Stage Design

STAGE DESIGN. Until about 1900 the pictures created on any stage, generally known as scenery, had no relation to the feeling for form, colour, composition or light which art from 185o to 190o had made a common possession. The picture of the world within the theatre was invariably dull, without illusion and rigidly painted,—painted, in fact, with the same merciless and metallic precision which led Manet to exclaim before one of Meissonier's paintings of charging cuirassiers, "Everything is of steel except their breast-plates." Trees stood invariably in regimental rows and their foliage hung in separate parallel layers above their trunks. The walls of hovels or palaces reminded the most careless eye that they were merely painted canvas; the sky flapped, an ob viously painted sheet. The ugliness of the total result was all the more glaring because, in an age of realistic playwriting, actors were using every artifice they possessed to make an audience feel that they were Russian or Silesian peasants, Norwegian town coun cillors, or English clergymen and poets. Every word in the theatre was trying to convince its hearers that what they saw was not actors, but human beings in a world as real as the one they had just left to enter the theatre ; that people "were like that"; that life had this significance and that meaning. But everything on the stage reminded the audience that, after all, what they were seeing was a play in a thoroughly artificial place, the theatre, that had no relation to life. Even when a poet held the stage the result was equally ludicrous. It was difficult for the singers of Wagner to transport an audience to the beginning of the world, where the gods were deciding the destiny of men, when everything about them seemed an enlarged landscape done in chromolithograph. Mary Garden wandered in a park that had neither magic nor mystery, in the supposed gloom of palace halls as bland as litho graphs of English country houses, current in the '5os. Any sym bolism that might have lurked in Maeterlinck's fairy tale of the terror and foreboding of young love was dissipated ; and Melisande's cry "I am not happy" seemed less a comment on the state of her soul than on the preposterous stage settings that sur rounded her.

The inadequacy of this type of scenic background, so prevalent at the turn of the century, did not lie alone in its artificiality nor in the fact that it was an obvious and flimsy convention. Artificiality and the conventions of formally painted designs, as proved by the work of Inigo Jones, Berain and the Bibienas, can breed beauty in the theatre just as easily as the same tradition in the 19th cen tury bred ugliness. The reason for the change which makes painted scenery in one epoch enhance the meaning of the play and in an other detract from it, is our changed attitude towards the theatre.

The creative dramatists of the past 4o or 5o years, whom for con venience sake we may call modern, such as Ibsen, Shaw, Haupt mann, Chekov and Strindberg, Synge and O'Neill, are modern in the sense that one and all they do not regard the theatre as a place of pure entertainment. And they have succeeded so well that though we may still go to the theatre merely to be amused, we also go to watch a play with the same expectation with which we open a novel treating of modern life—in the hope of seeing more clearly into the springs of character, of getting a fresh sense of human destiny.

The Modern Scenic Movement.

The blatant dissonance be tween modern plays that were attempting to reconceive a world and scenic backgrounds that merely reflected the conventions of a purely theatrical theatre, was so preposterous that it could not endure. For that reason, directors of modern theatres in every country in Europe, beginning with Germany, and finally in the United States, enlisted painters or designers to make the world on the stage the world of the play. This is the genesis of the so called modern scenic movement. It arose, not because modern art already existed, but because it became essential to the theatre in order to quicken the reactions of the audience until the world the dramatist asked them to believe in had the plastic real ity of a world before their eyes or the imaginative quality of a poet's dream. The source of modern scenery has not been dogma. It did not arise because Gordon Craig prophesied that only screens could back a stage ; modern scenery would have occurred whether or not Craig had ever existed or penned a line. He, however, was one of those who prophesied that a change must come and that stage settings must be designed to interpret the play they housed. Every manner and method of modern painting, has, with the aid of some mechanical device, been put to work in the theatre : the plaster dome, in conjunction with the flexibility of incandes cent lamps which made the painted sky seem a heaven and filled the stage with all the ambient light of day; the spot-light, manipu lated to create the chiaroscuro of Daumier; light mixed with colour in the manner of Monet and Seurat making colour vibrate, and achieving the atmosphere of the impressionists, or en meshed in gauze, giving the atmosphere of Whistler's nocturnes. Every technique of modern art has been exploited, whether of im pressionism, post-impressionism, cubism or futurism. However, from the point of view of pictures constructed within the pro scenium frame of the theatre, almost every method at one time or another, in the hands of a particular director and in con junction with the methods of his actors, has succeeded in con vincing an audience and projecting the interpretation of a drama tist's ideas.