: Continental stagecraft by Macgowan Kenneth Jones Robert Edmond Illustrator - Theaters Stage-setting and scenery; Theater Europe; Theaters Europe; Theaters Stage-setting and scenery Europe

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PREFATORY NOTE vii

CHAPTER

The art that lies closest to life. Because its materials are living men and women, it should not seek the illusion of reality. Its object is to achieve the Form of life.

From Realism through Expressionism. The attempts of Ibsen, Tchehoff, Wedekind, and Strindberg to reflect the Form of life. The expressionist movement in the German theater; its violence, morbidity and failure. Its arresting significance. Some examples of its vitality. Expressionism and the unconscious Through Form to beauty.

The place of Germany in the theater. Its pioneering past and its natural virtues and failings. A beaten and bruised people that still makes a fine audience. Berlin becomes Broadway-ized and morbid. Economy breeds simplicity. A new day dawns on a black-curtained stage.

Four styles of acting: Impersonation by wigs and spirit, as practiced by the Moscow Art Theater. Impersonation by type-casting. The exploitation of personality by great actors. Presentational acting, and the expository performances of the Vieux-Colombier.

In the search for the director who can fuse the new acting and the new play we come first upon Max Reinhardt. His past and his present. His virtues and his faults. Powerful theatricalism in the best sense possible in the old theater. His influence and his followers. His future.

The advent of the artist in the theater, a functionary unknown to Moli?re or Shakespeare. The designer as an originator of directional ideas. The inevitable union of director and artist, in the sceneryless theater of the future.

J?rgen Fehling of the Volksb?hne adds understanding to Jessner's freedom and vigor. A drama of industrial revolution produced in abstract terms and made immensely moving. Scenery almost disappears and a workmen's hall becomes a flight of steps surrounded by blackness. Arbitrary light and a chorus that speaks as one. Audience, players and play pass through the black purgatory of revolutionary Germany.

Reinhardt's Grosses Schauspielhaus, the gigantic compromise between the Greek Theater, the circus and the realistic stage, in which he made his last effort towards a new type of production. The failures of the building architecturally. Its virtues and its possibilities, which the withdrawal of Reinhardt has left unrealized.

The Redoutensaal of Marie Theresa converted by the Austrian government into a theater without proscenium, machinery or scenery. Audience and actors lit by crystal chandeliers and surrounded by Gobelins and a permanent setting of baroque architecture. Mozart and Reinhardt bring to it an old and a new theatricalism. The principle applied to the stage and the plays of to-day.

Seeking both the new theater and the old spirit, Reinhardt invades the church. The Cuckoo Theater. Religion in the terms of the theater a thing of vital and creative spirit in Greek times and in the Middle Ages. Can the artist of the theater bring it out of our material age?

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