Important architectural experiments have been made which aim at changing the conventional "peep-show theatre," as its critics have called it, where we look into a stage picture through a more or less gilded frame. Theatres have been projected with the stage as a formal platform, where the actor emphasized in space, picked out by light, can mingle freely with the audience and is partially surrounded by them, a sort of electric contact being the goal sought. The most notable theatres of this sort have been the proj ects of the American Geddes, the Dutchman Vanderwelde and the Austrian Stranad. Jouvet's platform stage designed for Copeau existed in Paris for a number of years ; a circus theatre by Poelzig, "the theatre of the o,000," was actually built in Berlin, but like Copeau's theatre it was abandoned. Quite apart from economic problems, what thwarts the development of these playhouses is the fact that modern playwrights will not write enough plays that can be given in any such manner. O'Neill and Shaw, Toller, or Werfel, revert to realism quite as often as they depart from it and write plays which require the three-sided box room or the illusion of distance in an actual world which can only be achieved, in the theatre, by looking through a frame. Until modern play writing achieves some unity of tradition, these formal stages must remain isolated experiments or dreams on paper.
Lighting.—The most important effect that the shallow-box stage has had on designing is the fact that perspective planning and painting become preposterous ; anything that leads the eye from the front of the stage directly across it to the back wall, makes the eye realize that the picture is only 20 ft. deep. Hence the kind of composition modern scene design employs is not the Renaissance composition of distance into which the eye is led by receding parallel perspective, but distance suggested in the Japan ese manner by planes cutting one another like the distant peak of Fujiyama appearing directly over the brink of a hill. The eye, leaping from one to the other, imagines the distance and gets the suggestion of space. Thus a space in modern settings is suggested rather than revealed : the base of one column will suggest an entire temple; one pillar in a gloom pierced by a stained glass window will convey an entire cathedral, and because there is no intermediate form between the pillar and the window, the blackness will seem as deep as the nave of a church. Even the window may not be shown but a shaft of light may be thrown from a point out of the spectator's range of vision in order to increase the scale by the same process of suggestion.
Light is the scene-painter of the modern theatre; light, not paint, draws the scene, and by varying planes of intensity, models it, and makes the corner of a building solid, a hill remote, a sky infinite though it be only two arms' length from the garden wall. If a stage 25 or 3o ft. deep is flooded with even radiance, nothing will persuade the eye that it is anything but a shallow box, how ever suggestive the arrangement of the setting itself may be. Settings are constructed now as in the Renaissance period, of can vases stretched on wooden frames and hinged or lashed together, but the paint on them is a mere preparation for the light to be thrown on. No setting can be designed until one is certain how one is going to light it ; the colour painted is conceived as an undertone of what it will seem when lighted on the stage.
The railway viaduct in Liliom, for example, if it is to seem massive and menacing must have the light thrown across it, not at it, otherwise it will become flimsy canvas. Thrown from right to
left the single pier casts a sharp shadow which gives a sense of solid masonry. The whole forepart of this scene must have a different quality and intensity of light from the distant silhouette of factory chimneys. With the right balance of light they will recede and seem distant even though they are actually only 8 ft. behind the arch culvert. And both foreground and background must be properly related to the sky if they are not both to fall into it.
So much for the scene ; but there are the actors. They must be modelled and emphasized in the areas in which they move ; sharply picked out at certain moments, where the action calls for it, at others almost blotted into half shadow, for this scene is one of ambush, of two thieves waiting to rob a cashier, and a rim of shadow into which they can retreat is part of the process of creating the atmosphere of terror and suspense when the crisis comes. Every scene has pools of light waiting for the actors, light which we do not see or know is there until the actor walks into it at a given moment.
Emotionally we react to light far more quickly than to any other medium in the theatre. We react to it even more quickly than to the actor's voice. In fact it sets the key of our emotions, and determines what effect the actor's voice will have on us. Lights not only paint and model the setting, emphasize its planes, and define its form ; light also sustains the mood of a scene, and dramatizes its meaning. Crude or blatant lighting can war against the emotions an actor is trying to convey, and often destroy them entirely, all the more so because the lighting of any scene often does not remain static, but is dimmed or heightened, pulses and fluctuates with the action, like an orchestral score.
Change of light alone created every difference essential to the five acts of the Tidings Brought to Mary. The park scene of Liliom (Plate II.) consisted of two gauzes on which the silhouettes of trees were pasted. The entire mood of poetic dusk was created by a balance of lights. In Man and the Masses, the contrast be tween the mystic dream scenes (not shown) and the sculpturesque force of the mob scenes is entirely a matter of lighting. In the course of the play there were several hundred subtle shifts of lighting timed to coincide with the action of the play. The tree of knowledge in Back to Methuselah was entirely made with light, projected from the rear. The sphinx in Peer Gynt became a towering form by the same process. The sacred tree on the rim of the Persian desert in Marco Millions was merely a silhouette on a semi-transparent back-drop. But it towered in mysterious majesty because of the way light was thrown upon it, from both front and rear.
The technical basis of this important phase of modern theatre art is the spot-light—in contrast to the flood light—which can be controlled and focussed accurately upon one particular spot. To be effective these spot-lights must be separately controlled so that each can be set at any point of intensity from full to dim and fluctuated back and forth if need be during the progress of the play. Hence the rheostats, or dimmer board, that controls these lights, is to the designer's conception what the central nervous system is to the ideas in the brain. Increased subtlety both in design and control of electric light, and particularly the colour of light, is the key to theatrical design of the future. That must wait not only on the playwright and stage designer, but on the lighting engineer, who, more than anyone, holds the key to the modern theatre's destiny. (See THEATRE : Modern Tendencies.)