Scenery and the Drama

I

THE myth of a godhead persists even among iconoclasts. And the primitive impulse to believe in creation by the will of a father clings to innovators. Therefore modern stage scenery is commonly supposed to have sprung from the visions of Gordon Craig and the prophetic books of Adolphe Appia. Scenic art has been analyzed almost entirely in terms of sin and salvation. Almost every discussion of its problems ends with some rigidly logical theory of the final and perfect type of stage setting, just as Moroccan Berbers still cultivate a pigtail so that, at their death, the Prophet can conveniently yank them into Paradise.

We have been assured that the modern theatre would be regenerated because its new backgrounds emphasized and aureoled the actor, and then that any and every form of tangible background must be destroyed in order to give proper emphasis to the actor, picked out by a spotlight from the void. The stage was to be redeemed by putting the actor behind a mask; it was to be saved by suppressing the actor entirely and replacing him with a supermarionette. The dilemma was to be resolved by making stage settings of nothing but light, pulsing like music, controlled by keyboards as flexible as any piano’s. More recently we have been told that the modern stage must be as bare as the walls of a factory, and scenery, the outline of its construction, as rigid as the iron skeletons of skyscrapers, derricks, or railway trestles. Over these the artists of the theatre were to mount into eternal life much as the gods once ascended a rainbow into Walhalla. And if the theatre was not to be saved by this method, it could be saved in any case by ignoring the proscenium frame and becoming an arena or a circus: the final renascence would result from the actor mingling freely with his audience. Original sin has been successively paint and the scene painter, the actor and the spoken word, realism of any sort, decoration in any form. And the prototype of salvation has been discovered in every golden past: among the ritual dances of Asia and Africa, the archaic theatres of Attica, the naves of cathedrals, the platforms of Elizabethan innyards, and the ballrooms of baroque palaces hung with eighteenth-century tapestries.

Such, within the last ten years, have been a few of the alternatives presented by the theatre’s theologians. They offer no immediate aid to a designer who wishes to analyze the basis of the art of designing stage settings as a means of practising it more intelligently. If he approaches his problem realistically, he will, I think, recognize at once that the choice of method and the problem of style, in the theatre of to-day, are entirely relative and the particular method chosen, in itself, unimportant. Like all modern art, the art of the theatre cannot be pure in the sense that the earlier arts have been pure or single in their tradition, for the reason that the material from which the theatre to-day selects its themes is no longer a homogeneous body of myth — the tale of Troy and Pelops’ line of the Greek arenas, or the sacred mysteries and legends of the mediæval market place. We stage not one world, but a dozen different ones. A century of ‘culture’ engendered by popular education and archa’ology disseminated through art museums has made us acutely conscious of the Greeks and the Romans, the Medes and the Persians, not only as human beings, but as inhabitants of civilizations essentially different from our own. We are also vividly aware of the variety of all the races that inhabit the globe at present, and we are eager for dramatic interpretations of them. And after one hundred years of what we term the Industrial Revolution and the acceleration of all the means of communication, every metropolis imports alien plays as continuously as it imports foreign fruits and vegetables to vary its diet and absorbs them just as it absorbs dates, bananas, or alligator pears.

Every age is our quarry, every manner our prerogative, every myth a challenge to reinterpretation. And none is seen by cither the playwright or his audience from any single and accepted point of view, cither moral, religious, or political. If we revive the ancient world, it is not to dramatize accepted codes as to political ambition and the fate of tyrants and traitors. We recall them in order to demonstrate what intelligent statesmanship should be, just as we reconstruct China or Jerusalem in order to criticize current moralities. And our avowedly romantic plays underline the fact that neither Cyrano’s escapades nor PoncedeLeon’s quest was undertaken because dueling and swashbuckling were the order of the day.

There can be no unity of style in mounting contemporary plays, because there is so little unity of style even in the work of a single contemporary playwright. Eugene O’Neill is typical of an age in which dramatists have almost as many methods as they have subjects, and change in swift succession from the colloquial idiom of sailors in stokeholds or water-front saloons to the heroic manner of traditional poetic verse and even mingle them in one and the same play. But, whatever method the playwright may adopt, the setting of his stage is more important than ever. For in the theatre to-day the stage picture is nothing less than a form of literary expression.

After a century and a half, during which a theory of democratic government has become increasingly selfevident, we conceive the individual as part of society, as typical of a group, as expressing himself as much through his environment as through his person. Hence the pictures on his walls, the furniture on which he sits, even the pattern of his wall paper, may speak to us as eloquently as any words — witness the stage directions of Bernard Shaw. And nineteenth-century painting has emphasized this in pictorial terms by training us to see a human being, not as an isolated form bounded by a hard and arbitrary outline, but enmeshed in ‘atmosphere’ and light that unite him with a visible background. The furnishings of the modern stage are invariably something more than the traditional boards with a table and a few chairs, because the background of action is, in a very literal and concrete manner, written into plays so that even the mechanics of action depend upon it. Any frame with a means of getting on and off’ will do for almost any comedy of Molière. But deliver the wrong set of scenery to almost any current play and the action cannot be made plausible enough to continue. Realism must remain one necessary form of theatrical art, whether or not it is pictorially good or bad, ugly or beautiful, just so long as modern playwrights like Shaw and O’Neill use it as one method of arousing our emotions and projecting ideas about the world we live in, which seem important enough to lure us into the theatre.

There the spoken word is not in itself enough to dramatize even the so-called “poetic’ play, because the dramatist so rarely depends entirely upon it. The Hairy Ape must be lighted with the glow of his particular hell, or as a symbol he becomes meaningless; and the rhythmical crunch of coal is as essential an accompaniment to his diatribes as the chant of any chorus. The actor is called upon to project a world he cannot possibly convey wholly by his person, partly because the playwright does not rely on him to do so, and partly because the world in which he acts, even when he revives classic masterpieces, is not the accepted world of his audience. The connotations of speech are insufficient to convey it. Word pictures in themselves cannot satisfy modern audiences unless they are entirely colloquial. The action of fully half the plays produced would seem implausible, remote, often preposterous, unless the world of which the actor is a part were separately dramatized.

Inevitably the age of the dominant mime, the ‘star,’ has passed, and no one has arisen to take the place of Irving, Mansfield, Bernhardt, Coquelin, or Duse. Plays to-day are not only acted — they are produced. And the way they are acted is determined by the mind of a director who creates a carefully integrated whole and directs his players as a conductor does a symphonic orchestra. The age of the great actor-managers, of soloists in the theatre, of histrionic virtuosi, lias been succeeded by an age of dominant directors — the age of Reinhardt, Jessner, Fehling, Barker, Copeau, Stanislavsky, Tairoff, and Meyerhold. And to these the designer, whether painter or architect, is almost as essential as the actor himself in interpreting their material and arousing the emotions of their audiences.

II

It is these directors who realized the need of changing the role of scenery from a static and perfunctory background to a dynamic element in projecting a play across the footlights. The record of their productions is the history of modern scenery in all its phases. But to compare pictures of this half century of renovated stage settings and discuss them in pictorial terms, as though they were pictures in frames, is to miss the essential quality which made them a new art. For it is only as a factor in impinging the imagination of a particular playwright upon the imagination of a particular audience, under particular social and political conditions, that modern stage settings, even as a craft, have any new meaning. It is only as part of an event that they contribute new life to the theatre.

To Stanislavsky and Danchenko the method of meticulous realism had all the authority of law and all the finality of a true art of the theatre. But realism became their method primarily because Tchekoff was the only important playwright that the Moscow Art Theatre discovered. The success of that troupe was based very largely upon Tchekoff’s career as a playwright, so much so that the sea gull became the Art Theatre’s monogram. Stanislavsky felt very rightly that in Tchckoff he had found a profound intuition into Russian character and the typical dreams and dilemmas that confronted the Russian soul. But to Russian audiences Tchekoff’s insight was at first neither plausible nor convincing. At the outset they refused to accept these helpless intellectuals as either significant or typical, just as they could not accept their elliptical and casual colloquies, which seemingly led nowhere, as having any dramatic force whatsoever. The whole effort of the Moscow Art Theatre was to evolve a method of acting that made these ineffective gentlefolk the accepted symbols of their time, until every play said in effect, ‘This is you; this is really Russia. We are nothing more than this. At our best we do nothing more than this.’ And the plausible solidity and equally plausible detail of realistic background, of costume and make-up, were only part of the effort of two producers to make Tchekoff’s characters and themes a part of the recognizable, unmistakable texture of Russian life.

After the Revolution of 1917, when these politically impotent intellectuals were wiped out as a class and replaced by a militant and dominant proletariat, the realism of Stanislavsky immediately seemed ‘classic’ and oldfashioned. The Moscow Art Theatre to-day is the ‘First Academic Theatre.’ A nonrealistic formula of stage setting, of constructivist skeletons, in which the industrial and mechanical structure of the world is symbolized, seems a significant form and the final type of scenery to a populace eager to graft the dictatorship of the factory worker on a nation of peasants, dominated by statesmen who conceive a political Utopia in terms of industrial efficiency. Precisely because this is the vision to which the imagination of present-day Russia responds, constructivism has become appropriate even for reviving French operettas of the Second Empire such as Giroflé-Girofla, in which singers swing from trapezes and chorus men turn handsprings over trestles like acrobats. Lysistrata is made hilarious by grotesque mobs that chase each other over and under a skeleton Acropolis, and Carmen is rewritten so that it can be sung by a people’s chorus.

Outside of Russia, where collectivism is not a dominant creed, constructivism has been imported and accepted as an art form. Nevertheless, despite constant critical acclaim, it has failed to become an appropriate setting for accepted masterpieces. And playwrights who hail it as a great liberation and write scenes that can be interpreted only on trestles, chutes, and elevator shafts invariably write empty and pretentious allegories. Where collectivism is not a faith outside the theatre, constructivism within it very quickly degenerates into a sporadic stunt.

Reinhardt’s career at first glance seems the inevitable triumph of one form of theatre art over another, in reality, it is a record of a director’s triumphs over successive types of audiences. When Hauptmann’s Weavers, Rose Bernds, and Fuhrmann Henschels were a revelation to Germans of their national character, Reinhardt very rightly exploited every naturalistic device to give them added force and plausibility. When Tolstoi’s peasants seemed the creations of an equally important vision, the peasant yard in The Power of Darkness was complete to the last shed and the stage floor littered with straw. The appetite for the classics of a rigorously educated German bourgeoisie was sustained with period backgrounds of convincing completeness for Schiller and Goethe. Shakespeare’s poetry, dulled in translation, was heightened with the all too solid pictures of which the revolving stage was capable, rotated with such precision that the entire text could nevertheless be given in three hours.

When the growing prestige of democratic consciousness asserted itself in opposition to the waning prestige of Kaiserdom, the tragedy of CEdipus was performed with a chorus enlarged to a mob, in whose gestures the pity and terror of his fate could be magnified. After the collapse of the monarchy Danton’s Death was expanded into a circus arena, ‘The Theatre of the Ten Thousand,’and the sans-culottes howled and swirled among the audience. But, despite an amazing number of prolific German playwrights, none of them could write enough plays to keep this circus theatre open; it was abandoned as a playhouse almost as soon as it had been proclaimed the theatre of the future. When the economic consequences of the peace wiped out the German bourgeoisie as an effective audience and made a repertory of the classics financially precarious, Reinhardt rediscovered the theatrical methods and manners of the eighteenth century. His productions became festivals, his audiences cosmopolitans on pilgrimages to old-world shrines, and these, in turn, his ‘ideal stages,’where the glamour of baroque palaces and churches could, as backgrounds, add a romantic glamour to the play.

The resthetic methods of the stage designer, like those of his director, are determined by factors not in themselves æsthetic. Design in the theatre is essentially nothing more than a kind of visual eloquence, integrally part of the act of interpreting a theme. It will be vital only where it is a necessary factor in the struggle to impregnate spectators with a dramatist’s idea, whether it illuminates their present or revives a fresh sense of their past.

The style of modern stage settings is therefore a relative, not an absolute, matter. It can be neither deduced from any formal concepts of pure beauty nor evolved by avoiding any specific ugliness. Its beauty will be only the vividness with which it reflects dramatic ideas that a producer can bring to life; its finality, as form, no greater than the insight or the imagination of which audiences of to-day are capable.

III

If designers had docilely accepted Gordon Craig’s dogmas and turned scenery into uniform screenery, their settings could never have had any relation to a living theatre. Modern scenery has been associated with ‘Art Theatres’ not because these have been born of an interest in art, in its formal sense, but because they have been born of an interest in ideas. What makes our modern theatre modern is not a trick or two of carpentry, or even the magic illusions of which electric lamps, rather than gas jets and candles, are capable, but a widespread realization that the theatre is, at this moment, suited to reinterpreting life and reconceiving the world. It is typical that theatrical designing rose to the rank of a separate profession in this country, in art theatres like our American Washington Square Players, Provincetown Playhouse, and the Theatre Guild — theatres that were dedicated, not to provide visually beautiful spectacles, but to propagate what seemed to them significant and important ideas in terms of dramatic tales. The importance of visual beauty in the theatre was made plain just as often in stage pictures of drab fo’c’sles and peasant kitchens as in vistas into kings’ palaces or visions of the Garden of Eden.

The incentive to design was primarily the necessity of making the world of the play as real to an audience as it was to the playwright. The scene designer was enlisted as part of the job of ‘putting the play over,’ of creating the backgrounds that made seeing believing. And he was most necessary in theatres where the theme of the play was neither accepted nor obvious, where the picture of life it conveyed did not correspond to the pictures already in our heads.

Plays that arouse none of this conflict with the audience are rarely mounted with beauty. Themes that are universally accepted are rarely staged with any distinction of style, because they have no need to be. For an audience of editors of the Variorum Edition and the old lady to whom Shakespeare was so full of familiar quotations, any set of dull and puffy costumes and drab flats from the nearest storehouse are enough to dress any of the tragedies or the comedies. Molière has always been staged with solid dullness at the Comédie-Française, where he was a universally accepted classic. The backgrounds of Don Juan in Russia, where the world of Moliere was an alien thing, needed the brush of Golovin and the hand of Meyerhold and ‘hundreds of wax candles in three chandeliers . . . little negroes flitting to pick up lace handkerchiefs from the hands of Don Juan, or to push the chairs before tired actors . . . handing the actors lanterns when the stage is submerged in semi-darkness.’ ‘These,’ writes Meyerbold, ‘are not tricks created for the diversion of snobs; all this is the .main object of the play: to show the gilded Versailles realm.’

Back drops no better than eidarged postcards of Norwegian fjords did well enough for years in Norway where Peer Gynt was a national hero, his story part of a national folklore. The hills and valleys of his adventures first had the lure of a fairy tale in Berlin and New York, where he was the mouthpiece of an exotic legend. If Liliom, as I have been frequently told, was more beautifully staged at its New York premiere than in Budapest, the reason was simply that here his haunts had to be created. To his native audience the amusement park where he flourished as a barker was no less familiar than Coney Island is to us. It was, in fact, so fresh in their memory that the meanest suggestion of it in the theatre was enough. Here it had to be designed, in order to make it live vividly as part of Liliom’s life. And the impulse to invest the tawdry squalor of his world with beauty was based upon the fact that, to the Theatre Guild the play was something more than the story of a thief, amusing bits of first-hand observation twisted into a highly sentimental ending. Liliom was less recognizable as a fact than as a symbol. The play seemed worth doing, not as a picture of a foreign underworld, but as an expression, through the mouth of a thief, of a romantic faith in human compassion, eloquent enough to make its poignant allegory. For that reason it became essential to give beauty even to the tumble-down shack where this ‘bum’ lived and the dusty corner of a city park where he fell in love under the light of a lamp-post.

Shakespeare was first restaged in every variety of style of which the modern art theatre of its day in Germany was capable, beginning with the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen’s company, long before England or America felt the necessity for anything but the back drops of their grandfathers. It was not until the obvious word magic of Midsummer-Night’s Dream began to fade that Barker created a more magical and iridescent forest. It is only when Hamlet’s agony over his mother’s incest, no longer a sin to us, begins to make his tragedy seem remote that we become supremely modern and put him in a dinner jacket in order to make him one of us. It is only because so much of the fun of The Taming of the Shrew begins to be heavy and meaningless that we send Petruchio and Katherine rattling from Padua to Verona in a Ford.

We stage designers like to think of ourselves as so many Lochinvars trailing clouds of glory in pigment and colored light behind us, and are inclined to believe historians who tell us that a revolution has been accomplished because painters entered the theatre — Roller, Bakst, Stern, and Sievert — and replaced the lifeless palette and the rigid drawing of traditional scene painting with the living color, composition, and light of modern art. It is true that we have re-created and beautified many things. Foliage no longer hangs in rows like the washing of some giantess hung out to dry; and the heroine’s shadow is no longer cast on the back drop. That back drop now seems as illimitable as the sky of Perugino, and the stage a world vibrant with all the moods of day and night. Hovels or palaces have a solidity which delights us as the interplay of architectural form does, and a balance of light on structural surfaces. But the stage has been transfigured before, if not by painters, then by architects — Serlio, Inigo Jones, and the three Bibbienas. There have been spectacles three centuries before our day which our ingenuity, with all our modern devices, would be hard put to it to duplicate, such as The Love of the Gods, with its sixteen changes of scene, or the contemporary masque at the court of Ferrara, where seven mounds welled up from the stage, then changed to seven abysses belching smoke, and the sky finally opened while a cloud carrying a gilded car with Venus and the three Graces and the five Hours was ‘seen to sink gradually and most beautifully to the stage.’

If the etched intentions of Gordon Craig, the sepia water colors of Robert Edmond Jones, — where figures in vermilion and silver challenge the Calvinistic gloom of rooms and battlements, — or the drawings of Norman Geddes, in which Dante’s dream ascends again from Hell to Heaven, survive as records of our stage, they may seem pallid and meagre compared to the prodigious invention and the lavish pictorial beauty of the seventeenthand eighteenth-century stages, already catalogued in the archives of the Bibliothèque Nationale and the Albertina. The librarian of 2029 will probably compare our sketches patiently in order to discover some common aim which would make them evidence of a revolution in theatrical art. He will probably smile if he finds a footnote anywhere telling him that the revolution was really in our souls, and that an age which abandoned its churches and paraded its skepticism did believe that the theatre was a place where the meaning of life, the past and the future, could be revealed. Nor will he suspect that, even as pictures, the beauty of our stage settings moved us, because they were part of adventurous moments of insight and ecstasy.