THE ARTIST AS DIRECTOR
The 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.
[Illustration:
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.
[Illustration:
_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.
[Illustration:
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.
[Illustration:
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.
]
The immediate question is obviously this: If the director cannot
acquire the talents of the artist, why cannot the artist acquire the
talents of the director? If the knack of visual design, and the keen
appreciation of physical relationships cannot be cultivated in a man
who does not possess them by birth, is it likewise impossible for the
man who possesses them to acquire the faculty of understanding and of
drawing forth emotion in the actor?
The problem narrows down to the temperament of the artist _versus_
the temperament of the director. There is a difference; it is no use
denying it. The director is ordinarily a man sensitive enough to
understand human emotion deeply and to be able to recognize it, summon
it, and guide it in actors. But he must also be callous enough to
meet the contacts of direction—often very difficult contacts—and to
organize not only the performance of the players, but also a great
deal of bothersome detail involving men and women who must be managed
and cajoled, commanded, and worn down, and generally treated as no
artist cares to treat others, or to treat himself in the process of
treating others. The director must be an executive, and this implies a
cold ability to dominate other human beings, which the artist does not
ordinarily have. The artist is essentially a lonely worker. He is not
gregarious in his labor.
So far as the future goes, the hope for the artist is that he will be
able to reverse the Butlerian process which held in the relations of
director and designer. He must be able to “grow a director.” This may
not be so very difficult. It may very well happen that an artist will
employ a stage manager, as an astute director now employs an artist, to
do a part of his work for him. He will explain to the stage manager the
general scheme of production that he wants, much as a director explains
to an artist the sort of settings he desires. The stage manager will
rehearse the movements of the actors towards this end. When the artist
sees opportunities for further development of action and business, he
will explain this to the stage manager, and perhaps to the players
involved, and the stage manager will again see that the ideas of his
superior are carried out. Something of the kind occurs even now where
a director employs a subdirector to “break in” the company. Both
Reinhardt and Arthur Hopkins, though thoroughly capable of “wading
into” a group of players, and enforcing action by minute direction and
imitation, generally use the quiet method of consulting with players,
and suggesting changes to them, not during the actual rehearsal, but
afterwards in the protection of a wing or the privacy of a dressing
room.
[Illustration:
The first scene from _Othello_ as staged by Leopold Jessner in Berlin.
On long curved steps which remain throughout, and against the neutral
background of the cyclorama, the artist, Emil Pirchan, puts the barest
indications of place. Here, Brabantio’s house gleams like a moonstone
against a background of neutral-tinted distance.
]
The presence of the artist as director in some future theater without
scenery, implies a decided influence on the type of acting.
Such a stage itself, thrust boldly at the spectators, if not actually
placed in the midst of them, tends to dictate a frank, direct contact
between players and audience. In such a house an actor will be all
but forced to desert the purely representational style of to-day, and
to present himself and his emotions in an open, assertive, masculine
manner as objects of art and of emotion.
The tendency of the artist towards this kind of theater implies, I
think, a tendency towards presentational acting. Certainly I have
talked with few who were not receptive to it.
Put together a stage that tends towards presentational acting and an
artist whose instincts run to the same ends, and the outcome is not
difficult to foresee.
The problem at present is, what artist? And where? And how soon?