CONTINENTAL' STAGECRAFT.*
• Continental Stagecraft. By Kenneth }McGowan and Robert Edmond Jones.
liondon: Benn Bros.. Ltd. . [26s. net.). .
THOUGH such theatrical experts as Mr. Granville Barker and Mr. Gordon Craig have lately written about their profession,
I have yet no hesitation in saying that the new book by two young American critics, Continental Stagecraft, will prove the most important book on the theatre that has been published for several years. It is full of faults. It is sprawling and romantic. Its authors seem unaware of some large and interesting aspects of the stage. I mean that the book leaves the impression that the authors would be incapable of appreci- ating the art of Racine, nearly incapable of appreciating Ibsen, and quite incapable of seeing through a revue's disarming mask of frivolity.
They are earnest. The eighteenth century would have called them " enthusiasts." They have found a panacea, and they are obsessed. But when we have said this we have said all. Within the very definite limits of what they are capable of enjoying and appreciating their taste is admirable, and both discerning and distinguishing. They can admire intensely the art of men like Jessner, Reinhardt and Craig. They are sensitive to many kinds of acting and, within their prescribed area, to more than one sort of dramatic excellence. Their work is fresh, markedly so in the English sense, and a little, I think, in the American sense. For example, there is a sentence in the Prefatory Note which I see has annoyed a many of my fellow reviewers :-
" For the purpose of this book our journey excluded England, because observation and reliable report showed little there that was not a faint echo of what was to be found on the Continent."
This declaration of independence, however, is followed by not one, but by several descriptions of settings for Shakes- peare's or Bernard Shaw's plays, many of them designed by Mr. Gordon Craig. We are not snubbed.
Otherwise, however, the book, though extremely critical, is hardly at all contentious, but is full of solid information about what can be done and what is being done. New theatres are being built in London, the new spirit is touching not merely the choicer spirits, the Basil Deans, the Playfairs, • the Granville Barkers; who have always been among the children of light, but is even beginning to penetrate the commercial theatre. I do hope that the more commercial managers will see their way to smoke one or two of those long cigars over this book—those cigars without which we of the public can hardly imagine the director of a commercial theatre.
For English people, the most topical part of the book is, perhaps, that which deals with the work of the two theatre artists,' Schwabe and Hasait, and which gives the history and outlines the possibilities of the lighting system that Londoner? will now have an opportunity of seeing at the St. Martin's Theatre (the reader will find this discussed on page 446).
There is one misconception which this book will help to cleat away. It is one which has done a great deal to put obstacles in the path of the modernization of the theatre in England. It first got abroad through the indiscreet writing of Mr. Gordon Craig. It is the notion that modernism in the theatre is the enemy of the art of acting. One or two people have written to this paper to object to a somewhat bitter remark as to Mr. Gordon Craig's prose style which was made in the column signed each week by the Literary Editor. The phrase objected to was an allusion to " Mr. Craig's deplorable prose style." Mr. Craig's style is deplorable because it is not a clear medium. He is, for example, not in reality the enemy, but the ally of the actor, but one could not guess so from his writing. Written words are notoriously headstrong. It is his technical difficulty with his prose style which makes him seem endlessly polemical and his enthusiastic way of writing that has led him to take up the position of the actors' enemy. He is nothing of the sort, and neither is the modern movement. And in this connexion I would particularly recommend Continental Stagecraft. A candid reading of the book will, I think, convince the reader that in none of its very diverse developments is the modern theatrical spirit, with its glorifica- tion of the scenic artist, the enemy of the actor.
The designer, of scenery who intrudes himself when the whole field should be given to the playei to express his or her personality is a bad scenic artist. If Mr. Gordon Craig or M. Reinhardt or M. Appia for a moment muffled the golden voice of a Sarah Bernhardt, a Duse, a Siddons or a Garrick, they would be as much in the wrong as was the traditional school of decor when Sir Herbert Tree and Crununles absurdly dis- tracted the audience with real rabbits or a practicable pump. It cannot be too often reiterated that the good decor artist uses negation (the absence even of beauty) as consciously, as necessarily, as the architect uses voids as well as solids, as the musician uses pauses as well as notes. All art is a process of selection, of isolation, and it is only sham artists who do not know when to stop. Of course, a decor artist who shouted ortissimo all the time would be an intolerable bore. The moderns would agree to this as readily as the traditionalists. I think that those enthusiasts, and there are many, who say " No, let our scenery and dress be ugly that the light of the actor may shine the brighter," are making two mistakes, one emotional, one intellectual. The first mistake comes from association. They have seen, say, Sarah Bernhardt act divinely with abominable scenery. Bad scenery, therefore, quite fortuitously," tastes " to them of good acting. The second mistake is one which the taste of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has made in almost every aesthetic field. The world suddenly lost the power of seeing things as a whole. A flower is not really more beautiful for growing in a dustheap. Let us say that the art of the actor is the flower of the art of the theatre—that it gives in quintessence the whole message of the theatre rather as the sculpture and ornaments on a fine building express the general message of the building—to take a literary metaphor—in compact lyric form. It was the mistake of the epoch through which we have just passed to suppose that the ornaments would look more beautiful if the building, the square, the city, the countryside, which were its environment, were bad, or at best insignificant. But we are learning that the effects which can be produced by the flower on the dustheap, the actor in the bad theatre, the beautiful picture in the ugly room, the fine statue on the ugly façade, are limited and precarious. But I am outrunning my limits ; this is a review of a book, not a general dissertation on the art of the theatre; perhaps the most fascinating of the arts to discuss because it is the most complicated.
I thoroughly recommend Continental Stagecraft, not merely for those who are " interested in the theatre," but to playgoers. It is a book which will greatly intensify the pleasure of any reasonably intelligent person in going to the theatre.
TARN.
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