A NEW ADVENTURE IN DIRECTION
The outstanding director in the German theater to-day is also the most
radical director. And the most radical director is at the head of the
Prussian State Theater, the Schauspielhaus, in Berlin. His name is
Leopold Jessner, and he is the only man who has threatened to fill
the place made vacant by Reinhardt’s retirement. Some say that he has
already filled it, and—with disarming logic—that Reinhardt was only a
mountebank anyhow. Some think Jessner a clever eccentric. Certainly
he is the most discussed personality in the German theater, and his
methods are the most debated.
One word crops up whenever his name is mentioned—_Jessnertreppen_.
The German language has boiled down into a single word an idea that
we would have to phrase as “those crazy steps of Leopold Jessner.” It
makes a handy stone for the anti-Jessnerites to throw at the director’s
friends. Jessner’s friends are beginning to have the good sense to pick
up the stone and throw it back. For the word _Jessnertreppen_ hits off
a virtue—perhaps, the main virtue of the man.
[Illustration:
_Othello_: act III, scene 3. A towering column, with its lower end
sharpened like the point of a lead pencil, is seemingly driven into
one end of the central platform. Othello and Iago stand at the base.
IAGO: Have you not sometimes seen a handkerchief
Spotted with strawberries in your wife’s hands?
]
Jessner fills his stage with steps. He seems unable to get along
without them. He must have platforms, levels, walls, terraces. They
are to him what screens, towering shapes, great curtains are to Gordon
Craig. In every production Jessner, through his artist, Emil Pirchan,
provides some permanent foundation besides the stage-floor for the
actor to play upon, some arrangement of different levels. In his
_Richard III_ it is a wall all across the stage, with a platform along
the top at the base of another wall, and for certain scenes a flight
of steps like a pyramid placed against the lower wall. In _Othello_
Jessner uses two platforms, one on top of the other, each reached
by two or three steps, the lower a long ellipse almost as large as
the stage, the upper one smaller and proportionately broader; upon
the upper platform Jessner places certain indications of setting.
For Grabbe’s _Napoleon_ he uses four or five steps rising sharply
to a platform perhaps four feet high. Sometimes this platform is
supplemented by a high one pulled apart in the middle to make opposing
hills, redoubts, vantage points in the battle scenes.
The _Jessnertreppen_ are the key to the physical things in this
director’s productions. They give the stage one general shape for
each play. They establish a formal quality. They tend to banish
representation in scenery, since only indications of setting harmonize
with their frank artificiality. And—their main purpose—they provide
the director with most interesting opportunities for manœuvering his
actors.
One of the simplest and most obvious of these is a new way of making
entrances. Such steps as are used in _Othello_ and _Napoleon_ go down
at the back as far as they rise in the front, and below that the
director opens a trap or two in the floor. Thus he is able to have
an actor walk straight up out of the back of the stage, and appear
in a dominating position in the middle of the action. Jessner uses
this novel means of entrance again and again in _Othello_, and it is
always fresh and effective. For the return to Cyprus the Moor marches
triumphantly up these steps, to the welcome of his wife.
Far more important, however, is what Jessner does with the front of
the steps. They may be there to help a formal stage with very little
scenery to seem steadily interesting even to audiences that expect the
conventional gauds of the theater. But their true office is to make
possible a sort of three-dimensional direction for which Jessner has
become renowned. Ordinarily the actor moves in only two directions upon
the stage—right and left, and towards the footlights and away from
them. As a matter of fact, the latter movement is so unsatisfactory
from the point of view of any spectators except those in the balconies,
that the actor really has only one plane in which he can move visibly
and expressively. Jessner does more than add a third dimension when he
sends his actors up and down the steps. He also gives a great deal more
significance to the movement towards and away from the audience.
[Illustration:
_Othello_: act 4, scene 2. Cyprus. The castle. On the central platform
are set two curved screens of dull salmon pink. Behind, the quivering
darkness of the unlighted cyclorama. Emilia, dressed in deep crimson,
stands in the foreground.
]
Beside the sense of movement—always an intriguing thing in the
theater—Jessner provides in his steps a mechanism for solving many
dramatic problems. His actors do not spend their time getting out of
the way of the actors behind them. They are not shuttling back and
forth in an effort to let the audience see all the players at the same
time. One actor cannot “cover” another if he stands on steps. Even a
very large crowd can appear on such a stage without the individual
speakers being lost. As Lee Simonson showed in his use of different
levels for the Theater Guild’s production of _He Who Gets Slapped_,
with the proper sort of elevations on the stage a large number of
actors can play a very complicated scene without confusing their
relationships or assuming awkward positions.
But a great deal more important than this negative virtue is the
positive contribution of steps in permitting many more and much finer
compositions than the flat floor permits. Jessner composes freely in
three dimensions. He composes both for esthetic and for dramatic effect.
There are times when you can see him arranging his actors with nothing
but the esthetic aim in mind. Take the first scene in which Napoleon
himself appears in Grabbe’s drama. It is not a particularly good
setting in some ways; it is a rather obvious and ugly silhouette of
a bastion and a slanting parapet leading up to it. The scene shows
Napoleon receiving reports from an officer and giving orders. Jessner
deliberately places Napoleon on top of the bastion against the sky and
stands the officer stiffly on the parapet below; the relation of the
two men as characters in the play is thus established visually as well
as through the text. The relation of the two men as a composition—not
as characters—has to be disturbed by the entrance of a second officer.
It is obviously impossible for Napoleon and the first officer both
to retain their positions if the second officer is to fit into a
composition. Accordingly the first moves just enough to establish a new
esthetic relation embracing all three.
Jessner is free with his dramatic compositions and occasionally
altogether too obvious. He keeps his dominant people at the top of
the _Jessnertreppen_, or brings them down as they lose command. He
handles the accession of Richard III as Shakespeare did, and as very
few directors have since done. When the burghers come to ask Richard to
be king, they find him “aloft, between two bishops,” in compliance with
Buckingham’s advice: “Go, go up to the leads.” Jessner has Richard walk
upon the platform above the wall; it is his first appearance on high
and he maintains his place until the battle at the end. At the close of
_Napoleon_, the emperor, who has appeared hitherto only at the top of
the steps, is seen seated, broken and disconsolate, on the lowest step
of all, with a sinking sun behind him, and the soldiers above.
[Illustration:
_Othello_: act 4, scene 2. Iago lurks in the shadow of a great black
shape distorted like the trunk of some fantastic tree. Cassio pursues
Roderigo along a narrow path which skirts the base of the cyclorama;
you see their running figures, far away and small.
]
It would seem safe to infer from all this that Jessner is not a
realistic producer. He might, of course, have achieved many of these
effects within a natural setting, but only at the cost of a great
deal of laborious planning and manœuvering. As a matter of fact,
Jessner doesn’t use one ounce of energy trying to be either natural or
plausible. His method is openly expressionistic.
Jessner distorts the natural in a hundred ways to achieve something
expressive of the drama. The first scene in _Napoleon_, as he gives it,
is supposed according to the text to pass in the arcades of the Palais
Royal, lined with booths. Various episodes, dialogues, and harangues
take place between different speakers and different knots of the
crowd. The usual method of handling such a scene is to turn on and off
the speech of the different groups of actors at will, making certain
speakers and parts of the crowd obligingly inaudible to the audience.
There is little enough of nature in such a business, but Jessner
banishes even that. He keeps the stage empty except for small crowds
that rush out, along with the speakers or show-barkers, for particular
episodes.
Jessner handles crowds even more arbitrarily at times. Later in
_Napoleon_, during a riot preceding the news of Napoleon’s return from
exile, a revolutionist kills a tailor. As his body sinks to the steps,
the crowd of red-clothed men and women falls upon him, almost as if
to devour the corpse, and covers the steps as with a great blood-red
stain. In _Richard III_, when Gloucester appears as king in a red
cloak upon the top of the red steps, which are placed for this purpose
against the wall, his eight retainers, also in red, sink down in a heap
below him like a pile of bloody skulls. In _Othello_, when the Moor
returns in triumph to Cyprus a cheering crowd comes with him up the
steps from the back. When he has reached the top and can go no higher,
the crowd sinks prostrate. For a moment he seems to grow in stature,
and his triumph to tower upward.
[Illustration:
The prison scene from _Richard III_. A triangular patch of light
discloses a low arched opening in the nearer wall of the permanent
setting where Clarence sits in chains.
CLARENCE: Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl,
Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels....
]
These are all compositions in three dimensions, as well as violations
of ordinary human conduct. Jessner can also create symbolic action out
of unnatural action without any particular aid from the steps. The
scene of Napoleon’s entrance into the throne room of Louis XVIII is
an interesting example. The steps give prominence to the throne, and
enable the audience to see better; but Jessner’s symbolism has nothing
to do with the steps. The scene is made up of some curtains masking
each side, two wings cut in rococo curves and ornamented with lilies in
rococo patterns. A flat backdrop of the same design and colors—not a
very good design or very French colors—completes the room. In this room
in an earlier scene Louis has held audience, a fat, yellow-and-white
egg of a man, like some Humpty-Dumpty caught in a flood of the fierce
white light that is supposed to beat about a throne, and all too
seldom does anything of the kind. But now Louis is gone, and the
lilies of the wall are shadowed by curtains of Napoleonic blue, which
have, for some unaccountable reason, got themselves hung in the room.
Napoleon enters through the gap in the curtains, reaches up, seizes the
edge of one of them, and pulls it down over the glory that was Bourbon.
Then he turns and faces the audience while two files of soldiers march
stiffly past him to the opposite side from which each entered. The
gesture to the curtains, and the _staccato_ march of the soldiers back
of Napoleon, set out the drama of his returning power.
Naturally Shakespeare, even more than Grabbe, gives Jessner exceptional
opportunities to symbolize and formalize in direction. He is quick to
seize them—particularly in the soliloquies. He begins _Richard III_
with Gloucester speaking to the audience as Prologue; he ends it with
Richmond as Epilogue. Jessner always flings asides directly at the
spectators. When he comes upon soliloquies—as in Brakenbury’s musings
after Clarence has fallen asleep in his cell—he cuts them off sharply
from the previous action by altering the lighting, and bringing the
actor down-stage to speak full at the audience. He places the murderers
squatting on the prompter’s box for much of their chatter. He has
the scrivener read Hastings’ condemnation to the audience from the
same vantage point, and upon this relic, in poses fashioned a little
after Rodin’s _Burghers of Calais_, he places the three citizens who
discourse of the old king’s death and the sorry state of the realm.
Jessner is quite as arbitrary in his handling of light as in his
handling of people. He does not use light merely to illumine the stage,
as directors did thirty years ago. He does not use light and shadow
merely to define action by making faces and figures more dynamic,
as Appia set modern producers doing. He uses light and shadow as a
parallel expression to the play. Light and shadow act the drama almost
as much as do the players. The light is not in the least “natural.” It
suits the mood of the scene. It waxes and wanes with the progress or
the action. When the little princes enter in _Richard III_ the light
shines out more brightly. When Othello dies, it grows dim, then a sharp
shaft of light shoots out from the prompter’s box, and throws the
shadow of Iago over the tragedy he has caused, and the shadow of the
great canopied bed spreads out over the cyclorama, which has stood as a
sort of limit of space about the play. Jessner is particularly fond of
shadows. When one rival meets another and vanquishes him, Jessner will
have him literally “throw him into the shade.” Spotlights, flashing on,
create meaningful shadows. An amusing example occurs in the soliloquy
of Richard ending:
Shine out, fair sun, till I have bought a glass,
That I may see my shadow as I pass.
As Richard says this, the lights on the stage go down, and a
spotlight from the prompter’s box throws his humped shadow on the wall.
[Illustration:
_Richard III_: Gloucester and his shadow. A high green-gray wall
extends straight across the stage; in front, a lower wall. As
Gloucester speaks,
Shine out, fair sun, till I have bought a glass,
That I may see my shadow as I pass,
a spotlight concealed in the prompter’s box is suddenly turned on and
his shadow looms up, huge and sinister.
]
Jessner has his players under unusual control, and he permits very
little of the accidental expression of feeling which Gordon Craig
inveighs against in the actor. He even forbids the little shiftings and
motions of the hands which are natural to anybody, actor or layman,
while listening to a long speech from another. Jessner’s actors,
if they are not speaking, and if their emotions are not being very
markedly played upon, are held motionless. They do not move a limb. I
have heard that, in a ball room scene, Jessner kept dozens of players
absolutely immobile in the poses of the dance while the two principals
talked.
Jessner’s company, as it appears in _Richard III_, _Napoleon_, and
_Othello_, displays no extraordinary talent. The director has instilled
a vitality as sharp as the silence and immobility which he frequently
demands; and they play with that drive and that sharpness of accent
which are inherently German. But there is no genius here, no Moissi.
Fritz Kortner, who plays Richard and Othello, is the outstanding
figure, but he seems a player of limited vision and not very great
technical range. He plays both parts on the same two notes: a soft,
precise, and almost whispering voice, and another that rasps and all
but squalls. Both are a little monotonous in tempo and accent. He uses
the voice of the dove a great deal in _Othello_, both to establish the
Moor’s kind and noble nature, and also as a base upon which to rear the
contrast of his anger. The dove is a serpent in _Richard_.
Physically, Kortner’s Richard is odd and striking. The actor is not
very tall, and he is decidedly thick in figure. His attitudes, the
apelike swing of his arms, his pudgy face, twisted by an evil grin,
give him an odd appearance that constantly suggests other images
than Richard himself. A humped toad, a fat, cross monkey, a grinning
Japanese mask, the mask of a Greek comedian—finally the truth strikes
home: it is the _Balzac_ of Rodin.
[Illustration:
_Richard III_: Gloucester becomes King. Robed in scarlet, he stands at
the head of a flight of blood-red steps. Below him, a double row of
kneeling, scarlet-clad courtiers. Behind, a high gray wall. Above, a
blood-red sky.
]
There is a moment in _Richard_ when this curious figure is forgotten.
It is the dream of the king the night before the battle of Bosworth
Field. (Why is it, by the way, that no producer seems to have the
genius and naïveté to produce this scene as Shakespeare wrote it, to
place the tents of Richard and of Richmond on either side of the stage,
and to let the ghosts bless Richmond and curse Richard alternately as
they do in the text?) Jessner shears away the blessings, and lets the
ghosts curse in the wings. Upon the slant of the blood-red steps lies
Richard sleeping. As the voices call, he writhes and twists upon his
uneasy couch. The voices rise and race, his agitation grows more and
more horrible, until at the end his humped body is beating a fearsome
tattoo to the rhythm of the cursing ghostly voices. Immediately
after this really effective and fine scene, comes the extraordinary,
much talked of and quite ludicrous end of Richard. He has his scene
with the generals, then goes off to battle—or is it merely to tear
off his coat of mail and his shirt? At any rate he is on the stage a
few moments later, staggering along the top of the wall, naked to the
waist. He cries: “A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!” Then he
mounts his sword and, as if on a hobby horse, hops down the steps until
exhaustion overcomes him and he falls.
Perhaps this indicates the fault that at present keeps Jessner from
being a great director. His judgment and his taste—which mean the soul
with which he interprets and animates his work—are very, very faulty.
There is no austerity and almost no true beauty in his _Othello_, only
strength. There is no dignity in his _Richard III_, only horror. He has
made Richard terrible, but only with the terror of wormy graveyards.
There is nothing of 15th century England in it, none of the beauty and
flash of the time to make the hideousness of Gloucester the darker. The
play is drowned in black—dirty, mean black. Far worse, it is stripped
of the qualities that are Shakespeare. Worst of all, there is no shred
of poetry in the whole length of the production, unless it is the final
moment.
If you can forget the question of taste—if you do not care what
interpretation a man puts on a great work of art—you must admit
Jessner to a very high place as a director. He has originality,
ingenuity, bravery, an uncommon technical ability. He is industrious,
and indefatigably careful. His sins are not the sins of Reinhardt. No
detail escapes him; so small a thing as off-stage noise he handles with
the greatest skill. But Jessner is no poet.
With the question of taste goes also another fault, not so grave, yet
important and perhaps significant. Jessner appears to worship the
obvious, to believe that the theater is a place of A. B. C. impressions
and reactions. He is daring enough in his technique but not in his
ideas. He flings out symbols right and left, but they are the symbols
of the primer. He directs in words of one syllable. _Richard III_ is
an explanation in black and white, which occasionally ventures to
lisp in white and red. Richard begins the play in black against a
black curtain, speaking the soliloquy of “Now is the winter of our
discontent.” Richmond ends it in white against a white curtain with his
speech to Stanley and his soldiers converted into a soliloquy to the
audience. The troops of Richard are red-clothed figures crossing the
red steps. The troops of Richmond cross it in white. This is symbolism
in baby-talk, presentational production in kindergarten terms. It is
not impossible that an audience is up to more than that.
[Illustration:
_Richard III_: on the blood-red steps of Richard’s coronation stands
Richmond, a white-robed general at the head of an army all in white.
]
It may be, of course, that Jessner is feeling his way and that
to-morrow he will venture upon subtlety—if it is in him. At any
rate, here is a presentational director, a man who forswears
resemblance and the picture frame, and who sets actors and their
movements, the setting and its lights, talking directly to the
audience. This is an advance in the methods of production which makes
the new movement of twenty years ago look like an afternoon stroll, a
revolt which makes that much-hailed revolution seem a pleasant little
excursion. It is an advance and a revolt, however, still looking for a
leader.