THE TWILIGHT OF THE MACHINES
There are many things upon the German stage besides black dawn. The
twilight of the machines, for instance, and all the past of the new
stagecraft lagging superfluous.
Even the past of the old stagecraft. In the same theater in Frankfort
where one of the three significant pairs of German directors and
artists labors, I have seen _Peer Gynt_ given as incompetently as
any patron of an American small-town stock company could demand. The
settings were hideous; the same badly painted backdrop served for two
or three scenes in different localities; the revolving stage rumbled
noisily and did nothing to shorten intermissions. While the orchestra
played Grieg’s introductory music in the wings and the stage was dark,
waiting actors, who imagined that thereby ears as well as eyes were
dimmed, restlessly shifted from one foot to another in squeaky shoes.
At the beginning of each scene the lights came up like thunder. Through
as many scenes as could be endured, the same players who gave a sharp,
almost electric performance of _Maria Stuart_ the next night, acted
_Peer Gynt_ dully and sloppily to a running fire of assistance
from the prompter’s box. It is worth remarking, incidentally, that
the _souffleur_, as he is euphemistically called, is no necessity in
the repertory theater. He may give a complete and studied reading of
the text one lap ahead of the actors in the Grosses Schauspielhaus,
the Frankfort Schauspielhaus, the Burgtheater in Vienna, the Lessing
Theater in Berlin, and a dozen other first-class theaters; but you
don’t hear his voice in the State Schauspielhaus of Berlin under
Jessner, in Copeau’s Vieux-Colombier in Paris, or during a performance
of _Masse-Mensch_ at the Volksbühne.
[Illustration:
The sleep-walking scene from _Macbeth_ as produced by Harald André at
the Royal Opera in Stockholm. Moonlight slants down through four tall
windows making alternate bars of light and shadow, through which moves
the white-robed figure of Lady Macbeth. The Doctor and the Gentlewoman
are half-hidden at one side in the darkness of the foreground.
]
The past of the German stage is seldom slovenly, but it is often
disturbing. To see in 1922 a setting by Roller for _Die Meistersinger_
is like encountering at a fashionable New York _thé dansant_ the girl
you used to take to high school dances in St. Louis in 1907. The German
stage is full of such disquieting reminders of juvenile infatuations;
Sweden is not exempt. The work of the pioneers and imitations of the
work of the pioneers are still to be seen. Verdi’s _Macbeth à la_ Craig
at the Stockholm Opera; _The Sunken Bell_ at the Grosses Schauspielhaus
with Stern’s hill from _Penthesilea_; Reinhardt effects in _Maria
Stuart_ in Frankfort; good old Russian painting in faked perspective in
_Florian Geyer_ in Munich; a wedding of Heinrich Leffler and Maxfield
Parrish at Dresden in the Verdi opera which the Germans so cheerfully
translate as _Der Troubadour_; the style, if you can call it that,
of the Washington Square Players in _Towards Damascus_ in Frankfort.
Everywhere traces of Reinhardt and Craig and Roller.
Roller, alone of the artists who were new fifteen years ago, is still
busy in the theater. The mood he arouses is mixed. It is thoroughly
annoying to find him so unable to grasp the problem of setting in
the remarkable new theater in the Redoutensaal in Vienna, unable to
see that the Gobelins and the crystal, the golden moldings and the
rich baroque ornament of that marvelous room which is both stage and
auditorium, must set the style and color of the screens and formal set
pieces of the stage. It is a little sad to see Roller trying in _Kain_
at the Burgtheater to adopt the steps and black curtains and the one
or two plastics of the newer and younger men. When he is decking out
some war-horse like _Die Meistersinger_ in the good old style of the
revolutionists of 1910, you have to forgive him much, even while you
wonder at the limitations of so many of the stage designers outside
Russia. Take the first scene, for example. Dramatically the thing is
right in proportion and arrangement. It is an interesting composition
of wall spaces and doors, which becomes all the more interesting when
the director has arranged the many costumed characters in waves that
ripple along the shore of the picture and roll up here and there about
some promontory of the design. But when you look away from composition
to color, you see a lack. It is not the difficulty of bad color,
which besets most of the Germans; Roller and Stern generally escape
that. The fact of the matter is that there simply isn’t any color—in
spite of a furnace of dulled orange smoldering on the walls, and some
gray-greens damping it down for contrast. This is not color in the
sense that the Russians know it. Roller does not think in color as does
Nicolas Roerich. What Westerner does—or ever has? Roller thinks in line
and mass and proportion. Then he goes to his paint-box, and selects two
nicely contrasting tones, more or less appropriate to a large medieval
building. He never bothers his head over the dramatic problem of
whether they mean anything in relation to the action, or the artistic
problem of whether he has made one of those subtle arrangements of many
curiously harmonizing colors, which, in the alchemy of the eye, take on
a psychic significance.
[Illustration:
A setting by Alfred Roller for the first act of _Die Meistersinger_ at
the State Opera in Vienna. An example of the purely decorative setting
at its best.
]
Such laggard things—the relics of Craig-ideas and the work of various
of the elder directors and artists—play a more or less normal part in
the life of the German stage. They would find a parallel in any age.
They know their place and keep to it. Something that is only just
beginning to learn its proper and subordinate part in the advance of
the theater is the far-famed stage machinery of Germany.
It was the most natural thing in the world that the Germans should
turn their stage into a machine shop. When they build one of their
great five-story office buildings they begin by laying a railroad
along two sides on the street level and another up in the air above it,
and putting in a traveling elevator, dump-cart, and crane that runs
along on the tracks; after they have this gigantic apparatus in order,
building the building is mere child’s play. _Der verrückte Krieg_ was
all that prevented the development of a most ingenious mechanism for
erecting the erector that builds the building.
The German stage machine is a Frankenstein stage-hand. It is intended
to do the work of scene shifting at great economy of effort and time.
Actually the German theaters seem to employ more stage hands than the
American theaters, and the waits are no shorter on the whole than those
we are able to manage if we want to.
There are two main divisions to the species. Lewis Carroll, listing the
different varieties of Snarks, supplied a formula. There are those, it
is said, that are round and revolve, and those that have rollers and
slide. The revolving stage—made famous by the cohorts of Reinhardt—and
the sliding stage—which includes a sinking variety.
The revolving stage has its furious adherents. They include Reinhardt,
Stern, who utilized its shortcomings quite as marvelously as its good
points in his productions for Reinhardt, and the host of Reinhardt
disciples. It came from Japan in 1896 through Lautenschläger of Munich.
It is a great circle cut out of the stage floor and mounted on wheels
so that it may be freely turned by hand or power. The circle is from
forty to sixty feet across, and usually occupies the greater part of
the stage space. On it the different settings are placed back to back,
anywhere from two to ten fitting snugly together. One after another of
these settings is presented in the opening of the proscenium as the
stage revolves. It retains its reputation because it is the simplest
and handiest scene-shifting machine to use with the great solid plaster
dome which Reinhardt and so many other directors found essential as a
substitute for the flapping and wrinkling canvas sky.
The sliding stage pure and simple is just a couple of low platforms
the size of that part of the stage usually acted on. These carry the
settings and slide out sideways into the wings. While one platform
is in front of the proscenium with the actors giving the play in its
setting, the other is being reset at the right or the left. It is easy
to see that these platforms cannot slide past either end of the plaster
dome if it is far enough down front to be of any use. The Deutsches
Opernhaus in Charlottenburg, Berlin, gets around this by having the
whole gigantic dome slide, too; hung from tracks and carrying its
lights with it, the dome is pushed back into the depths of the stage
when the platforms at the front have to slide. The amusing feature is
that the present director of the theater has so little notion of what
it is all for that in _Don Giovanni_ he makes a number of changes by
rigging his flats and drops on lines, as we might do, and hoisting
them into the flies in full view of the audience on what is by a polite
fiction called a dark stage.
All this whirling of palaces and scuttling of skies is child’s play
beside the sinking stage. As developed by Adolf Linnebach, technical
director of the State Schauspielhaus in Dresden, it almost defies
understanding or description. The simplest variety is to be found
across the National Gallery and the Theaterplatz under the guiding and
inventive hand of Max Hasait of the State Opera House, Linnebach’s
great mechanical rival. The stage of the Opera is divided into seven
sections from the proscenium opening to the spot a hundred feet back
where the _Hinterbühne_ or auxiliary rear-stage begins. These seven
sections can rise some feet above the stage level or sink into the
basement. While the front sections are in the basement, carrying a
setting that has already been used, the rear sections, with another
setting on them, can, by a complicated arrangement, be rolled down
on tracks to take the place of the front sections in the proscenium
opening. While the front sections are in the basement the setting
upon them is changed; the same thing happens to the rear sections
when they are rolled back again. The stage of the Schauspielhaus is
far more complicated. It is divided in only three sections, but when
the two forward sections are in the basement, sliding stages of the
ordinary sort, which rest upon them, can be slid out to the sides
for changes of scene. On these sliding stages small “wagon stages” or
mechanical stage hands operate, carrying large pieces such as stairs
and mantels into place. Under the orchestra pit at the front is another
contrivance, like a small stage on stilts, which can be trundled onto
the first sinking stage straddling the setting. Thus two stages are
super-imposed, and a sort of elevator stage produced, such as Steele
MacKaye once invented. Hasait is nursing a scheme for rearranging his
sinking and sliding stages so that the seven stages may run forward,
sink to the basement, slide back, rise, and run forward again in rapid
succession like an endless chain. The prospect is distinctly startling.
Opponents of the new stagecraft have often claimed that the scenery
ignores the actor. With the sliding and sinking stage a little further
advanced, you can imagine the scenery taking a really furious interest
in the actor, pursuing him from floor to basement and back again. You
can imagine some new director working out a drama in which a cathedral
chases an apostate priest about the stage, or a phallic column pursues
the heroine into the darkness of the cellar only to lose her as she
rises triumphantly on the last of the seven mystic stages guided
and blessed by that unique functionary of the German theater, the
_Obermaschineninspektor_.
[Illustration:
_Der Schatzgräber_: the cottage of the epilogue in Schrecker’s opera.
An extreme conventionalization of the old scenic materials. The
artist, Emil Pirchan, has indicated a cottage by the shape of the
opening in the flat drop. Here, design replaces machinery in securing
a quick change of scene.
]
There are peculiar disadvantages to these expensive mechanisms. The
revolving stage simply can’t handle certain scenes without ceasing
to be a revolving stage. It is impossible to use the entire width
or depth of the stage for an exterior without shoving all the other
scenes off the “revolver,” and giving up its use. All exterior scenes
on the revolving stage have to go up over the rooms set at the back.
The western prairies and the North German sea coast are equally
unpopular with the friends of the revolving stage. The exceptionally
fine production of _Masse-Mensch_—with its various great steps the
whole width and half the height of the stage, alternating with flat
open scenes—received almost no assistance from the “revolver” at the
Volksbühne in Berlin. The technical director, putting this stage
through its paces and exhibiting such amusing tricks as its ability to
rise or sink some six feet at either end, thus producing a slanting
floor, confessed that he much preferred some other type of stage.
The sliding and sinking stage has fewer disadvantages; but it is an
elaborate, expensive, and cumbersome machine to do the work that
designers and stage hands might quite as well accomplish. On the matter
of expense, it is disquieting to hear at a scene-rehearsal of _Das
Rheingold_ that one hundred and fifty men, including electricians, are
busy with this labor-saving device. It is still more disturbing to the
machine-worshiper to time the intermissions in German theaters, and to
find that waits of from two to five minutes are quite as frequent as
in America. The explanation, of course, is the costumes. “The stage was
all set in half a minute, but we had to wait for the tenor to get into
his blue tights.” It looks very much as if the _Maschineninspektoren_
should have introduced sliding wardrobes or adapted the harnessing
devices of fire-houses before they put thousands of dollars into
sliding stages.
The German technical men are beginning to chafe at the limitations of
the machines, to be content to push them into second place. If you talk
to Linnebach, at Dresden, once high priest of the sliding stage, you
will note with some surprise that the word _einfach_ has a Carolinian
way of getting into the conversation. Things must be simpler. No big
solid sets; instead, some curtains and lights and a dome on which to
project painted designs. The word _Podium_ also crops out. Like almost
all forward-looking artists and directors in Germany, Linnebach wants
to put the actor on a sort of tribune thrust out into the audience.
He wants to give him back the vital heritage of the Greek and the
medieval stages. Linnebach is content mechanically with the devices of
the electrician; when he mounted Hasenclever’s expressionist drama,
_Jenseits_, he made the setting out of light and shadow, a few chairs
and tables, only one or two set pieces, and some projected backgrounds.
Machinery like the sinking stage has advantages apart from its
ability to change heavy realistic sets. It is difficult to see how the
opening scene of Shaw’s _Pygmalion_, looking out to the street from
under the portico of Covent Garden, could be better created or more
quickly shifted than in Linnebach’s production. Certainly without the
ability to sink with ease the rear part of the stage three or four
feet, he could not have given us the natural effect of the street level
below the eyes of the audience and the actors. The great virtue of a
mechanical stage of this kind is not to shift scenery, so much as to
supply economically and quickly different levels for the actors to
play upon. The use of levels is one of the important advances of the
Continental theater since the war, and the sinking stage helps greatly
with this. With a few inner prosceniums and simple backgrounds, it can
supply, as it were, an infinite variety of formal stages such as the
Continental theater seems slowly to be tending toward.
[Illustration:
_Das Rheingold_: Alberich’s Cave. A setting by Linnebach and Pasetti
at the National Theater in Munich. An atmospheric scene produced by
lights playing across a frankly painted background which emphasizes
the rocky converging lines of a cavern.
]
Barring the realistic and the formal, there is a middle ground in
which the machine is of little value compared with the designer. In
Linnebach’s theater—though not from his designs—a Hindu romance,
_Vasantasena_, was mounted frankly and freshly against flat settings
in the style of Indian miniatures. This was accomplished, without the
aid of stage machinery, by the use of a permanent setting or portal of
Indian design, with steps and a platform, on which, framed within an
inner proscenium, drops and profiles were changed much as we would
change them. The artist, Otto Hettner, supplied a style, as well as a
formal stage, which made the machine taboo. Working with Pasetti at
the National Theater in Munich, Linnebach accomplished the changes of
_Das Rheingold_ quite as easily. In an older production at Dresden,
under Hasait, the fields of the gods opposite Valhalla were made of
bulky platforms and plastic rocks, which went rolling back behind the
cyclorama while up from the basement came in one piece the cave of the
Nibelungen with its nooks and corners, its overhanging ceiling, and
its whole equipment of plastic canvas rocks, which might have come
out of some cavern on a scenic railway. In Munich the simpler levels
of the fields in the second scene served in the cave scene also. They
were lost in the shadows, along with the side walls, which were hardly
more than masking curtains. The rocky cave was suggested wholly by
the backdrop. This was painted in broken, converging lines of rock
formations. Because of the magic of light, it did not seem like some
conventional old backdrop.
The spirit of the theater as it has developed since the war seems to
call upon the designer and _régisseur_ instead of the mechanician.
When artists were building heavy and cumbersome settings, elaborate in
physical proportions if not in design, sliding and revolving stages
were unquestionably necessary, though we may well ask how much the
presence of the mechanisms tempted the artists into such excess.
To-day, however, the setting is being stylized, the stage itself made
formal. Machinery becomes irrelevant. Copeau does not need it even for
the realistic _Les Frères Karamazov_; the Redoutensaal is almost too
innocent to suspect its existence. _Régisseurs_ of the new sort want
something more theatrical than a turntable that any round-house might
boast.
The playwright works with the _régisseur_ and the artist to this same
end. While Dorothy Richardson, Waldo Frank, and James Joyce are busy
taking the machinery out of the novel, the playwrights are making
machinery unnecessary for drama. They drop “atmosphere,” and take up
the soul. They seek the subjective instead of the physical. They want
to thrill us with the mysteries and clarities of the unconscious,
instead of cozening us with photographic detail or romantic color. For
all this they need imagination in setting, not actuality. Form carries
the spirit up and out. Indications speak to it louder than actualities.
Design, which is of the spirit, drives out mechanism, which is of the
brain.
The day of the machine is over in the theater, the day of its
domination at any rate. For a time it looked as though the name of the
old theater in the Tuileries would have to be painted over every stage
door in Germany—La Salle des Machines. Now the stage machine is sinking
into its proper place—the cellar. A new device is lording it in the
theater, but it cannot be called a machine. The electric light is not
a mechanical thing. It is miraculously animated by something very like
the Life Force, and night by night its living rays are directed to new
and unforeseen ends.