Stage Design

For if that scene succeeded in conveying Japan effectively to the audience, the world of the Japanese could be taken for granted for the rest of the evening. A white sheet and the shadowgraph of a few pine boughs might have done just as well for the winter hills. This instance reveals how superficial it is to codify stage sets according to purely pictorial principles.

Staging of "Liliom..

Molnar's Liliom presents an analo-. goes problem of transplantation, not from one century to an other but from one country to another at the same period. The producer's problem in Liliom was, in essence, that his story deals with the creed of a gangster and a "tough" who is fundamentally romantic. Liliom falls genuinely in love with the servant, Julie, and evinces a belief in "the eternal feminine" worthy of a latter day Faust. He is transported by the prospect of fatherhood. When he stabs himself rather than be captured by the police in an attempted hold-up that fails, his last cry is "Julie . . . my little girl . . . my little cricket." When, after facing the judg ment of heaven and ten years' probation, he returns to earth as a beggar for an opportunity to win redemption, he steals a star to give to his daughter, and then in a moment of exasperation beats her, as he formerly beat her mother. The child cries "he hit me . . . but I didn't feel anything--as though someone had stroked my hand . . ." "Nothing has happened" her mother as sures her, divining who the beggar is, "it is possible, my child, for someone to hit you—so that you don't feel any pain." Liliom is not forgiven in heaven; he is redeemed on earth by the per sistence of human compassion. The beauty of the final scene made the play at the Guild theatre an allegory, the vindication of a romantic faith, and dictated the scenery. The play was some thing more than the story of a foreign underworld; its realism was made an ironic cloak for poetic truth. Thus the amuse ment park where Liliom flourished as a bully was made as au thentically Hungarian as possible, so that the audience might accept the reality of a romantic gangster and not reject him as a maudlin invention. On the other hand, precisely because the play seemed important as an allegory because of its poetic truth, the tawdry squalor of Liliom's surroundings had to be invested with beauty, even the tumbledown shack in which he lived. And the railroad embankment, where he attempted his hold-up and met his death, was composed with some of the dignity and severity appro priate to tragedy.

Scene 2 represents the park where Liliom falls in love. The point is that, bully, seducer and braggart though he is, he does fall genuinely in love. He is transfigured and the moment be

comes as beautiful for this Hungarian hooligan and a kitchen maid as it does for all lovers. Therefore, the park where they meet must be made beautiful. The hour is dusk, when, as Whistler re minded us, "the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry as a veil, and the tall chimneys become campaniles, and the ware houses are palaces in the night and the whole city hangs in the heavens"; the "exquisite hour" as Verlaine calls it. Therefore the problem for a designer was to clothe that park with poetry as with a veil; with tree silhouettes hung on transparent gauzes (see Plate II.) putting into those tree silhouettes all the grace and the loveliness appropriate to the trees of a pastoral bower des tined to arch over young lovers. Had the scene been one of cynical seduction, this quality of tenderness and brooding would have been irrelevant.

Scene 6 represents heaven. Liliom sees heaven in terms of the police courts with which he is familiar. He can conceive of no other bar of judgment ; heaven is merely the last police court presided over by a police-court judge; the attendant angels are to his eyes only detectives and policemen. The stage directions emphasize the fact by stating that their costume is the usual police uniform. Nevertheless, Liliom has died; he is in heaven awaiting eternal judgment. If the play is to be properly interpreted this seat of judgment cannot be the proverbial heaven with a celestial throne. On the other hand, if the allegory of the play is to be made plain it cannot be shown simply as a police court. This dilemma was solved by making the scene as far as Liliom's eye ranged a drab room, with the ordinary judge's bench at one end; but the solid walls ended at the wainscoting and window frames. Beyond that was emptiness ; the room sat without walls or roof under a blue sky as illimitable as stage light could make it. By this combination of realism and fantasy, the reality of heaven was established for the audience, and at the same time the fact was made clear that to Liliom its judgments were no different from what he had experienced on earth. These four scenes from two plays entirely different in type demonstrate how contradictions of realism and decoration in stage pictures are determined by problems of dramatic interpretation and not primarily by pic torial considerations. The picture is a result of a conviction as to what the meaning of a play is and how it can be reflected in picto rial form.