Stage Design

The Method of Abstraction.

Settings that eliminate the stage picture entirely are designed for the same reason and by the same process. The Tidings Brought to Mary, by Paul Claudel, was played on the same platform for its entire five acts, which according to the stage directions take place in a barn, a farm kitchen, an orchard and a road at the edge of a forest. Fedor Komisarjevsky, the director, chose the unit platform because he felt that the play was mediaeval not only in its but in its quality. It was a mystery, couched in the mystic faith of a truly mediaeval catholicism. A single square block served as a bench and, covered with a formal cloth, as a supper-table and an altar (see Plate IV.). The orchard became eight nuns clothed in Byzantine splendour, each holding a branch of silver flowers, who stood in a remote semi-circle. The sky behind them at this moment became green to suggest the foliage of out of doors. For the road-side scene at night, the same backdrop became the inky blue of a wintry night spangled with a few stars. And a cold steel-blue light thrown over the platform gave the illusion of win ter snow. For the miracle the sky blazed forth gold, like the back ground of a i4th century mosaic, and aureoled the actors. The same intention was carried through the costumes : many were mediaeval French, but others—those of the father and mother— were clad in the traditional robes of early religious paintings, so that the mother had a suggestion of the Mother of Christ, the father, of one of Christ's disciples, and in its formal grouping, the supper of farewell suggested an apostolic meal.

In Man and the Masses, by Ernst Toiler, the formal platforms became almost invisible. The settings were made wholly by the massing and the movement of the actors. The human beings on the stage provided all the scenery that was needed, for the play was conceived as an abstract allegory. One leader who tries to limit the workers to the bloodless methods of a general strike, is called simply The Woman. The agitator who incites them to revo lution is called The Man. Though the workers are supposedly in their union hall, their angry indictments of capitalistic society are chanted in unison as a formal chorus. How could this meet ing be placed in a realistic setting of an actual union headquarters, without making such formal choruses seem ridiculous ? The title literally translated is "mass-man." The force of Toller's con ception is his vision of mass-man. The working-men are a single stubborn unit, welded together in resentment and anger, from which only voices of the young and the old emerge to cry, threaten and lament. If a group of 3o or 4o actors on the stage are to give this feeling of mass power, they cannot be scattered, they cannot move about much ; they must be welded. Hence a stage setting was devised that was a literal cross-section of an amphitheatre; the players never moved from the spot where they were wedged ; they rose with waving arms and clenched fists to face The Woman, who pleaded with them (see Plate IV.) ; they towered over her; she was below them, supplicating. When this compact mass of 3o actors stood they seemed to represent "the masses"; it seemed that they could sweep down on The Woman and overwhelm her. Then The Man sprang out of their midst and slowly backed up step by step to the top of the amphitheatre. As his eloquence grew they swung slowly round, looking up towards him, turning their backs on The Woman as they ignored her pleas. Finally, at the moment when they were won over to a doctrine of violence, they were a solid mass, crouching under him waiting to spring; as he cried "revolution" they took one step up, the only step they took in the entire act, and lunged together like a huge beast, echoing his cry "revolution." Each one had turned com

pletely round during the scene without once moving from the spot on which he or she stood. They remained a mass, and by a single mass movement expressed their change of faith.

Varieties of Interpretation.

The designing of scenery is thus never a purely pictorial problem ; it is part and parcel of the act of interpreting a play. Whether a designer chooses abstraction or realism, a picture-stage which imitates the world as we see it in rooms with the fourth wall knocked out into which we peep, or a formal stage which symbolizes the world, is in itself a rela tive thing. The method of design chosen is only good even from a pictorial point of view provided it touches the imagination of an audience, and really, convinces it of the truth and reality of the play. Setting the play is only part of the process of acting it so as to give it dramatic force; no method, however beautiful it is as a picture, is the right method if it fails to convince an audience ; and there are as many types of audience as there are kinds of play. No play has only one meaning ; it can mean all things to all men. The imagination of the director must decide and the pictorial imagination of the scene designer must second him. If you can make your audience accept Liliom's story as a modernistic fairy tale, an allegory from the outset, Pitoev's method of presenting it in clear hard formal outline is the right one. If the play means more as a story in which the allegory is implicit, then the more realistic method of the Theatre Guild is better; similarly with He Who Gets Slapped (see Plate II.). To corn pare the two one would have to sit through the two productions as played by two different casts.

There is no one way of producing any play, even classic master pieces. In fact every one, whether Euripides or Shakespeare, has to be constantly re-interpreted, in order to become relevant and remain living. If Shakespeare's characters seem important as fig ures rescued from an actual historic past then the elaborate and exact costuming of the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen or Henry Irving is not only necessary but effective. To one audience, which con ceives them primarily as creatures of Shakespeare's time, the bare boards of the Elizabethan stage will make them live more com pletely. To another audience, particularly sensitive to Shake speare's word-magic, formal scenery, even a single curtain, is enough. To a German audience, for whom much of the poetry is lost in translation, more pictorial backgrounds are necessary, into which that lost glamour ,must be projected. But to both German and American audiences for whom Shakespeare's , pro tagonists are imaginative figures living in the world of the imagi nation, they become most real when part of an unreal world, a forest of dyed strips of tapestry or gauze (Barker's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream and Reinhardt's production of the same), or a blood red stairway (Jessner's production of Rich ard III.), or among golden screens (Craig's production of Hamlet with Stanislayski at the Moscow Art theatre). And if the trag edy of Hamlet begins to seem too remote and archaic to us, we can make him a human being, for certain audiences, by putting him in modern dress. The art of scene designing is a liv ing art because it can find no final formula. It will live pre cisely as long as it can discover new meanings in every play of every epoch. Scenery is the background of a play, and as such is part of the continuous adventure of projecting the meaning of a play across the footlights, finding, firing, and then fusing the imagination of an audience. And that adventure will always be a different one in every country and every epoch.