The Modern Theatre
The New Movement in the Theatre. By Leon Moussinue. (B. T. Batsford. 10 guineas.)
'rim huge volume, from the standpoint of book-production, is a miracle of magnificence. It is no handy reference book for Bloomsbury garrets or the stage manager's library in small repertory theatres. No one, however, can say it is not value for money. The hundreds of lovely plates in colour and photogravure drawn from all Europe and America are of an unbelievable sumptuousness, and I cannot help feeling that in this case Mr. Batsford is a philanthropist rather than a publisher.
Apart from little freshets of Jean Cocteau and others, which bubble out among the plates, two rivulets of com- mentary trickle through this magnificent scenery—a foreword by Gordon Craig, and an introduction by R. H. Packman. For Mr. Craig's writings on the theatre I must confess I have long ceased to have that exaggerated respect which I paid to his preaching when it still looked possible that he would give us an ounce of practice. His foreword does little more than repeat his plea for that importance of the designer in the theatre, which the designer has long been enjoying while Mr. Craig was bombinating in the wilderness about his wrongs, and he again casts the usual undocumented aspersions on the intelligence and capacity of actors, producers, managers or anyone faced with a job of carrying the designer's beautiful dreams into actuality.
Mr. Packman strikes a more original note by emphasizing the influence of modern political and social thought on the arts, particularly so social an art as the drama, and some of his words are well worth weighing.
He is right in suggesting that the need for economy was one of the original spring-boards from which some of the Central European and Russian designers attained new ideas of simplification and stylization. Is he right in suggesting that the modernist methods are particularly adapted to the untutored masses ? Ruthless stylization demands an eye and an intelligence already trained to a considerable degree in the appreciation of its earlier phases. I have studied the modernists with the greatest interest, yet I find it difficult, when I see a bunch of barbed wire on one side of the stage, a kitchen chair on the other and a clothes-line somewhere between the two, to realize that this decor either presents or represents or expresses or symbolizes the Palace of the Tsar and the mood of the actor and the reaction of the audience at the same time.
Many of the designs included do not represent the new movement at all. The new movement in the theatre is back to sanity, and this development the compiler ignores or despises. Much of the so-called expressionist drama is old- fashioned, and when Meyerhold, whose work is highly lauded in the book, brought his bag of tricks to Berlin, the Germans found he was doing what they had gone through and given up some time before.
Actually, some of the finest illustrations are from the older Russian ballet, yet in the text we find a scornful reference to " Diaghilev's decorative trivialities ! "
Typically, again, the English theatre is " represented " by only four examples, The Beggar's Opera, the Gate Theatre's Revolt in the Reformatory, the Festival Theatre's Henry 1'111, and a projected setting by Paul Nash for King Lear which has never yet been seen on the stage. There are several " projects " and " suggestions " for designs in the book.
In this book, where one is able to compare the original design with a photograph of the final result on the stage, the comparison is illuminating—and depressing.
There are many beautiful drawings here of costumes conceived as hanging on the human frame when it is either entirely. static or moving only in a limited series of highly artificial poses. The " intellectuals " want a dehumanized theatre to suit a dehumanized world. Emphasis is constantly laid by Craig and his choir on the preferability of the marionette theatre to the theatre of living actors. Why ? Because the autocrat-designer-producer of the Craig theatre does not want any exercise of independent intelligence or emotion to complicate his task, and because the movements of marionettes can be arbitrarily controlled and limited to their place in the diagram.
Those of us who are working in the English theatre can view with detached interest this ideal of a designer-controlled theatre, in which marionettes act stylized plays for mass- minds. And if we published our own book on the same lavish scale we should not omit Oliver Messel, Doris Zinkeisen, Paul Shelving, Norman Wilkinson, George Sberingharn, Aubrey Hammond, G. E. - Calthrop, E. McKnight Kauffer, Laurence Irving and half a dozen more who without attach- ment to any narrow theory are creating apt beauty in the practical theatre.
But the more I read of critics who deplore the backward state of the theatre the more I am assured that their only test of greatness in the theatre is freedom from the contamination of working in one.
C. B. COCHRAN.
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