THE LIVING STAGE
There is something in the nature of the theater that makes Realism
a natural and a thoroughly unsatisfactory method of expression. Its
principal material, the actor, is too near actuality. It is no triumph
of art to make a flesh-and-blood man named Grant Mitchell into a
flesh-and-blood man named Andrew Lane. Especially when the heart of the
whole business is an elaborate pretense that there really isn’t any
actor, and there really isn’t any theater, and we are really looking
through the fourth wall of a room in the next village.
Obviously no other art is so close to life or so quick with life’s
vitality. Literature uses printed signs of a very arbitrary and
formal nature, which we translate into words forming ideas and mental
pictures, which, in turn, may suggest human beings and their emotions.
Music employs sounds some of which faintly suggest bird-notes or the
rumble of the heavens, but none of which comes within shouting distance
of the human voice. Painting has pieces of canvas and lumps of colored
clays, and these it arranges in patterns, through which, by custom
and habit, we are able to gain an impression of a curiously flattened
life. Even sculpture, literal as its rounded, three-dimensional shapes
ordinarily are, must use the intermediary of clay or rock. The theater
is the one art that works in the materials of life itself. It employs
life to render life. Painting, architecture, and sculpture may supply a
background to the actor, but the actor is the center of the play, and
when he speaks the words of literature he speaks them as the actual
human being from whom they are supposed to come.
The actor brings the theater far too close to life to please some of
its great lovers. The actuality of the actor affrights them. Gordon
Craig, once an actor and always a true partizan of the theater, has
felt this. He has found the actor too much a piece of life, too much a
creature of the emotions of existence, and too little an impersonal and
dependable tool of the artist. “The actions of the actor’s body, the
expression of his face, the sounds of his voice, all are at the mercy
of the winds of his emotions.” He is not clay, he is not stone, he is
not curves of ink, he is not arbitrary sounds produced from wood or
brass. He is life itself, and a very irregular and undependable part of
life. Therefore, says Craig, the thing that the actor gives us is not a
work of art; “it is a series of accidental confessions.”
Now the contrast between the pliant and well-behaved clay and the
intractable actor is interesting. And there is a certain significance
in the fact that when Craig describes the work of the actor as a series
of “accidental confessions,” he uses a phrase which would delight the
harshest of the realists—the writers who practised Naturalism, the
literal transcription of the irregularities of life. But the issue goes
deeper. The actor is essential to the theater. He cannot be turned out
for a glorified puppet, an _Ubermarionette_. But perhaps he can be
told that he is far too near life and its accidents to spend his time
imitating them. To give us life and its significance the dramatist,
like workers in the other arts, needs an intermediary. If the actor is
not a true intermediary, because he is a part of life, the dramatist
has only to see that he can go beyond the actuality of the physical
actor to Form. With the creative vitality of the living actor to awaken
us and make us sensitive and responsive, the dramatist may strive to
reach beyond outward truth to that inner truth which presents itself to
us in deliberate and natural arrangements of life.
It is no easy thing to tell what is meant by the word Form when we take
it past the idea of the design of things in a literal sense, and apply
it to significance in the design of life. But it is easy to say that
Form has nothing whatever to do with representation or illusion. As
Clive Bell points out in his book _Art_, in which he makes a brilliant
plea for what he calls “significant form” as the test of visual art,
the fact that a thing is representative, does not at all suggest either
the presence or the absence of Form. It does not preclude its having
Form just as it does not in the least assure it. The theater will
always have the physical body of the actor, and to that extent it will
always be representational. But that is certainly all it need have of
illusion. What the actor says and the atmosphere in which he appears
may be absolutely non-representational. Even his physical body, as he
uses it, may take on qualities outside and beyond illusion.
It remains the dramatist’s special business to master the extremely
difficult task of fighting through to Form while retaining the
realistic technique, or else—which seems far better—frankly to desert
Realism, representation, illusion, and write directly in significant
terms, no matter how unplausible they may be. After all, common sense
sees that it is better to concentrate all of an artist’s technical
energies on the major thing he wishes to accomplish. Bell says of
the men and women of the future: “When they think of the early
twentieth-century painters they will think only of the artists who
tried to create Form—the artisans who tried to create illusions will
be forgotten.” It is equally true that the artist who tries to create
illusion is more than likely to forget to create Form.
Now creating Form does not mean hiding the actuality of the actor
under strange robes. There seems to be a curious notion abroad that
the alternative to Realism is Romance. It is true that in trying to
escape out of Realism a number of playwrights have avoided reality
and wandered into the never-never-land of Thalanna and Kongros. It is
also true that modern sciences, history, archeology, and psychology,
have made the past new and real and alive again, and that certain
playwrights have seen in the rejuvenated ages a chance to escape the
realistic and to attain more permanent values. But it is not true that
the present offers smaller opportunities. Expressionist playwrights
have already shown this conclusively enough; witness Eugene O’Neill’s
_The Hairy Ape_.
Theatrical history has never been as popular with theatrical reformers
as it should be. It shows not only that the realistic technique is a
matter of the last half century, and that the greatest periods of the
theater’s history were non-realistic. But it shows also that even when
Realism was an impossible idea, and when expressive, significant Form
was the only thing at which the playwright aimed, the theater and its
audiences usually lived frankly and healthfully in the present.
Greek tragedy, to be sure, was not a thing of the present—except in
the reality of its religious emotion. Its heroes came out of the past.
They did not talk or act like the Athenians that watched them. They
even dressed according to a set convention of their own. In every way
the Greek tragic theater embraced Form, directly and naturally. It was
in the temperament of the Greeks. Their sculpture was realistic to a
degree never before reached and not surpassed in physical truth to-day;
yet from these statues we gain a sense of Form far more significant
than the sense of life which they give us. Representation was not an
end to the Greek artist. The dramatist of Athens felt no desire to
“humanize” his heroes or to make them like the people about him in any
particular. The drama was religious in origin and had not yet grown
temporal. So long as the Greek mind had its fondness for Form, there
could be no demand for the smallest actuality.
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.
[Illustration:
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.