. If a play-goer were to see only one play, he
couldn’t detect any difference. If he were to see two, he would be
likely to get some added pleasure out of the knowledge that the
same people were acting both, and he would probably use up on the
business of spying out the tricks of it all a good deal of the energy
and attention that he ought to give to the play.
There is one practical difference, however, in these two ways of
casting a play. You cannot make a repertory company out of types.
In spite of the old jargon about Leading Man, Leading Woman,
Juvenile, Old Man, Ingenue, Heavy, Character Man, and so forth, no
permanent company giving realistic plays can get along without
actors who can achieve some sort of differentiation. Since the
German theater and most of the European theater is run on the
repertory system, the Continental actor is generally a man adept in
masquerade. Because America has no repertory theater, because
producers in New York pick new actors out of the apple barrel for
every new play, and because almost all the legitimate actors of
America make New York their headquarters, the system of casting
by type is the natural, workable system for us.
Type acting need not mean that the type the actor plays is
absolutely identical with his own personality in private life. It usually
isn’t. But it does mean that, because of his own personality, his
physical and mental equipment, the actor is able to play a very
similar type to his own. Two excellent examples of this are Frank
Craven and Ernest Truex. In real life they are never Tommy Tucker of
The First Year or the hero of Six Cylinder Love, but on the stage they
are never anything else. It is just possible that they could be
something else, but they began this way, and this way the managers
and the public will probably make them continue.
All of which brings up a single artistic point upon which varied
impersonations and the repertory theater defeat type casting. Type
casting is apt to tie a man to the kind of part he first acts with any
ability, and not the kind he can act best. He may be able to play ten
different sorts of characters, and one or two of these may release
something in him that permits him to be a true artist in his
impersonation. But if he happens to play some other of the ten
characters first, and play it reasonably well, our casting system may
keep him from ever reaching those characters in which he might
excel. For another thing, the constant change of parts in a repertory
theater gives an actor practice that he cannot get if he repeats type
parts in fewer plays, as he must do in America. Through this practice
with varying parts, he may come to add something of artistic
significance to his work.
A nice esthetic point arises if you find a type-actor—say Craven—
giving an extraordinarily good performance. He is playing himself, we
will say; yet within that familiar personality, he is achieving just as
interesting emotion as some other actor of a different personality,
but possessing the knack of varied impersonation, could achieve; he
is even reaching a sense of Form, selecting out of his own
personality, experience, and emotion, and combining these into a
shape that moves us esthetically—whether to laughter or to tears. Is
this art? Would it be art if the actor were Georgie Price imitating
Craven, or somebody from the Moscow Art Theater impersonating
Craven? Would it be art if Craven played a character so different
from himself as the savant in He Who Gets Slapped, and played it as
successfully as he has played Tommy Tucker? Unquestionably the
answer to the last question would be Yes. As for the others, there is
legitimate room for argument.
This business of varied impersonation versus self-impersonation
arouses a great deal of dispute. The most interesting feature of the
squabble is that usually the opponent of self-impersonation or type-
acting points back with mournful pride to some of the great actors of
the past like Booth or Forrest. When he does this, he passes clean
outside of realistic acting. Moreover, he brings into the argument
actors, who, while they played a wide variety of parts, never took
the trouble to hide behind the wig-maker or to pretend to be
anybody else physically than the great Edwin Booth or the
celebrated Edwin Forrest.
To-day we have this same kind of acting, I imagine—and this is
the third kind that I want to list—in the work of Sarah Bernhardt,
Giovanni Grasso, Margaret Anglin, or Clare Eames. If you started out
to list the players who use their own mask frankly for every part,
achieving impersonation and emotion by their use of features and
voice as instruments, you would find many more names of women
than of men; for the actress has far fewer opportunities than the
actor to employ the ingenuities of make-up. You would also find, I
think, that your list was not so very long, and that it contained the
names of most of the players of great distinction from Eleanora Duse
to Charlie Chaplin. There is magic in the soul of such players, not in
their make-up boxes. They create their impersonations before your
eyes, not in their dressing rooms. You may, perhaps, be tempted to
say that their art lies in the voice, that the face is a mask. But the
face is obviously not a permanent mask; it changes not only from
character to character in many subtle ways, but from scene to
scene, and emotion to emotion. Also, there is Chaplin, the voiceless;
his face speaks. It seems a mask, too, but it is articulate.
Such acting may be given—and usually is given—to the
interpretation of realistic drama. It belongs at heart to another thing,
to almost another age, past or to come. It achieves the necessary
resemblance through the inner truth of its art. But it never submits
to submergence. It reaches out towards a kind of acting that we
used to have and that we will have again, while it meets the
necessities of Realism.
This fourth kind of acting may be called presentational—a word
that derives its present use from a distinction set up by Alexander
Bakshy in his The Path of the Russian Stage. Presentational acting,
like presentational production, stands in opposition to
representational. The distinction is clear enough in painting, where a
piece of work that aims to report an anecdote, or to photograph
objects, is representational, and a piece of work striving to show the
relation of forms which may or may not be of the everyday world, is
presentational. In the theater Bakshy makes a parallel distinction
between a scenic background that attempts to represent with canvas
and paint actual objects of wood or rock or whatnot, and a
background that presents itself frankly as what it is—curtains, for
instance, or an architectural wall. The distinction applies to acting as
well. A Broadway actor in a bald wig or an actor naturally bald, who
is trying to pretend that he is in a room off in Budapest, and who
refuses to admit that he knows it is all a sham, and that a thousand
people are watching him, is a representational actor, or a realist. An
actor who admits that he is an actor, and that he has an audience
before him, and that it is his business to charm and move this
audience by the brilliance of his art, is a presentational actor. The
difference deserves better terms, but they do not yet exist.
It is obvious enough that the first actors were presentational. The
Greek men who shouted village gossip from the wains, and made
plays of it, were villagers known to every one. The actors in the first
dramatic rituals may have worn masks, but they were frankly actors
or priests, not the gods and heroes themselves. Roscius was
Roscius, Molière was Molière; even the Baconians cannot deny that
Shakespeare was Shakespeare when he appeared as old Adam. I
would maintain that Garrick and Siddons, Talma and Rachel were
frankly actors; did they not see the audience out there under the
light of the same chandeliers that lit their stage?
To-day our greatest players reëstablish to some extent the bond
with the audience when they abandon any attempt to represent their
characters through wigs and make-up, and present their own faces
frankly as vehicles of expression. In comedy and in tragedy
presentational acting comes out most easily. There is something in
really great sorrow—not the emotions of the thwarted defectives of
our realistic tragedies—that leaps out to an audience. Hecuba must
speak her sorrow to the chorus and over the chorus to the people
who have come to the theater for the single purpose of hearing it.
There can be no fitting communion with the characters who have
caused the tragedy or been stricken by it. The sufferer must carry
her cup of sorrow to the gods; they alone can drink of it and make it
less. And the great fact of the theater is that the audience are gods.
It is a healthy instinct that causes many an actress in a modern
tragedy to turn her back on the other characters of the play, and
make her lamentation to the audience as though it were a soliloquy
or an aside.
There are gods and gods, of course, and it is to Dionysus and Pan
that the comedian turns when he shouts his jokes out across the
footlights. In fact he takes good care, if he is a wise clown, that the
footlights shan’t be there to interfere. If he is Al Jolson, he insists on
a runway or a little platform that will bring him out over the
footlights and into the lap of the audience. If he is a comedian in
burlesque like Bobbie Clark, he has the house lights turned up as
soon as he begins a comedy scene. He must make contact somehow
with his audience. If the fun-maker is Fanny Brice, the method is a
little less obvious, and it draws us closer to the sort of presentational
acting which will dominate many theaters in the future, the sort of
acting that presents an impersonation, and at the same time stands
off with the audience, and watches it. If the player is Ruth Draper or
Beatrice Herford, you have something that seems to me almost
identical with the kind of acting I am trying to define.
I present these four categories of acting for what they are worth.
They are frankly two-dimensional. They are divisions in a single
plane. Other planes cut across them, and the categories in these
planes intersect the ones I have defined. Consider almost any player,
and you will find a confusion of methods and results which will need
more explanation than I have provided. There is Richard Kellerhals,
for instance, the Munich player whose strikingly different work in
The Taming of the Shrew and Florian Geyer I have described. This is
not impersonation achieved with make-up. It is a thing of
expression, a spiritual thing. Take the actors of the Moscow Art
Theater. They use make-up to the last degree, but there is always a
spiritual differentiation far more significant than the physical, and
there is always a sense of the Form of life more important than
either. Harry Lauder has one impersonation—The Saftest of the
Family—which is so different from his others in almost every way
that for the moment he might be a different player. Here is a
presentational actor indulging in the tricks of the realistic
impersonator, and showing that, while the fields of realistic
impersonation and presentational acting are not absolutely exclusive,
at least they are somewhat incongruous or at any rate mutually
hampering. Louis Jouvet of the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier presents
an opposite phenomenon when he appears in the realistic drama Les
Frères Karamazov as the horrific old father, Feodor, and in Twelfth
Night as Aguecheek. These are absolutely contradictory
impersonations. In each case Jouvet completely disguises his own
personality. The interesting point is that the physical impersonation
which he brings to the Russian play is essentially unrealistic. It is all
very carefully designed in costume, make-up, and gesture as a
broad and striking expression, but not as a representation, of rough
dominance. The red face and the green coat mix in the olive-bronze
hat. His hair and his hat, his coat and his elbows flare out in lines of
almost comic violence. He is very close to caricature in a thoroughly
realistic play. Here is a curious mixture of methods and ends—planes
and categories cutting across one another and creating new figures.
Copeau’s Vieux-Colombier is to-day the most interesting forcing
bed of the new acting in Europe—unless the Kamerny Theater of the
Russian expressionists is nourishing more than scenery. Copeau’s
theater, with its naked stage and almost permanent architectural
setting, its lack of proscenium and footlights, and its steps and
forestage leading down to the audience, makes unquestionably for
presentational acting. The illusion of Realism and representation is
extremely difficult to attain. In four plays, Les Frères Karamazov,
Twelfth Night, The S. S. Tenacity, and Le Carrosse du St.-Sacrement,
varied as they are, we see no great amount of the sort of
masquerading which Jouvet does so well in the first two. In the
main, the actors keep their own normal appearance throughout; but
they are not, of course, playing types. To some extent, therefore,
they are working in the vein of Bernhardt and Grasso, striving for
impersonation in emotion rather than in physique. Except for a gouty
foot and a simple change in costume, Copeau’s Peruvian governor in
the comedy Le Carrosse du St.-Sacrement, and his impersonation of
the intellectual brother of the house of Karamazov are outwardly
very much alike. It is in the mood alone that he registers the
difference. In both, but particularly in the comic governor, there is a
touch of the presentational attitude which fills the rest of the
company in varying degrees and informs most of Twelfth Night. The
difference between this acting and what we are accustomed to, is
particularly plain in a comparison of the English sailor as played in
the New York production of The S. S. Tenacity, and in the Paris
production—the oily reality of Claude Cooper’s impersonation against
the rather brash, certainly very dry version of Robert Allard. Allard’s
performance has the stamp of almost all the acting at the Vieux-
Colombier. It is something intellectually settled upon as an
expression of an emotion, and then conveyed to the audience almost
as if read and explained. In the school of Copeau, who was once
journalist and critic, there is ever something of the expounder. It is a
reading, an explanation, in the terms of a theatrical performance. It
is, to a certain degree, presentational, because in every reading, in
every explanation, there must be an awareness of the existence of
the audience.
 CHAPTER IX
THE REINHARDT TRADITION

P LAYS of a new expressionist quality—profound, grave, ecstatic,

and as far from the neurotic as from the realistic—may be
written in the next few years without the stimulus of a great
expressionist theater or a great expressionist director. How they are
going to get themselves properly produced is another matter. They
may be conceived out of the spirit of the time, under the stimulus of
the expressionist settings of the scene designers; but the
accouchement will demand a rather expert midwife.
Expressionist acting, on the contrary, will never achieve more than
a hint of existence without a director to call it forth. A Copeau is
necessary to bring out the freshness of the company of the Vieux-
Colombier, and the hints it gives of the new acting. A rather
extraordinary director will be needed to banish representational
acting, and to put in its place a presentational ensemble, and to fuse
it with the new play.
Is there such a man in Europe to-day? Is there already an
indication of his coming in the modifications that other men have
wrought in acting, in setting, and even in theater?
We may as well begin with Reinhardt. He has been the greatest
man of the theater of this century. He fled from his Berlin theaters in
1920, to find in Salzburg a retreat from disillusion and a place of
new beginnings. We found him there in the summer of 1922
preparing to issue forth from the baroque beauty of the loveliest
palace of this lovely city to the conquest of America, and to an
experiment in Vienna which may make him again the one figure of
the theater—the director we seek. And here and there about Europe
we came on spasmodic signs of his continued activity—extraordinary
plans for a Festspielhaus in Salzburg or in Geneva, and productions
of Orpheus in the Underworld and Strindberg’s The Dream Play in
Stockholm.
It would be better, perhaps, to call Orpheus and The Dream Play
efficient pot-boilers, and to let them go at that. They give no true
measure of the man whose strength and vision grew from art-
cabarets to which Balieff owes the inspiration for his Chauve-Souris,
and naturalistic beginnings with Gorky and Wedekind, until he had
assembled the most striking company and repertory west of
Moscow, and centered about himself the whole theatrical movement
which Craig and Appia began. The Swedish productions are worth a
moment’s attention only, for they show some of Reinhardt’s faults,
and hint at a virtue.
I write of Orpheus alone, because the qualities of the Strindberg
drama were only to be guessed at from photographs and reports, all
uniting in dispraise. There were lovely things in this performance of
Offenbach’s operetta for which neither director nor composer could
claim credit—the light, clear, nightingale voices of the women of the
Swedish Opera, their superb figures, and the icy beauty of blue eyes
and ashen hair. But the things I remember from Orpheus in which
Reinhardt had a share are often disappointing things, scenes
slighted, episodes badly lit, above all carelessness of detail. It has
been Reinhardt’s major fault, this failure to bring every feature of a
production to the highest point of perfection within his grasp. He has
always been satisfied to slight one part if the whole could be “put
over” by emphasis on another part. Those who remember Sumurûn
will recall things in this brilliantly exciting pantomime that struck
them as impossibly slack—bad painting on the canvas flats, a bald
contrast between the flimsy front scenes and the solid structure of
the court of the harem behind.
In Orpheus his negligence seems to have begun in the choice of a
designer. A Dane, Max Rée, makes a mess of the scene on Olympus,
and gets to nothing better elsewhere than a golden gate from a
chapel in Nancy set against a blue night; Cupid against a gray sky,
and, for the descent into Hades, white rays from out a great cloud,
down one of which the company dances against the velvet black of
the back drop. Before now, Reinhardt has let himself wander from
his first instincts and desires—which are usually the instincts of Ernst
Stern, his notable designer; there are the horrors of Poelzig’s
decoration of the Grosses Schauspielhaus to testify to this.

The Cathedral Scene from Faust. A Reinhardt production of 1912,

designed by Ernst Stern. Two huge columns tower up against black
emptiness. Crimson light from the unseen altar at one side streams on
the congregation and throws quivering shadows of a cross on the
nearer column.
 The three moments of Orpheus which electrified Swedish
audiences are common enough in conception, but they have
something of the simple directness and smash which characterized
Reinhardt’s earlier work. The three episodes are closely linked and
make the climax of the piece. There again you can see Reinhardt’s
method—the expenditure of so much of his care and energy upon
the most important action of the play. In Orpheus the place for such
emphasis is the revolt on Mt. Olympus, and the descent of Jupiter
and the gods to Hades. Reinhardt begins with the carmagnole of the
revolutionists, with their red banners upon long poles rioting about
in the light blue of the celestial regions. For the beginning of the
descent into Hades, Reinhardt sees to it that there shall be a high
point at the very back of the stage, and from here, clear down to the
footlights and over them on a runway beside the boxes, he sends his
gods and goddesses cakewalking two at a time down into the depths
of the orchestra pit. After a very brief darkness, while the cloud and
its rays of light are installed down stage, Reinhardt sets the gods
prancing down this white and black path into the flaming silk mouth
of hell. By recognizing an opportunity for an effect at the crucial
point of the piece, and concentrating upon it whatever energies he
has for Orpheus, he makes the descent of the gods far more
memorable than it can have been in any other production. Yet it all
seems a trivial and half-hearted effort for the man who made
Shakespeare so tremendously vital at the Deutsches Theater, and
lifted Sophocles’ Œdipus into crashing popularity at the Circus
Schumann.
In his day Reinhardt was all things to all men. He began with the
great naturalist director Brahm of the Freie Volksbühne. He made a
Night Lodging of utter Realism. He put on A Midsummer Night’s
Dream in a forest of papier-mâché. He brought an austere symbolic
quality to Hamlet, closing the play with those tall, tall spears that
shepherded the body of the Dane upon its shield. He made the story
of Sister Beatrice into a gigantic and glorious spectacle in The
Miracle. He championed intimacy in the theater, took the actor out
upon a runway over the heads of the audience in Sumurûn and
finally, at the Grosses Schauspielhaus, he put the spectators half
around the players, and thrust the players in among the spectators
in the last scene of Rolland’s Danton.
Instinct led him to the heart of plays, as it led him from Realism
and the proscenium frame back to the Greek orchestra and the actor
as a theatrical figure. He grasped the emotional heart of a drama
with almost unerring judgment, and he bent a tremendous energy to
the task of making the heart of the audience beat with it.
Occasionally he ignored or could not animate some secondary but
important phase of a play. In The Merchant of Venice, though he
made Shylock rightly the center of the play and built up a court
scene of intolerable excitement, his Portia and his Nerissa were
tawdry figures. But his successes were far greater and far more
significant than his failures. Romeo and Juliet he made into a thing
of youthful passion that was almost too deep, too intimate for the
eyes of strangers. Hamlet with Moissi was an experience of life itself,
asserting again the emotional quality of Reinhardt as against the
esthetic quality of Craig.
It is hardly necessary to speak of the part that Reinhardt played in
establishing the vogue of the designer in the theater, of his attempt
to bring Craig to his stage, of his experiments with stage machinery
and lighting equipment, or of the extraordinary personal energy
which made so much work possible. The German theater testifies
continually to his influence. Dozens of younger men must be working
in his vein to-day. As far north as Gothenburg, the commercial city of
Sweden, and as far south as Vienna his influence spreads.
In Gothenburg works a young director, Per Lindberg, who is as
patently a disciple as he was once a student of Reinhardt. There in
the Lorensberg Theater is the revolving stage, with settings by a
young Swede, Knut Ström, which might have been seen at the
Deutsches Theater ten years ago. A large repertory brings forth
scenery often in the heavily simplified fashion of ten years ago, but
sometimes fresh and ambitious. Romeo and Juliet appears against
scenes like early Italian paintings, with one permanent background
of hill and cypresses and a number of naïve arrangements of arched
arcades from some Fra Angelico. The artist turns régisseur also in
Everyman, and manages a performance fresh in its arrangement of
setting, platforms, and steps, if a little reminiscent in costumes and
poses and movements.
In Richard Weichert, of the State Schauspielhaus in Frankfort, you
find a régisseur who suggests the influence of Reinhardt without
losing distinction as one of the three really significant directors of
Germany to-day. It is not so much an influence in an imitative sense,
as a resemblance in effectiveness along rather similar lines.

Maria Stuart: the throne-room at Westminster. Tall screens of blue and

gold are ranged behind a dais surmounted by a high, pointed throne
of dull gold. At either side curtains of silvery blue. Queen Elizabeth
wears a gown of gleaming gold. A Weichert production in Frankfort
designed by Sievert.
 Weichert, like so many of the outstanding directors of Germany,
has a single artist with whom he works on terms of the closest
coöperation—Ludwig Sievert. It is a little hard, therefore, to divide
the credit in Maria Stuart for many of the dramatic effects of people
against settings and in light. You might put down the scenic ideas
wholly to Sievert, since Weichert has permitted the use of a
particularly poor setting for the scene of Queen Mary’s tirade against
Elizabeth; a setting which is a sloppy attempt at lyricism in keeping
with Mary’s speech at the beginning of the scene, but quite out of
touch with the dramatic end. If Weichert could dictate the fine prison
scene reproduced in this book, he would hardly allow Sievert to
include the greenery-yallery exterior to which I have taken
exception. On the other hand, can it be only an accidental use that
Weichert makes of the curtains in the throne room scene? The act
begins with a curious arrangement of square blue columns in an
angle of which the throne is set. When the audience is over, pages
draw blue curtains from each side of the proscenium diagonally
backward to the columns by the throne. This cuts down the room to
terms of intimacy for the council scene. The point at which Weichert
must enter definitely as régisseur comes when Elizabeth steps to
one side of the room away from her group of councilors to read
some document; then the down-stage edge of the curtain at the
side by the councilors is drawn back far enough for a flood of amber
light to strike across in front of the men, and catch the white figure
of the queen. Here in this light she dominates the room; and
Leicester, when he steps into it for a scene with Mortimer, does the
same. It is a device of great use to the actor in building up the
power and atmosphere of the moment.
The dramatic vigor of Weichert never goes so high in Maria Stuart
as Reinhardt’s, but he is never so careless of detail or of subordinate
scenes. Almost every inch of the play seems painstakingly perfected.
Not only are the actors who give so sloppy a performance in Peer
Gynt under another director, strung up constantly to their best
effort; but every detail, from contrasts in costuming and the
arrangement of costumed figures, to the motion of hands and
bodies, seems calculated to heighten the play’s emotion. Take the
first scene, for example, the prison in which Queen Mary is confined
with her few retainers. The drawing shows the interesting
arrangement of the scene with bars to indicate a prison but not to
obstruct action. It pictures the final scene in a later act, when the
queen receives her friends and says good-by before going to her
death. The contrast of the queen in white and the others in black is
excellent. In the first act, even the queen is in black; the only note
of color, a deep red, is given to the heroic boy, Mortimer, who is to
bring something like hope to Mary. The long scene between
Mortimer and the queen is handled with great dignity, and at the
same time intensity. It is studied out to the last details. The hands
alone are worth all your attention.
Weichert’s direction passes on from atmosphere and movement to
the expression that the players themselves give of their characters.
It is here perhaps that the resemblance to Reinhardt is closest. You
catch it in many places: the contrast between Mortimer’s tense
young fervor, and the masterful, play-acting nonchalance of
Leicester; this red and green horror of an Elizabeth, looking
somehow as bald beneath her wig as history says she was, and
bursting with pent energies and passions; towards the end of the
play, Leicester, the deliberate fop, leaning against the wall like some
wilted violet, Mortimer exhausted but still strong beside him; then
the death of the boy, the quick stabbing, and the spears of the
soldiers raying towards his body on the floor. It is all sharp, firm,
poised—and very, very careful.
 Maria Stuart: a room in the castle where Queen Mary is imprisoned.
High black grills fill the proscenium arch on either side. Behind, a flat
wall of silvery gray. The sketch shows the moment when Mary,
gowned and veiled in white, bids farewell to her attendants. A
Weichert production in Frankfort designed by Sievert.

This is the past of Reinhardt—continued into the present and the

future by other men. What of his own continuation of it? Some have
thought him finished. Fifteen, twenty years of such accomplishment
in the theater are likely to drain any man. And indeed Reinhardt
does seem to have run through his work in Berlin, and finished with
it. No one will know just how much was personal, how much
professional, how much philosophic, in the force that drove him to
give up the leadership of his great organization, and see it
destroyed. The difficulties of management, with increasing costs and
actors lost to the movies, undoubtedly weighed heavily. But it is
certain that he felt the failure of his big, pet venture, the Grosses
Schauspielhaus. It was to have been the crown of his efforts and
beliefs—the “theater of the five thousand,” as he had called it from
the days when he astounded the world with Œdipus. In structure
and design it was badly handled; it proved a bastard thing and won
the severe condemnation of the critics. Added to this was a desire,
unquestionably, to shake loose, to get a fresh prospect on the
theater, to strike out again if possible towards a final, sure goal.
Germans spoke of Reinhardt as vacillating and uncertain in his first
years in Salzburg. But is anything but uncertainty to be expected
when a man has given up a long line of effort, and is seeking a new
one? It is a virtue then to be unsure, to be testing and trying the
mind, to be seeking some sort of truth and repeatedly rejecting
error.
Certainty began to creep in with Reinhardt’s plan for a
Festspielhaus in Salzburg—a Grosses Schauspielhaus of simpler and
more conservative pattern built truer on a knowledge of the
mistakes of the first. It was to unite Reinhardt, Richard Strauss, the
composer, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the playwright. It reached
some sort of tentative plan at the hands of Poelzig, who mis-
designed the Grosses Schauspielhaus, and Adolf Linnebach, then
passed on to Max Hasait, who laid out a stage scheme for some new
architect to build his plans around. This scheme called for a semi-
circular forestage, with a revolving stage in its center, a traveling
cyclorama of the Ars pattern behind this revolving stage, a larger
cyclorama taking in still a deeper stage, and another and a larger
cyclorama behind that. The proscenium was to be narrowed or
widened to suit the size of production and cyclorama. The house
itself was to be as adjustable, with a ceiling that let down in such a
way as to cut the seating capacity from three or four thousand to
fifteen hundred.
While this project waited on capital, an almost hopeless condition
in Austria, and hints began to come that the Festspielhaus would
have to be built in Geneva instead, a new opportunity came to
Reinhardt’s hands through President Vetter, head of the Austrian
State theaters, an opportunity of working in a playhouse that agreed
with much that Reinhardt had felt about the relations of audience
and actor. He was invited to produce five or six plays in the fall of
1922 in the new theater in the Redoutensaal in Vienna. Here, upon a
stage practically without setting, and within a room that holds actors
and audience in a matrix of baroque richness, Reinhardt will have
produced, by the time this book appears, the following plays:
Turandot, Gozzi’s Italian comedy, Clavigor and Stella by Goethe,
Molière’s Le Misanthrope, and Dame Cobalt by Calderon. Here he will
have to work in an absolutely non-realistic vein, he will have to
explore to the fullest the possibilities of the new and curious sort of
acting which I have called presentational. This adventure in Maria
Theresa’s ballroom will measure Reinhardt against the future.
 CHAPTER X
THE ARTIST AS DIRECTOR

T HE director of the future may not be a director of to-day. He may

not be a director at all. He may be one of those artists whose
appearance has been such a distinctive and interesting phenomenon
of the twentieth century theater. While we examine Max Reinhardt to
discover if he is likely to be the flux which will fuse the expressionist
play and the presentational actor, it may be that the man we seek is
his former designer of settings, Ernst Stern.
The relation of artist and director in the modern theater has been
a curious one, quite as intimate as that of pilot-fish and shark, and
not so dissimilar. Attached to the shark, the pilot-fish has his way
through life made easy and secure; he is carried comfortably from
one hunting ground to another. Often, however, when the time
comes to find food, it is the pilot-fish that seeks out the provender,
and prepares the ground, as it were, for the attack of the shark.
Then they both feast, and the pilot-fish resumes his subordinate
position.
We may shift the figure to pleasanter ground by grace of Samuel
Butler, the Erewhonian. This brilliant, odd old gentleman, a bit of a
scientist as well as a literary man, had a passion for transferring the
terms and conceptions of biology to machinery and to man’s social
relationships. Departing from the crustaceans, which grow new legs
or tails as fast as the old are cut off, he said:
“What ... can be more distinct from a man than his banker or his
solicitor? Yet these are commonly so much parts of him that he can
no more cut them off and grow new ones than he can grow new
legs or arms; neither must he wound his solicitor; a wound in the
solicitor is a very serious thing. As for his bank,—failure of his bank’s
action may be as fatal to a man as failure of his heart.... We can,
indeed, grow butchers, bakers, and greengrocers, almost ad libitum,
but these are low developments and correspond to skin, hair, or
finger nails.”
I do not know whether it would be right to say that directors have
grown artists with great assiduity in the past twenty years, or that
the greatest of the directors have become as closely associated with
particular artists as a well-to-do Englishman is with his banker or his
solicitor. At any rate the name of Reinhardt is intimately associated
with the name of Stern; Jessner has his Pirchan, Fehling his
Strohbach; I have spoken of the close relationship of Weichert and
Sievert, and I could point out similar identifications in America. An
artist of a certain type has come into a very definite, creative
connection with the art of production, and he has usually brought
his contribution to the theater of a particular director.
The designer is a modern product. He was unknown to Molière or
Shakespeare; the tailor was their only artist. Except for incidental
music, costume is the one field in which another talent than that of
actor or director invaded the theater from Greek days until the last
years of the seventeenth century. There were designers of scenery
in the Renaissance, but they kept to the court masques. Inigo Jones
would have been as astonished and as shocked as Shakespeare if
anybody had suggested that he try to work upon the stage of the
Globe Theater. The advent of Italian opera—a development easy to
trace from the court masques—and the building of elaborate
theaters to house its scenery, brought the painter upon the stage.
The names of the flamboyant brothers Galli-Bibiena are the first
great names to be met with in the annals of scene painting. And
they were the last great names until Schinkel, the German architect,
began in the early nineteenth century to seek a way of ridding the
stage of the dull devices of the current scene painters. Scenery was
not an invention of Realism; it was a much older thing. I doubt if any
one more talented than a good carpenter or an interior decorator
was needed to achieve the actuality which the realists demanded.
When artists of distinction, or designers with a flair for the theater
appeared at the stage door, it was because they saw Shakespeare or
Goethe, von Hofmannsthal or Maeterlinck sending in their cards to
Irving or Reinhardt or Stanislavsky.

The Desert: a setting by Isaac Grünewald from the opera, Samson

and Delilah. A vista of hills and sky, painted and lit in tones of burning
orange, is broken at either side by high, leaning walls of harsh gray
rock. The director, Harald André, has grouped his players so as to
continue the triangular form of the opening through which they are
seen. At the Royal Opera in Stockholm.

Now what are the relations that this modern phenomenon has
established with the theater through the medium of the director?
Ordinarily they differ very much from the attitude that existed
between the old-fashioned scenic artist and the director, and the
attitude that still exists in the case of most scenic studios. This is the
relation of shopkeeper and buyer. The director orders so many
settings from the studio. Perhaps he specifies that they are to be
arranged in this or that fashion, though usually, if the director hasn’t
the intelligence to employ a thoroughly creative designer, he hasn’t
the interest to care what the setting is like so long as it has enough
doors and windows to satisfy the dramatist. Occasionally you find a
keen, modern director who, for one reason or another, has to
employ an artist of inferior quality. Then it is the director’s ideas and
conceptions and even his rough sketches and plans that are
executed, not the artist’s. In Stockholm, for example, Harald André
so dominates the official scene painter of the Opera that the settings
for Macbeth are largely André’s in design though they are Thorolf
Jansson’s in execution. Even in the case of the exceptionally talented
artist, Isaac Grünewald, with whom André associated himself for the
production of Samson and Delilah, the director’s ideas could
dominate in certain scenes. For example, in the beautiful and
effective episode of the Jews in the desert which André injected into
the first act—a scene for which the director required a symbolic
picture of the fall of the walls of Philistia to accompany the
orchestral music which he used for this interlude. The brilliance with
which Grünewald executed the conception may be judged from the
accompanying illustration.
The commonest relationship of the director and the designer has
been coöperative. The artist has brought a scheme of production to
the director as often, perhaps, as the director has brought such a
scheme to the artist. The director has then criticized, revised, even
amplified the artist’s designs, and has brought them to realization on
the stage. And the artist and the director, arranging lights at the final
rehearsals, have come to a last coöperation which may be more
important to the play than any that has gone before.
 Samson and Delilah: the mill. A remarkable example of an essentially
ornamental theatrical setting, designed by Isaac Grünewald for the
Royal Opera in Stockholm. Black emptiness. A slanting shaft of light
strikes the millstone in a vivid crescent. As the wheel travels in its
track this crescent widens to a disk of blinding light, and then shrinks
again. The actual forms of this setting are sublimated into an
arresting composition of shifting abstract shapes of light.

You find, however, constant evidence of the artist running ahead

of the director in the creation of details of production which have a
large bearing on the action as well as on the atmosphere of the play.
Grünewald brought a setting to the mill scene in Samson and Delilah
which was not only strikingly original and dramatic, but which forced
the direction into a single course. The usual arrangement is the flat
millstone with a long pole, against which Samson pushes, treading
out a large circle as the stone revolves. The actor is always more or
less visible, and there is no particular impression of a cruel machine
dominating a human being. Grünewald changed all this by using a
primitive type of vertical millstone. The sketch shows the stage in
darkness except for one shaft of light striking sideways across. The
great wheel is set well down front within a low circular wall. Along
the wall Samson walks, pushing against a short pole that sticks out
from the center of one face of the high narrow, millstone. As he
pushes, the stone swings about and also revolves. This allows the
beam of light to catch first a thin crescent at the top of the curving
edge of the wheel, then a wider and wider curve, until suddenly, as
Samson comes into view, the light brings out the flat face of the
wheel like a full moon. Against this the actor is outlined for his aria.
Then, while the orchestra plays, he pushes the wheel once more
around. This arrangement is extraordinarily fine as a living picture
and as an expression of the mood of the scene. Moreover, it is a
triumph for the artist, because it is an idea in direction as well as
setting. It dictates the movement of the player and manages it in
the best possible way. No other action for Samson is possible in this
set, and no other action could be so appropriate and effective.
Examples of similar dictation by the artist—though none so
striking—come to mind. In Frankfort Sievert arranged the settings
for Strindberg’s Towards Damascus in a way that contributed
dramatic significance to the movement of the players. The piece is in
seventeen scenes; it proceeds through eight different settings to
reach the ninth, a church, and from the ninth the hero passes back
through the eight in reverse order until he arrives at the spot where
the action began. Sievert saw an opportunity to use the revolving
stage, as well as elements of design, in a way interpreting and
unifying the play. He placed all nine scenes on the “revolver,” and he
made the acting floor of each successive setting a little higher than
the last. This results in rather narrow rooms and a sea shore
bounded by formal yellow walls, but it permits an obvious unity, it
shows visually the path that the hero has to follow, and it symbolizes
his progress as a steady upward movement towards the church.
The artist dictating a particular kind of direction is obvious enough
in Chout (Le Bouffon), the fantastic comic ballet by Prokofieff which
Gontcharova designed for the Ballets Russes. Gontcharova’s settings
are not particularly good, but at least they have a definite and
individual character. They are expressionist after a fashion related
more or less to Cubism. They present Russian scenes in wildly
distorted perspective. Log houses and wooden fences shatter the
backdrop in a war of serried timbers. A table is painted on a wing,
the top tipping up at an alarming angle, one plate drawn securely
upon it, and another, of papier-mâché, pinned to it. All this sort of
thing enjoined upon the régisseur a kind of direction quite as
bizarre, mannered, and comic. Chout seems to have had no direction
at all in any creative sense. The régisseur failed to meet the
challenge of the artist.
 The first scene of Tchehoff’s Uncle Vanya. Here Pitoëff indicates a
Russian country side by a rustic bench and slender birch trees
formally spaced against a flat gray curtain.

It is ordinarily very hard to say what share the artist or the

director has had in the scheme of a setting, or whether the director
has bothered his head at all about the setting after confiding it to
what he considers competent hands. It is an interesting speculation
just how much the physical shape of Reinhardt’s productions has
been the sole creation of his artist, Stern. Certainly Stern delighted
in the problems which the use of the revolving stage presented, and
only in a single mind could the complexities of these sets, nesting
together like some cut-out puzzle, be organized to a definite end. It
is entirely possible that, except for a conference on the general tone
of the production, and criticisms of the scheme devised by Stern,
Reinhardt may have given no thought at all to the scenery. Stern
was a master in his own line, and for Reinhardt there was always the
thing he delighted most in, the emotional mood produced by the
voices and movements of the actors. His carelessness of detail even
in the acting, suggests that for him there were only the biggest
moments, the important elements and climaxes, that put over the
emotion of the play.
Sometimes artist and director are the same, as with Pitoëff in
Geneva and Paris, or with Knut Ström in Gothenburg. In such a case
setting, direction, and acting are one. But ordinarily there is a
division of responsibility, and an opportunity for the artist to play a
part in the production of a drama far more important than Bibiena’s.
Just how important it may prove to be is bound up, I think, with the
future of the theater as a physical thing, and with the temperament
of the artist. Working as a designer of picture-settings, the artist can
only suggest action, but not dictate it, through the shapes and
atmospheres he creates. The important thing is that almost all the
designers of real distinction in Europe are tending steadily away
from the picture-setting. They are constantly at work upon plans for
breaking down the proscenium-frame type of production, and for
reaching a simple platform stage or podium upon which the actor
shall present himself frankly as an actor. This means, curiously
enough, that the designers of scenery are trying to eliminate
scenery, to abolish their vocation. And this in turn should indicate
that the artist has his eye on something else besides being an artist.
The director who works in such a new theater as the artists desire
—in the Redoutensaal in Vienna, for example,—requires an artist to
work with him who sees art in terms of the arrangement of action
upon steps, and against properties or screens. This is ordinarily the
business of the director in our picture-frame theater; with the work
of the artist enchantingly visible in the setting behind the actors, the
director can get away reasonably well with the esthetic problems of
the relations of actors and furniture and of actors and actors.
Nobody notes his shortcomings in this regard. Put him upon an
almost naked stage, and he must not only make his actors far more
expressive in voice and feature, but he must also do fine things with
their bodies and their meager surroundings. This is far easier for a
pictorial artist than for the director, who is usually an actor without a
well-trained eye. The director must therefore employ an artist even
in the sceneryless theater, and employ him to do what is really a
work of direction. The two must try to fuse their individualities and
abilities, and bring out a composite director-artist, a double man
possessing the talents that appear together in Pitoëff.

A scene from Grabbe’s Napoleon. The Place de Grêve in Paris is

indicated by a great street lamp set boldly on a raised platform in the
center of the stage. A Jessner production designed by Cesar Klein.