B Direction and Production I

Copeau's Theatre.

At the opposite extreme in size, Jacques Copeau created in the Theatre du Vieux Colombier, Paris, a playhouse which united the ac tors on a naked architectural stage with an audience seated within auditorium walls that con tinued back unbroken by any proscenium to make the walls of the stage itself. The Theatre du Marais, Brussels (Louis Jouvet, arch.), and other projects were offshoots from this pattern.

stimulus of trying to give Shakespeare's plays as he wrote them and not garbled and con densed to fit the modern realistic theatre has resulted in a number of attempts to revive the conditions of the Shakespearean stage on the stage of an ordinary theatre. This has brought back can vas make-believe, the portals of proscenium doors which all English theatres rejoiced in a century ago. First merely repre sented as part of the scenery, these means of linking the actor and the auditorium have now been built into the actual pro sceniums of many new houses, especially in the "little theatres" built here and there about the United States. Some such theatricalizing of the stage is present in the Werkbund Theater, Cologne (Van de Velde, arch.), with its tripartite division of the stage, and in A. and G. Perret's and A. Granet's theatre in the Arts Decoratives exhibition in Paris. But certainly the handsomest playhouse of a formal and ultra-theatrical sort is the Theater in der Redoutensaal, Vienna (Sebastien Heinrich, arch.), a stage with permanent walls but no proscenium or fly gallery, set down in a ballroom of Maria Theresa. From productions in this house Reinhardt turned to the rejuvenation of a lovely old Viennese theatre, the Josephstaedter, and then created in Salzburg in the Reitschule a non-realistic playhouse which he hopes finally to replace by a magnificent, neo-classic festival theatre from the plans of Poelzig.

Radical

designs, which are as yet largely projects, include those of the distinguished American pioneer architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. Norman-Bel Geddes has devised a remarkable theatre with the stage in one corner, the whole auditorium and playing floor surrounded by a single dome of light. He has also devised a long rectangular playhouse with the action passing on a stage stretching down the middle from end to end, and with the audience on both sides, as well as a circular play house with the stage in the centre, a scheme suggested by Robert Edmond Jones's project for Shelley's The Cenci in a prize ring. Variants on the usual relations of stage and audience are many, including a scheme by Friederich Kiesler for two opposing audi toriums sharing the same stage. One of the most remarkable is Oskar Strnad's circular theatre with the audience seated in the centre and the big ring of the revolving stage coming into view a segment at a time.

Out of all these attempts and projects, a really healthful new theatre is slowly but surely developing. It will not reach its full maturity until actors can enter naturally and easily from the auditorium as well as from the stage and step down from their own level to the level of the spectators. When every division between the world of the actors and the world of the spectators is eliminated, and when those who give and those who receive are —in the spirit of the classic theatre—once more surrounded by the walls of the same room, then and only then will it be pos sible to meet completely all the demands not alone for proper acoustics and proper visibility, but for purely spiritual pleasure achieved without hampering physical effort.