Stage Design

The point needs stressing because the history of modern scen ery is usually regarded from the point of view of a mere chronol ogy of begetting, and is continued in the strain of prophecy. A designer reading any of the current histories of his art would feel that the entire problem before him was the choice of a style. And the value to him, as a craftsman, of almost all discussions of the subject, is hereby rendered nil. The theatre, it is supposed, is about to be re-created, purged of evil, saved and given its final form if he, the designer, only makes the right choice; screens, a stage without curtains, scenery made of nothing but curtains, a circus theatre where the actor can mingle with the audience, scenery that is only light, scenery that is merely symbolic colour, scenery that is wooden trestles, and so on, depending upon which method at the moment has had the latest critical success in Europe. It is essential for the scene designer to avoid this criti cal approach if he wishes to analyse the basis of his craft. For whatever his preferences may be as a painter, he will find that the moment he sets out to design stage settings his problem is everywhere the same. He will find the problem of relating a par ticular play to a particular audience, the problem, as conceived by the director, of how the meaning of that play can be put over the footlights, and dramatized for that audience. His methods will be deduced not from any abstract aesthetics of the theatre but from the exigencies of that particular situation. For not all his convic tions as to why imitation and realism is a defunct method will prevent George Bernard Shaw from continuing to write plays so provocative that they must be acted in country-house gardens, Salvation Army barracks and physicians' consulting rooms, for which the designer will have to build the walls, find the furniture and even evoke the flowers. On the other hand, not all the dogmas in the world as to the value of realism will prevent Shaw, or any other playwright, from reconstructing Antony's adventure in Egypt or Adam's adventure in the Garden of Eden, for which there is an equally avid audience ; and the designer will have to find a decorative equivalent for the sphinx, or some symbolic equivalent of the tree of knowledge. And whether theatre audi ences are those of London, Prague, Berlin or Warsaw, the designer will find that they came to the theatre to share experiences that are not their own, so that in the course of a single season the designer may have to help in making plausible the romantic scruples of a Hungarian schoolboy or a Hungarian servant, the feudal scruples of Japanese noblemen, the political dogmas of Slavonic revolutionists, the moral codes of American revolution ists and Russian peasants.

Staging of "The Faithful..

Some of the problems of scenic design as worked out by the present writer at the Guild theatre of New York, although not final in any sense as examples of theatre art, are typical of the problems which every stage designer must face in order to evolve design, whatever the pattern he may ulti mately adopt. The Faithful, by John Masefield, tells the story of 47 Ronin, retainers and henchmen of a Japanese nobleman, tricked by a rival into committing an affront to the emperor's person for which the only expiation was suicide; of the voluntary exile of these Ronin as pariahs, and their final triumph over their dead master's enemy. It is a poet's celebration of the nobleness of loy alty. What is the producer's problem? Obviously something more than to demand poetic background for a poetic play, because the tale of the 47 Ronin, as much of a household story in Japan as Washington and the cherry-tree in America, is totally unfamiliar to Western audiences. He can count on no background in the audience's mind. But Japan is the background which he must

create decisively five minutes after the curtain is up, for the reason is that the unforgivable act committed was nothing more than a mistake in ritual, a failure of ceremonial observance, not to the emperor himself, but vicariously to the emperor's person as personified by his envoy. The rigid code of Japanese feudalism is a tradition difficult for Westerners to conceive. The danger is that they will find it, if not preposterous, at least not plausible, so that they cannot identify themselves with the hero. The problem here is that to an audience not composed of orientals or members of Japanese societies, the normal reaction would be "Stab oneself because of a mistake in court etiquette? How preposterous! What a trivial people!" The playwright cannot solve this problem in the many ways that are offered to the novelist ; he has no preliminary chapters or incidental comment to prepare the mind of his audience, as his story proceeds, to make them understand the rigid Samurai code of honour and accept the tragic alternatives imposed on its adher ents. Aware of this problem, the designer finds, in making his first researches into the field of Japanese costume and architecture, that ritual ruled not only court etiquette but all Japanese life of the period, to the most trivial detail. Everything is prescribed and ordered; the degree to which the head is shaved, and the degree to which the hair is looped forward on the head ; the precise way the obi or white silk belt is tied that holds the pleated skirt in place; the length of the sleeves, as well as the cut of the gown. Every thing is ordered ceremonial, even the squares of the matting, the placing of the sword in its rack, the one picture niche where the solitary landscape scroll is shown and the way the single group of flowers is arranged under it. There are in the simplest acts, of receiving a friend and taking tea in his presence, countless oppor tunities of outraging him by breach of etiquette.

In a world of this sort, it begins to be comprehensible that a mistake in court etiquette could involve the death penalty. Hence every effort—and here the producer co-operates—is made to con vey the ceremoniousness of the Japanese feudal world, in the gait of the actors, their gestures, their genuflections, the mode of entering or leaving a room. A Japanese is found to train them; he ties every obi, adjusts every costume, sets every hat and wig. The room which is the opening scene of the play is almost archae ological in its accuracy, and the line of every costume is estab lished with realistic nicety and with an attention to correct cut and material that could hardly be outdone by the Moscow Art theatre. In short, realism as a method is employed in order to make a poetic theme plausible.

On the other hand, once the world of the Samurai is realized, and the tragedy is enacted, there is no further need of such realis tic devices. The ragged Ronin wander in the snow, but the snow may be the snow gorges of Japan, painted upon a six-fold Jap anese screen, without diminishing either the reality or the suffering of these outlaws. Here a deliberately decorative method seems the inevitable choice. Japanese landscape is known to Western audiences through the popularization of Japanese prints. A screen setting evokes this purely decorative pictorial tradition and sug gests the countryside of Japan far more effectively than any attempt to reconstruct it realistically. Thus meticulous realism and deliberate decoration can be employed simultaneously in the same play, and for the same purpose. As pictures the snow scenes are far more effective (see Plate I.). But in the theatre the pal ace scene (see Plate I.) was far the more important of the two.