THE CIRQUE MEDRANO
Perhaps the gladiators gave it a bad name. At any rate for twenty
centuries men have hesitated to put anything more serious than a clown
or an athlete in the middle of an audience. The Romans could hardly be
called a timorous, a sensitive or a conventional people, yet even they
never thought of presenting a play in an amphitheater. C. Curio, rich
and reckless, celebrated the death of his father by building two great
wooden theaters back to back, giving performances in both at the same
time, then whirling the spectators about on turn tables, until they
faced each other, and the two semicircles of seats joined and made one
huge arena. But, though Curio was reckless of money and of the lives
of his guests, he was careful of the esthetic proprieties. The actors
performed in the theaters, and the animals in the arena.
So far as the feelings of the Drama can be learned, she did not approve
of the way the Romans shoved her actors out of the old Greek orchestra,
and crammed them into a shallow little box, which they called a stage.
The first chance that the Drama had, she climbed down close to the
people again, and played on the stone floor of the medieval churches.
Even Shakespeare did not have the temerity to try to put her back in a
box. It is said that there were rare times, as in some of the outdoor
mysteries of the Middle Ages and while the pageant wagons carried the
actors and their scenes into the squares of the English towns, when
you might have found the Drama entirely surrounded by the hosts of her
admirers. But some curious and perverse power seems to have schemed
through the centuries to seize a decadent time like the Roman days or
the last fifty years in modern Europe, and clap the Drama in a box. And
to-day, when the Drama is bravely insisting on a little air and light,
the power is still strong enough to keep the Drama’s liberators from
placing her naked and unashamed in the center of her fellows. She is no
longer a peepshow lure, but we still hesitate to treat her as a goddess.
Occasionally a theorist, who is as sick as the rest of us of the fourth
wall convention, comes forward with some extraordinary proposal to put
the audience in the middle of the drama. Furttenbach in the seventeenth
century laid out a square theater with a stage in each corner. Oskar
Strnad of Vienna wants to place a doughnut stage two thirds round the
audience; and some Frenchman has advocated whirling the doughnut.
Anything to distract the spectator from the drama; nothing to
concentrate him upon it.
In the “Theater of the Five Thousand” devised by Max Reinhardt in
Berlin, and in the imitation which Firmin Gémier launched at the Cirque
d’Hiver in Paris, the audience and the drama at last met in the circus.
But for some curious reason—at which I have only guessed in a more or
less absurd fashion—neither Reinhardt nor Gémier was courageous or
far-seeing enough to use the circus as a circus. Neither dared put the
players in the center, and forget the old stage. At one side there
always lingered a palace or a proscenium.
Reinhardt might make the excuse that for such a scheme he needed a
round circus, and that a round circus would be far too big for the
drama. (He would not be absurd enough to say that Moissi or Pallenberg
could not act unless all the audience saw all his face all the time).
There are round circuses in Europe, however, and small, round circuses,
and if Reinhardt could not find one in Berlin, he could have built one
for half the money he put into reconstructing the Circus Schumann into
the Grosses Schauspielhaus.
Up on Montmartre, just under the last heights on which perches Sacré
Cœur, there is such a circus. An intimate circus, a little circus, just
the place to begin the last experiment with the theater. Copeau could
go straight there from the Vieux-Colombier, and throw his _Scapin_ into
the ring without a second’s hesitation. It would bowl over Paris and
half the theatrical world.
Copeau could go straight there, but I think the audience should be
required, for a time, to make a detour via the top of Montmartre.
Certainly that is the only way to approach the Cirque Medrano to-day. A
_fiacre_ to the funicular. The funicular to the base of the cathedral.
A stroll all round that boarded-up curiosity. A look-off at Paris
swimming in the ebb-tide of the summer sun. Then supper in the Place du
Tertre. Not for the food, which is as good as any _cuisine bourgeoise_;
nor for the trees and window-groups out of Manet; nor for the tubby
widow of forty-five who sings:
Je le proclame,
Les mains de femme
Sont les bijoux
Dont je suis fou....
or the ancient with the two brass buttons in the back of his surtout
and the patience of an English politician, who recites inaudible and
probably unintelligible poetry before passing the hat. Supper in the
Place du Tertre is an appropriate prelude to the Cirque Medrano because
of the dog that watches all evening from the tin roof of an impossibly
ruined house, and the women straight out of the French Revolution, the
days of ’48 and the Commune, who stand about with their great naked
arms akimbo, and their strong sharp chins, high cheek bones, and eagle
eyes waiting for the liberty cap to crown them. The dog and the women,
they are the audience and the show. They are the Cirque Medrano.
This circus is a golden bowl. At the bottom, no sawdust but a carpet
of hemp, a great “welcome” doormat without the lettering; we take the
deed for the word. Outside the ring is a parapet nicely carpeted in
yellow; one of the clowns finds it amusing to roll round this track
on his shoulders. Above the parapet rise steep rows of seats, half of
them in bright orange for the spectators with fifty or sixty cents to
spend. Higher up the thin and graceful pillars which support the roof
cut across the vision a little; here there are only benches and the
_dévotés_. At opposite sides of the ring, walled passages lead out to
the greenroom and public entrances which circle underneath the seats.
Exits for the audience pierce the rows at the four quarters. From the
disk of the dome above, sixteen great lamps blaze down on the ring, and
sometimes a spotlight or two punctuate the darkness.
If you like to take your pleasure sentimentally, a performance at the
Cirque Medrano is like opening old letters—with a comic valentine now
and then for tonic. Huck Finn saw a one-ring circus; but Gentry’s Dog
and Pony Show is the farthest that the present generation ever get from
the three-ring-and-two-stage monstrosity which deafens our ears and
dulls our eyes.
The Cirque Medrano is the proper place for artists and _connoisseurs_.
The fifteen hundred people that it holds can study—and do study—with
the minute intensity of an anatomical clinic, M. Grossi and Coquette,
as the horseman, quite as proud as his mare, puts her through five
minutes of marching to music. They turn their eyes with just as much
appreciation to watch the aerialists, plunging into their dangerous
pastimes under the lights. Here M. Lionel, _Roi du Vertige_, gets the
sort of attention he could never win on the vaudeville stage; it must
seem to him sometimes, as he manœuvers gingerly on a chair balanced by
its right hind leg in the neck of a bottle which is perched in turn on
a ten foot pole, that the towering rows of seats are about to topple
over on the strange career which he has made of himself.
There is no question, then, about the sight-lines of the theater which
Copeau should make out of the Cirque Medrano. There never was such an
auditorium for sheer visibility. The last rows are better than the
first; they take in the whole audience as well as the show, while all
you can say for the front seats is that they would show you half of the
laughing or crying crowd of men and women, hanging over the actors in
far from mute adoration. The slant of these seats is greater than the
slant in Max Littmann’s theaters in Munich, but, because the rows swing
all round, you never get that feeling of awful vacancy and gap which
comes to spectators in the upper rows of the Prinzregenten and the
Künstler Theaters in Munich. And there is no proscenium arch to press
down upon the poor midgets at the bottom of the playhouse.
“But their backs? How about the actors’ backs?”
That is a foolish question from any one who has ever seen Copeau’s
players, who has watched Jouvet’s back play the coarse, immense
Karamazov, or seen his legs and buttocks send Aguecheek shuffling
across the stage, or caught the whole quick poise of Suzanne Bing’s
Viola in her shoulders and hips.
It is nothing short of the ravings of a mad man if the questioner has
been to the Cirque Medrano, and looked upon the clowns. People have
wondered how the actors of the Grosses Schauspielhaus could play to
three audiences at once, the one in front, the one at the right, and
the one at the left; here are the clowns playing to four. It is not
all slapstick either. There is almost no whacking in the clowns’ own
turns. In these scenes they work out broad little comedy skits such
as Ray and Johnny Dooley, Leon Errol and Walter Catlett, Eddie Cantor
and George Le Maire, Willie and Eugene Howard, or Weber & Fields might
offer in our revues. The difference at the Medrano is that the actors
seem to have consciously developed their gestures and their poses as
supplementary expression to their faces. Also they warily work round
during their scenes, and give each part of the audience the benefit of
both back and face. The comedy of the Medrano is far funnier than the
comedy of _The Follies_ or the comedy of the Redoutensaal in Vienna;
and not because the turns are broader. It is funnier because it is so
intimately alive, because it is made with all the actor’s body, and
because it is always directed at an audience. Four audiences at once!
It is a priceless advantage. The actor has always some one to press
his art upon. In our theater half an actor’s body is dead, or else
vainly talking to the scenery. That is an understatement, if anything.
The only way the actor can get directly at our audience, register upon
it the impact of his art, his personality, his emotion, is to turn
away from the scene and make his speech into a monologue. That is the
chief difficulty which stands in way of the sort of acting which deals
directly and frankly with the audience, which admits that it is art and
not reality, which says that the actor is an actor and the audience
is an actor, too; the kind of acting, in short, which is called
presentational in contrast to the realistic method of representation
which rules our theater. On any stage that is surrounded by its
audience, the player can speak to his fellow-actor and to his audience
at the same time. In the Medrano it is no question of backs or faces.
The whole man plays, and every inch of him has an audience.
There remains, however, the question of setting. Clowns need no
atmosphere, but Hamlet must speak to a ghost. An acrobat is his own
scenery, but Juliet needs a balcony. Can the Medrano manage such
things? Can this open ring do what the stage of the Redoutensaal balks
at?
The Medrano can do almost anything that our theater can do—and a great
many things more—because it can use the three essentials of setting and
atmosphere: light, human bodies, and indications of place.
Light.... It is the fifth turn in the Cirque Medrano. Lydia _et_ Henry,
“Babies Dancers,” two pitiable little children, who have been taught
to do very bad imitations of their elders in the banal dances of the
revues. After they have hopped and shaken their way uncertainly through
two or three fox trots and shimmies, the great lights in the roof go
out. Blackness, then a stain of amber in the center of the ring. The
light brightens and the stain lengthens. It might fall upon the stone
of an old cistern, if some one had thought to put it there. Then, when
the figure of Salome crawls out along the stain, it would be many
moments before we could see that it was the body of a four-year-old,
whom some one had togged out with breast-plates. Or again darkness,
and slowly a blue-green light from on high, and in the midst of it an
Apache and a girl. It needs no curb, no lamp-post, no brick corner, to
make the ring a moonlit street.
After light, there comes the human body. The Medrano as a circus does
nothing to show how the actors themselves can make a setting. Why
should it? But I remember the project of an American artist, in 1914,
to put _The Cenci_ upon the stage of a prize ring, and I remember how
the sketches showed a chorus of human figures in costumes and with
staves, circling about the people of Shelley’s play and forming a
dozen frames to the drama within.
[Illustration: An impression of the Cirque Medrano in Paris.]
After light and a setting of bodies comes just as much of the ordinary
plastic scenery of the stage as you need, and just as little as you can
get along with. If you care to dig a bit under the ring, and install
machinery that will lower the floor in sections, pile up hills in
concentric circles or even lift a throne or a well or an altar into the
middle of the circus while the lights are out—well, there is nothing
to prevent you. Juliet’s balcony may hang above one of the entrances;
or in the center of the stage throughout the whole action of _Les
Fourberies de Scapin_ may stand the _tréteau_ or block, which Copeau
makes the center of the action at the Vieux-Colombier. Scenically the
problem of the Medrano is the most fascinating problem of the stage
artist, the creation of a single permanent structure, large or small,
which can stand throughout a play and give significant aid to the
various scenes.
It is no such difficult task to imagine productions in the Medrano as
it is to find plays for the Redoutensaal. The accompanying sketch shows
an arrangement for _The Merchant of Venice_. Glowing Venetian lanterns
are hung in the spaces between the arches at the top of the theater.
The four entrances for the public are made entrances for the players
as well. Below each gate is a double stair, railed at the top with
Venetian iron. Between the stairs are benches, again in the shape of
the period. The railings become the copings of the Rialto. The casket
scenes are played in the center of the arena, while Portia and Nerissa
watch the proceedings from a bench at one side; another bench seats the
judges in the courtroom. Jessica leans out from an entrance to flirt
with her lover, and the carnival mob chases old Shylock up and down the
little stairs, over the benches, round about and out one of the two
lower gates to the ring.
The ghost scene in _Hamlet_? Imagine the sentinel’s companions moonlit
in the center. Imagine a gallery behind the arches lighted with a dim
and ghostly radiance. And imagine Marcellus suddenly and fearfully
pointing to the figure of the dead man where it moves above the last
row of spectators. No mixing of actors and audience, but what a thrill
to see the ghost across a gulf of turned and straining faces, what a
horror to see him over your own shoulder! Later Hamlet climbs stone by
stone to meet and speak with the ghost from a platform above one of the
great entrances.
_The Jest_—its prison scene? A block in the middle of the ring, a
single glaring light from straight above, and the figure of Neri
chained to the block.
[Illustration:
_The Merchant of Venice_ as it might be given in the Cirque Medrano.
]
_Masse-Mensch?_ But a mob-play is too easy. The scene of the defeat,
for instance; light upon the steps in the middle of the ring, workers
piled up on it, messengers and refugees running in from gate after
gate, from all four entrances, flinging themselves back on the
crowd in the center as the news of fresh disaster comes. The rattle
of firearms; lights against the back of the high gallery, and the
silhouettes of a score of machine guns trained on the actors and the
audience.
It would be foolish to deny that the Medrano is not a theater for every
play. It could not hold some that the artificiality of the Redoutensaal
would make welcome—Oscar Wilde’s, for instance—along with most of the
conversational Realism of the past thirty years. But it could house
all that the Grosses Schauspielhaus is fitted for—Greek tragedy and
comedy, Shakespeare’s greatest plays, dramas like _Florian Geyer_, _The
Weavers_, and _Danton_. Some of the scenes of such pieces, the intimate
episodes which Reinhardt’s circus balks at, could be done excellently
in the Medrano. It has all the intimacy of Copeau’s theater, and it
could bring into its ring many dramas of to-day,—_The Emperor Jones_,
_Strife_,—which are impossible in the Vieux-Colombier. The Medrano has
its limitations, of course, but they are not the limitations of size,
emotion, or period. The plays that it could not do would be the plays
least worth doing, at their best the plays which give to a reader
almost all that they have to give.
If you should try to make a comparison of method, rather than of
limitations, between the three active presentational theaters of
Europe, and the fourth that might be, it would run, I think something
like this: The Grosses Schauspielhaus tries to deceive you in curious
ways,—with dome and scenery and cloud machine. The Vieux-Colombier
carefully explains to you that this is a theater, and that this is also
life. The Redoutensaal asks you to dress up and see something artistic.
The Medrano unites you and overwhelms you.
The thing that impresses any one who studies the Medrano from the point
of view of play production—it may even impress the reader who tries
to understand and sympathize with these attempts to suggest how plays
might be produced there—is the great variety which such a theater
offers and always the sense of unity which it creates. From every angle
relationships center upon the actor, or cut across one another as he
moves about, makes entrances or exits, or appears in the back of the
audience. All these relationships work to a fine, natural unity. There
is the actor in the center with the audience about him; there is the
actor on the rim drawing the audience out and across to him. There
are three circles of action within one another in a single unity. And
there is the sense of all this which the audience has as it looks down,
Olympian, from its banks of seats.
Something of the vision of the aeroplane invades the Medrano. We see
life anew. We see it cut across on a fresh plane. Patterns appear of
which we had no knowledge. Relationships become clear that were once
confusion. We catch a sense of the roundness and rightness of life. And
in the Medrano, while we win this vision in a new dimension, we do
not lose the feel of the old. Such a theater establishes both for us.
It gives us the three unities of space in all their fulness. They cut
across one another like the planes of a hypercube. And the deeper they
cut, the deeper grows the unity.
The Medrano seems to solve two problems of the modern theater. These
arise from two desires in the leading directors and artists. One is to
throw out the actor into sharp relief, stripped of everything but the
essential in setting. This motivates a production like _Masse-Mensch_,
with black curtains blotting out all but the center of the stage,
and a theater like the Redoutensaal, with the actor placed amidst a
background of formal and permanent beauty. The Medrano supplies a
living background, the background of the audience itself. It is the
background of life instead of death, a fulness of living things instead
of the morbid emptiness of black curtains. It is a background more
enveloping and animating than the ballroom of Maria Theresa. It is a
background that accords with every mood, and is itself a unity.
The other problem is a psychological and a physical problem, the
problem of life-principles in art. In the beginning the theater
was masculine. Its essence was a thrust. The phallus was borne in
the processional ritual at the opening of the Theater of Dionysus
each spring; and its presence was significant. The greatest and the
healthiest of the theaters have always plunged their actors into
the midst of the audience. It is only decadence, whether Roman or
Victorian, that has withdrawn the actor into a sheath, a cave, a mouth,
and has tried to drag the spirit of the spectator in with him. The peep
show is essentially evil. I will not say it is feminine, but I will say
that the art of the theater is a masculine art, that it is assertive
and not receptive. Its business is to imbue the audience. It is not too
difficult to see in the proscenium arch the reason for the barrenness
of the realistic theater. Directors and artists who have felt this
have tried to find a playhouse that lies nearer to the masculine vigor
of Æschylus and Shakespeare. I think they can find it in the Cirque
Medrano.