THE THEATER OF THE THREE HUNDRED
Size is no mania with the French. They do not insist on buildings that
are taller than those of any other nation, an empire that is larger,
ambitions and dreams mightier and more terrible. So perhaps it was
only natural that when a Frenchman wanted to present actors in a new
relationship to their audience, he should choose for his theater a
little hall in the Street of the Old Dovecot instead of a circus or a
park.
Doubtless there were many reasons why Jacques Copeau’s theater had to
be small. A potent one may have been economy, a thing that accounts for
the little theater movement far more than any theories of intimacy. The
question of repertory also may have had weight. There are many sizes
of drama, and there are special repertories for special theaters; but
many more plays are possible for a theater of five hundred seats than
for a theater of five thousand. _The Trojan Women_ can be played to one
hundred and twenty-nine people in the Toy Theater of Boston, as Maurice
Browne proved; but _Le Misanthrope_ is impossible in the Yale Bowl.
Copeau’s theater had to be small, not only because he had little money
and a great love of all sorts of plays, but also because—and this
counted more than even the French liking for the moderate and the
exact—the thing he was interested in was the actor and not a grandiose
idea. He ended by creating the first presentational playhouse in the
modern world, by maintaining for a long time the most radical, and by
achieving after some years the most successful. But he began by looking
for some place for his actors to act. They were to be a company of
fresh, sensitive, intelligent spirits bringing an intense and honest
art to those who might care for it. Copeau had found his actors in all
manner of places besides the routine theaters. He had talked to them
about everything but make-up, curtain calls, and how to be natural on
the stage. He had played with them and worked with them in the country,
rehearsing the first pieces of the repertory in a barn. He did not
intend to dump them down into one of the ordinary theaters of Paris.
Copeau proposed to take the hall that his resources permitted, and to
make it over to suit the spirit of his company. He could build no ideal
theater, but he could make one in which his actors would escape the
realisms and the pretenses of the modern theater, and would play to and
with the audience as their spirit demanded.
And so we have the Théâter du Vieux-Colombier. It is not at all like
the hideous theater-hall that was there before. It is not quite as
it was when Copeau closed his first season before the war. It is
not in the least like the Garrick Theater, which he remade in New
York in 1917; as a matter of fact it is not so good. It is not very
charming in its shape or its decorations, and Copeau is as careless as
Reinhardt about things like good painting and clean walls. But this
Vieux-Colombier is a distinguished and a jolly place all the same, the
happiest and the healthiest theater west of Vienna.
It is hard to know where to begin a description of this curious
playhouse. Suppose you had never been to the Vieux-Colombier, but
suppose you knew that this was a theater without the illusion of
Realism, and suppose you sought for the thing that would tell you this
the quickest. What would you see? Probably the steps that lead from
the stage to the forestage, and even from the forestage to the seats
of the audience. There are no footlights, and so you have the pleasure
of seeing the square, firm edge where the stage floor ends. This edge
bends into a large curve in the middle, with three curved steps below,
and it angles out at the sides to where smaller steps join those of the
middle on an ample forestage. These steps and the edge of the stage
do more than any one thing in the theater to signal that you are not
looking into a picture-frame. Even when they are not used, as in _Les
Frères Karamazov_, these steps keep you warily alive to that fact.
When you examine the theater more closely you discover that there is
no proscenium. The nearest thing to it is the last of the arches which
hold up the roof of the auditorium. There is a curtain, to be sure, but
it does not fall behind pillars, and it does not cover the forestage.
It descends at that point where the walls of the auditorium become the
walls of the stage, and it merely serves to hide one end of this long
room while the stage hands make small changes in the permanent setting.
The permanent setting, like the theater itself, is an experimental
product of the attempt to provide what the actors need. It is really
no more than a balcony placed against the back wall, with an arched
opening in the middle, and with walls at the sides that let the actors,
who have gone out through the arch, get off stage unseen. This balcony
is so solidly built that it cannot be taken out, but certain portions
are alterable. The changes in setting are managed by changing the
width of the arch or the line of the top of the balcony, by adding
doors, steps at one side, or railings, and particularly by placing
significant properties or screens upon the stage. Louis Jouvet, stage
director as well as Copeau’s best actor, has done many ingenious things
to make his settings varied enough and characteristic enough without
losing the permanent thing that is common to them all, and that aids in
banishing realistic illusion. A detail that shows the working of his
mind is to be found in the screens that he uses to create a room in
_Les Frères Karamazov_; by giving them two or three inches of thickness
and a certain amount of molding, he has escaped the impression of
the bare, the unsubstantial, and the untheatrical which the screens of
other designers produce.
[Illustration:
_Les Frères Karamazov_: the Gypsy Inn. This sketch and the following
one show the permanent skeleton-setting of Copeau’s Théâtre du
Vieux-Colombier in Paris. Here, in an arrangement of paneled screens
Louis Jouvet has caught the mood of the scene without reference to
details of “atmosphere.”
]
The balcony is a most useful feature. It was not accident that put
a balcony in the Elizabethan theater or made the Greeks use the
theologium. It serves a practical purpose, of course, in any scheme of
permanent setting, for it makes it unnecessary to build balconies for
scenes that especially call for them. A good deal more important to the
director is the movement up and down, as well as sideways and back and
forth, which it gives him. With the forestage, the main stage, and the
balcony, Copeau has almost as useful a base for composing action in
three dimensions as Jessner has in the steps which he uses in various
productions in Berlin.
Sheldon Cheney has called Copeau’s stage a “naked stage.” It is a happy
accident of language that, when you call it a concrete stage, you
describe the material of which it is made and the feeling of sharp,
definite statement which resides in everything done upon it. The wall
at the right of the audience is solid, the wall at the back, too; the
ceiling of the stage has some openings between steel girders, but it is
more like the floor than the “flies” of the average theater. Only in
the left wall of the stage are there any openings. Through these the
actors manage to exit into the next building. The floor of the stage,
except at the edges, is even more adamant. It will not yield to pleas
for atmosphere, illusion or any of the gewgaws of our theater. It is
solid concrete. Copeau wanted to give the actor’s feet a sense of
support which they cannot get from yielding and resounding wood. At the
sides is a small section in timber which permits the use of a stairway
to a lower room as in _The S. S. Tenacity_ or _Les Frères Karamazov_.
In the forestage are two other openings, covered by wooden and concrete
slabs.
Jouvet’s lighting system is ingenious and philosophically sound, if not
altogether perfect. Practically all the light comes from four large
lamps hung in the auditorium. They replace footlights, borderlights,
and floods from the sides. Illumination from the auditorium itself
is essential to good stage lighting; the footlights are an unhappy
makeshift. David Belasco very wisely uses a battery of lamps hidden
in the face of the first balcony. In German theaters, the huge
6000-candlepower bulbs developed since the war, tempt directors to
inefficient and distracting lighting from the ventilator above the
main chandelier in the roof of the auditorium. Neither the latter
method nor Belasco’s is wholly satisfactory in a theater that forswears
representation, a theater like the Grosses Schauspielhaus or the
Vieux-Colombier or the Redoutensaal in Vienna. Electric light on the
stage begins as an imitation of the real. If a table is illuminated
by a large light in the first border, there must be a lamp above the
table in such a position as to suggest that it is doing all the work.
The next step is to use light for illumination and composition—for
beauty, in fact—without bothering to try to make it seem to come from
some natural source in the setting. When such light comes from the
auditorium we may get composition, but we also get a throw-back to
the source of the light itself. The ray carries our eye up to some
lens-lamp trying unsuccessfully to hide in the bottom of the dome
of the Grosses Schauspielhaus, or in the top of the ceiling of the
Burgtheater. A new problem arises. It should be answered by making
the source frankly visible. The hoods themselves of large bulbs have
a shape that would make them interesting and not without significance
in the Grosses Schauspielhaus; or a new shape could be supplied to
harmonize with architecture or setting. In the Redoutensaal we find
glorious old crystal chandeliers lighting the stage—an accidental
result of the fact that the Viennese government converted Maria
Theresa’s ballroom into a playhouse. In the Vieux-Colombier Jouvet
makes no bones about admitting where his light is coming from. He
places the bulbs in octagonal lanterns, which, by revolving on an axis,
present different colored sides for the light to pass through; the
lanterns may also be moved in such directions as to throw the light
upon any desired part of the stage. These lanterns are frankly visible;
and, though they are not a pleasing shape, they fit esthetically with
the theory of this theater. Here is electric lighting presented at
last as the thing it really is, not as an imitation of something else.
The greatest faults of the Vieux-Colombier over which Copeau had
control, and which he could easily have avoided, lie in the color and
quality of painting on the stage. The concrete and the cream of the
auditorium take warm lights; but in portions of the stage itself,
Copeau has used a cold gray that is surely unfortunate. Much that you
see is shoddy. If the paint chips off a corner, nobody bothers to
replace it. Rivet heads and structural iron show when they have no
relation to the shapes on the stage. Now it is a good thing not to
spend too much energy on the physical side of the theater, but there is
a difference between austerity and slovenliness.
Actual productions, animated by the actors and graced with some of
Jouvet’s scenic arrangements, do a great deal to make the stage wholly
attractive. _The S. S. Tenacity_, a realistic play with a French café
for its setting, makes interesting demands on this non-realistic
stage. The demands are met, and met successfully. There is a counter
at one side with racks for bottles, a wooden door in the arch at
the back, a table in the center, and above it—the mark of Realism—a
shaded lamp, from which a great deal of the stage light comes. With
the actors giving us the sense of French life which was missing in
the New York and Viennese productions, we have here a performance
which might almost be enclosed in a proscenium frame. But there is in
the acting, as in the setting, much that is non-realistic, much that
seems representational only by contrast with the dominating spirit and
physique of the theater and its people.
In the playlet that goes with _The S. S. Tenacity_, Mérimée’s
_Le Carrosse du St.-Sacrement_, we are back in a piece from the
romantic period, a comedy of clear and artificial vigor. A screen
and some hangings with a southern flash to them set the stage for
eighteenth-century Peru. Copeau himself has the same Punch-like visage
that he presents to you in his own study, but now he manages to make
you think him a Spanish puppet, an exasperated and wily doll. The same
Punch appears in _Les Frères Karamazov_, but a Punch of the intellect,
a tragic marionette dangling on the strings of rationalism. At the end,
when Ivan goes mad, you may see most clearly the subtle exaggeration
which is at the heart of the acting of Copeau’s company. The whirling
body, the legs that beat a crazy tattoo on the floor, the twisting head
and the boggling eyes, are none of them copied from a candidate for the
asylum. They are all an explanation of what sort of lines in the figure
of a crazy man would strike the imagination, what angles and movements
would most sharply indicate lunacy.
_Karamazov_ is effectively composed on this stage by a few draperies
for the first scene, a line of curtains hiding the whole stage and
begging the question in the second scene, a flight of steps for the
hall of the Karamazovs, and two heavy screens for the inn. There is
nothing so fine as the interminable steps that lead up from the balcony
at the Garrick to the wretched room of Smerdiakov; but there is enough
improvement in the very excellent acting seen in New York, to make
up for this. Jouvet’s father is gigantically good; set beside his
Aguecheek, it puts this young man among the most interesting actors of
Europe. Paul Œttly, as the eldest brother, plays the striking scene in
the inn of the gypsies with uncommon vigor, and the stage direction
sweeps the scene along to a burning climax. The intensity of the actors
in this play, added to the intensity of the play itself, demonstrates
how completely a formal theater of this kind, and a type of acting
which is a reasoned sort of explanation, rather than a thing of life or
of acting, can stand up beside the Realism of our directors when it is
at its best.
[Illustration:
_La Carrosse du Saint-Sacrement at the Vieux-Colombier_: another
arrangement of Copeau’s permanent setting.
]
In _Twelfth Night_ you find the company clear out of the shackles of
realistic or semi-realistic plays, and happy in the beautiful playhouse
of fantasy. And here the quality of exposition—which you may trace
back to Copeau’s profession of critic, and forward through the days
given to the reading and study and analysis of each new play—has almost
altogether disappeared. The playing is spontaneous, or it is nothing.
Suzanne Bing’s Viola is a-quiver with radiance and wonder. Jean Le
Goff’s Orsino is no such God-favored performance, but his eyes
are lit with an ecstasy of love-sickness. The comedians are far from
Englishmen; but their creations are immensely funny: Jouvet’s gently
gawking Aguecheek, Romain Bouquet’s shaven-headed, almost Oriental Sir
Toby, Robert Allard’s extraordinary clown, the finest either of us had
ever seen. It is interesting, for once, to see Malvolio put in his
place as a character, and not given the star’s spotlight to preen in;
it might be a more satisfactory arrangement if Albert Savry could be
funnier in his dry Puritanism.
_Twelfth Night_ triumphs at the Vieux-Colombier by virtue of the spirit
of the actors, and the vision of the director. The costuming is bad—an
unsuccessful attempt to make Illyria, as it might well be, a land of no
time or place but Poetry; and the setting is no more than bright and
freakish in a Greenwich Village way. But in the costumes and up and
down the setting these players frisk, weaving patterns of beauty and
fun that link them into the true spirit of the play. The curtain is
there at convenient times to make the forestage into a neutral zone for
duke or sea captain, and between this forestage and the balconied space
behind there is room for all of Shakespeare’s play to race along just
as he wrote it. With the trap door in the forestage to act as cellar,
Malvolio can be incarcerated below-stairs and happily out of sight—much
as Shakespeare intended.
Copeau is a believer in gymnastics. (He is also a believer in
improvisation, a school of playwrights, and other things whose absence
makes him grow impatient with his theater). Through months and years of
strenuous labor, he is training half a dozen young people of his own
school to have bodies that are as well under control as a gymnast’s.
The performances of the Vieux-Colombier draw on players not so well
trained, but they show what physical command can accomplish. Here you
see acting that makes you think again of sculpture and its relation to
the new theater.
Copeau’s people can meet the test which the theater with a Greek
orchestra, like the Grosses Schauspielhaus, exacts. They can play “in
the round.” Their bodies can be seen from all sides, and still keep
expressiveness and beauty. They have learned to master their bodies, as
well as their voices, and they are able to make the lines of arms and
torsos and knees speak directly to the audience. When Jouvet sharply
underlines and almost caricatures the salient shape of old Karamazov he
is able to escape from ordinary representation, which may or may not
make its point, and he is able to push his conception of the wicked,
vital old man into almost direct physical contact with the audience. I
have often wondered when the actor would learn the lesson of sculpture.
There were centuries of almost literal representation, with the inner
expression of the artist and the artist’s sense of Form struggling
furiously to impose itself upon Reality, and failing more often than
succeeding. Then, with Rodin came the sense that sculpture could make
representation a distinctly secondary matter. There could be expression
first, and resemblance afterwards, if at all. Idea, which is one sort
of Form, enters the clay with Stanislas Szukalsky. Expression and idea,
poised in the human body, begin to inform acting directly and openly in
the company of the Vieux-Colombier. The first presentational theater
adds the medium of the body to the medium of the voice.