THE GERMAN ACTOR
Four years of war left the elaborate machinery of the German theaters
intact. Four years of the purgatory called peace have even seen a sharp
advance in electrical equipment. Critics and managers of the victorious
nations and of the neutrals that enjoy a sound exchange may complain
of the quantity and quality of theater-goers; but the vanquished have
suffered less. At forty performances in Germany and Austria we saw
hardly two rows of vacant seats all told in the dramatic theaters,
though one or two musical shows were no more than two-thirds full.
The German theater has suffered, however, in one spot. The unfortunate
truth is that it is a vital spot—acting. Only the richness of trained
talent in its post-war companies enables it to suffer the drain of
the past years and still give performances far better than we see in
England or America.
War affected the German actor less than it did the actor in the
allied countries; Germany kept her players on the home front fighting
disheartenment. Peace and the movies, however, brought dispersal.
Companies were scattered, players exiled. The spectacular collapse,
of course, was the dissolution of Max Reinhardt’s famous company
that filled his two Berlin theaters. Moissi, Bassermann, Pallenberg,
Konstantin, Eibenschütz, Wegener, Dietrich, Arnold, Lehman, Eysoldt,
Bertens, Diegelmann, Heims, Jannings, Schildkraut—not one of these
names appears on the _Zettel_ outside the old Reinhardt houses. Some
are in the movies and some are stars, but all are gone.
If American films could have entered Germany in the face of the
depreciated mark, Reinhardt’s theaters might still be giving true
repertory, Reinhardt himself might still be there, and certainly many
of the old company would be playing together in Berlin. Other factors,
personal, financial, and artistic, gradually drew Reinhardt out of
production, but he himself declared with much truth that repertory was
impossible when actors had to give their days to the movies, instead
of to rehearsals, and that the theater was impossible for him without
repertory and actors. As for the players themselves, with the mark at a
cent and pomade at two hundred marks, it had to be either the movies or
stardom.
The star system of England and America, imported into Germany, has
done little to keep even the popular players in Berlin. The audience
is exhausted sooner than in New York or London, and then tours must
come. Alexander Moissi knocks about Switzerland and Austria. Leopoldine
Konstantin, the flashing slave girl of _Sumurûn_, is supposed to be
starring in Vienna, but you find her one night at _Der Blaue Vogel_,
the imitation _Chauve-Souris_ which one of Balieff’s assistants
installed in Berlin. Pallenberg goes up and down the country with _Der
Wauwau_, the German edition of _Grumpy_.
Even the younger stars are wanderers. That fresh exotic, Maria Orska,
competes with the traveling troupe of the Moscow Art Theater for
the patronage of Stockholm. She plays in the cosmopolitan German of
a Russian, against the Swedish of a resident company. The play is
Wedekind’s _Erdgeist_, first half of that staggering duology of sex
which ends with _Pandora’s Box_ and Jack the Ripper, and goes under the
name of _Lulu_. In Berlin Mme. Orska is thought a little sensational.
Her Lulu is anything but that. She does not dwell on the corporeality
of this daughter of earth’s joy. Her Lulu is not a human being made
hideous and fascinating with eternal lures. She is a kind of mask, a
thin mask, a shell of tinted and whitened silks over a face sucked dry
of all but passion and the shrunken charms of decadence. She is a sort
of doll—a _Pritzelpuppe_—with her long black legs and her pale face
thrust out from either end of a pierrot’s costume. Very much of a doll
when the play is most bitterly cruel. Dr. Goll flops to the floor,
dead, when he finds her with Schwartz. Orska tiptoes stiffly towards
him, manœuvers past his body like some marionette, pokes him with a
stiff toe and squeaks the squeak of a doll. Is it fear or pleasure or
both? A clever way to do Wedekind. But, in the end, night after night
with only self-display to remember.
But Berlin—or Stockholm—is not Germany. There is ensemble left in some
of the lesser cities—there is even ensemble in Berlin at the State
Schauspielhaus, if there is no great individual playing there.
The illustrious old Burgtheater in Vienna still has a company, if it
lacks a distinguished director. They manage portions of Tolstoi’s _The
Living Corpse_ very well. They give the episode of the gypsies’ singing
to Fedya and Mascha as it was never given in our own _Redemption_. In
the Burgtheater it is no discreet cabaret turn. The women and the men
hang over the lovers. Their song is a frank and touching celebration
of the love that their Mascha has won. It is an open display of
sentimental interest in love-making, which people only admit when
wine or perhaps gypsy blood have stilled inhibitions. But all this
is doubtless more a matter of direction than of acting. It is in the
old mother of Frau Senders, the aristocrats of Frau Wilbrand and Herr
Herterich, not quite so much so in the Fedya of Herr Treszler that
you find real playing. It is hardly possible that the performance of
Vildrac’s _The S. S. Tenacity_ is the best that the Burgtheater gives;
but it is a most excellent performance. It is peculiarly excellent,
because, while it is not French, it seems so little German in a racial
sense. Artistically, of course, it is most decidedly Teuton. It has
the hard, firm quality of German acting. Copeau’s production in Paris
is a rational thing; it is almost like a reading, a very intelligent,
sensitive reading. In New York we played it in flashes of misgiving
and determination; it was unctuous in Augustin Duncan’s roustabout
and in Claude Cooper’s English sailor, and fine and sensitive in
Marguerite Forrest’s rather ladylike barmaid; but the rest dropped in
and out of illusion. The Viennese actors play for a bright and firm
actuality, which they imagine is French. It isn’t precisely German,
but technically it is as Teuton in thorough-going emotionalism as the
passionate kiss with which the Viennese players replaced the salute on
the nape of the neck with which the French Bastien begins his wooing.
Individual acting as well as ensemble flourishes in the large company
that serves the four State theaters of Munich. It is a piece of good
fortune that both opera and drama are under a single management, and
that pieces may be given in any one of four houses—the small modernist
Künstler Theater of Max Littmann in the Ausstellungspark, the tiny,
wickedly cheerful old Residenz Theater, the reformist “amphitheater”
which Littmann created in the Prinzregenten Theater, or the National
Theater, just as much the conventional old-fashioned German opera house
as when it was called the Hoftheater. The large company and the breadth
of repertory which these theaters permit to be given efficiently and
properly, provides some exceptional players exceptionally well-trained
and in an interesting variety of parts.
The Munich group can give that shock of virtuosity which the German
repertory theaters provide, and give it to you at highest voltage. On
one evening, for example, you discover in _The Taming of the Shrew_
a most exceptional Grumio. His name is Richard Kellerhals, and he is
the sort of clown that happens once in ten years in America. He is
not a Charlie Chaplin, because that is a little too much to ask. But
he outdoes any other movie-comic that I can recall. He is not a Jim
Barton, because he does not drive ahead at just one thing—Gargantuan
burlesque. Kellerhals plays Grumio with his face and his legs and
his brain. His odd, wizened little face, inordinately simple, just a
bit loony; his acrobatic legs, quick and comic, getting him into all
manner of strange places; his brain, always alert behind the mask of
the loon, working out a dozen amusing twists of business. It seems a
highly original performance, though perhaps it is merely tradition
in Germany that Grumio should sniff the clothes of Biondello, and be
sniffed at, all within the bounds of decency, but very like two dogs
of their masters. At any rate, original or not, it is the sort of
sharp, brilliant fooling that would make Kellerhals a musical comedy
specialist in America, perhaps a star.
An evening or two later, out at the Ausstellungspark you see
Hauptmann’s play of the Peasants’ Rebellion, _Florian Geyer_.
Almost the first figure you notice among the peasants who are trying
desperately to make themselves far-seeing leaders in the fight against
the trained nobles, is a gaunt fellow with his head in a bloody
bandage, and with fever in his eyes. This is Geyer’s brother-in-law and
secretary in the field, a boy almost on the point of death who looks
like a sickened man of thirty. The desperate impatience of the worn
is mingled in his face with the fanatical devotion of the men who win
lost causes. The cause _is_ lost in the end, and after he has watched
this disillusion pile upon quarrels and jealousies and treasons, he
crumples up and dies. Every word of his tragedy you can read in his
face. When you look at your program you find that the name of the actor
is Richard Kellerhals. In America—if Kellerhals had acted this part
before Grumio—he would be competing with William B. Mack in the playing
of tortured gunmen the rest of his life.
Quite as good acting and almost as varied impersonations are to be
seen in the work of Friedrich Ulmer as Petruchio and as Geyer. His
Geyer—strong, simple, desperate in anger—is easy to imagine on our
stage; Lionel Barrymore could do it. But his Petruchio—a coarse,
bull-necked, and most amusing devil—is another matter. It sins against
the pretty romance of our Van Dyked Shakespeare. And it is famously
good fun, along with the whole riotous show.
Dresden has a company that makes no difficulty over playing Shaw’s
_Pygmalion_ one night, in German provincial accents that are supposed
to approximate the English dialects pursued and recorded by Professor
Higgins under the portico of Covent Garden, and over playing the next
night a comic and poetic romance of India called _Vasantasena_ by
a king called Sudraka. Here the women come out rather more sharply
than most of the men, two fine performances in particular by Melitta
Leithner as Eliza, the flower girl, and Alice Verden as Vasantasena.
The company cannot escape, however, a beefy German tenor-hero, one of
the sort that seems in danger any moment of turning into a leading
woman with a heavy beard.
Frankfort has perhaps less real acting talent than is to be found in
any of the State theaters of the larger cities. It shows an atrocious
performance of _Peer Gynt_. Yet, given direction such as Richard
Weichert furnishes in Schiller’s _Maria Stuart_, and it seems a company
of genius. Carl Ebert, a bad Peer Gynt, manages a Leicester of real
subtlety; the Elizabeth of Gerda Müller seems a tempestuous horror, and
the whole thing is lighted by many excellent small bits of acting.
There seems to be a certain hard, uncompromising insistence in all
German acting. It is a thing, perhaps, of narrow spirit and deep
intensity. It has unquestioned vitality. In Grabbe’s old drama,
_Napoleon_, which Jessner gives at the State Schauspielhaus in Berlin,
this vitality leaps to union most happily with the intoxication that
Bonaparte spread about him always, and never more extraordinarily than
in the Hundred Days which this play chronicles. It is all vitality,
the impatient vitality of the soldiers of Wolfgang Heinz and Lothar
Müthel, who await Napoleon’s return, the besotted and sinister vitality
of the new mob of the _carmagnole_, the energizing vitality of Rudolf
Forster’s Wellington, the sober, slow but potent vitality of Arthur
Krauszneck’s Blücher, and that font of indomitable self-assertion
Napoleon himself, played by Ludwig Hartau. Even the old Humpty-Dumpty
Louis of Leopold von Ledebur, and the courtiers who prop him up on
his throne take on a certain fixity of purpose—perhaps a deathly
fixity—from the vitality flowing round them.
In other performances of Jessner’s company this vitality flows over
into mere vigor, even into violence. That is the besetting sin of the
German actor. Fritz Kortner, celebrated for his Richard III and his
Othello, ranges from unnatural suppression of feeling, from studied
and almost whispered restraint, to mad screechings. An almost neurotic
violence crops up somewhere in every other performance in Germany. Even
the women fall into it. Gerda Müller’s Elizabeth, after an evening of
excellent, mastered power, breaks out into the hoarse-voiced raving
that seems more a mark of the male players. Sudden spurts of laying
it on too thick appear in some of the secondary players of _Florian
Geyer_. The comic villain of _Vasantasena_ plays the whole thing in a
knot of petty passion. It is ranting, this sort of thing, no matter
how far it may be from the orotund mouthings of our old-school players,
no matter how much sharp characterization and genuine passion may be
forced into it.
The performance of _Masse-Mensch_ at the Volksbühne in Berlin stands
out because it manages to carry intensity of feeling to a point just
short of violence, and then, with every excuse provided in this
desperate story of thwarted revolution, to bring it up short at the
right moment into high-pitched but beautiful vehemence. The outstanding
impression must be the astounding diction of the mob that speaks
clearly, rhythmically, and most movingly with a single common voice; it
gives you a sudden vision of what the Greek chorus may have been, and
why thirty thousand people listened. But the power of Mary Dietrich as
the Christ-figured, Christ-tortured woman is almost as unforgettable.
Looking back across these forty-odd performances, I find that a very
simple and very brief bit of acting stands out as sharply as any. It
is the quiet, sadly amusing, little Buddhist priest in _Vasantasena_
as played by Erich Ponto. It is not a thing the German stage often
discloses, this delicate mingling of humor and reverence. If it were,
the people from Moscow who played _The Cherry Orchard_ would not have
seemed to come from the one land where acting is a rounded and tempered
perfection.