THE REINHARDT TRADITION
Plays 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.
[Illustration:
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.
[Illustration:
_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.
[Illustration:
_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.