Beauty's Disguises
Robes of Thespis. Costume Designs by Modern Artists. Edited for George Mason by George Sheringham and R. Boyd Morison. (E. Benn. £8 8s.) SINCE Eve clad herself in a green garland and passed the guarded gates to sing the songs of Paradise in harsher
meadows, the more civilized of her children have made of their raiment a reticence and an expression, an ambiguity to match the mystery of language. If the rigours of climate had not insisted on clothes, the growing aesthetic need would have woven them, for both soul and sense appreciate the disguise of garments. Even in- Greece, while men delighted their eyes with naked beauty in the palaestra, the supreme religious rite of its greatest city was the presentation- of the Panathenaic veil.
Out of the Dionysiac festival grew the Greek drama of gods, demi-gods, and heroes ; and the masked figures moved hieratically, raised to more than human height, through the fixed pattern of the traditional story. Out of the Easter ritual in the choir, performed by priests and acolytes in symbolic stoles, arose the mediaeval drama. Whatever secular and realistic forces seized and altered them, there
is still something sacerdotal about the Robes of Thespis., Mr. Gordon' Craig's design on the cover of the sumptuous miscellany bearing this name shows a masked figure wrapt in curving wings and Coifed with plumage mystic as that of the Egyptian ibis. It is a sharp reminder that the stage has something divine in its figuration of agony and mirth, and that its mimes are not habited for their own vanity, but for a high ceremonial.
In the great poetic drama, indeed, the eyes of the spectator desire to harmonize the lines and colours of the miming figures, not only with the scenic background but with the passionate rhythms of their speech -and the intention of their gestures. For coldur has its inaudible music, pattern
fits with pattern, and the folds of an actress's robe may. Move the soul like the cadenced drapery of the Three Fatesi of the Parthenon. A horned head-dress may be an incanta-
tion ; and the decoration of a sandal evoke all the hyacinths of Hellas. No 'visible object in the setting is trivial. Dress has been fashioned by the psychology of time and plaCe as well as architecture, philosophy, and literature ; with architecture, indeed, it is always in close correspondence. Can you relish the wild and witty fables of Restoration comedy if the gallants are not clothed in the extravagant and seducing costume of their time ? Exaggerate the period note, if anything. Surely the monstrous .structure of Macheath's wig in The Beggar's Opera lifts him into an absurdity of myth, the Zeus of a Newgate world, whose amours are natural as well as amusing. And, to return to the great poetic drama, a Renaissance prince speaking with Renaissance pride and melancholy is only an offence in the garments of a golfer.
Not that even the arrogant Renaissance thought its own, fashions, superb as they were, of a fantasy fine enough for their masques and shows. Leonardo had to draw for the Milanese courtiers yet more romantically flying sleeves, yet more embroidered armour, when they deliberately became part of a spectacle. Shakespeare, in his poor Elizabethan playhouse, had to say " Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts," and provide his colours and shapes in evocative words. But that he would have welcomed 'C. R. Ricketts, Gordon Craig, Granville Barker, Albert Rutherston,, Lovat Fraser, and the other artists who have imagined beauty for his scene I do not doubt for a moment.
Scenic design, of which costume is essentially a part, has developed into a great modern art. The quickening of the historic sense, become not only more sensitive but more sensuous in its deliberate commingling of periods and places, has wrought upon the theatrical vision. Greek vases, Tanagra figurines, Mycenaean gold, Cretan fashions, mediaeval missals, Chinese painting, Persian manuscripts, Arabian Nights, Libyan images, Egyptian tombs yield their effects to the imaginative greed of the designers. The influence of the Russian Ballet, of Diaghileff and Bakst, has been both intoxicating and disintegrating. With soft thunders of colour and wild cymbals of sound compassing the incom- parable figure of Nijinsky, it stormed the eyes of Western Europe. Leon Bakst is naturally mentioned more than once in the pages of the Robes of Thespis, both with depreca- tion and with enthusiasm. When he married India with Olympos, archaic Greece with the Arabian Nights, a scent as sinister as the odour of blood stole through the marvel of exotic beauty. Yet there is also the " White Bakst," evoking the spring-like friezes of " Narcissus." Reinhardt and all his assistants, like Ernst Stern, have performed mighty works in production. - But a too unappreciative England might claim thatGordon. Craig began hii original work in stage design before them all. He who most of all insists on unity of costume and setting has indeed composed stage pictures so coMPlete that the only actors seem to be Light;- Shadow; and. Silence. How could a Lady Macbeth be visible otherwise .than :as -a mote on these solemnities of -winding stairs, under these rearing perpen- diculars of Mycenaean _keep ? Yet he will draw you a strange feathered creature,: a bird of doom ..from Hamlet, his notion of costume for that ttagedY, You find it in the Robes of Thespis, which splendidly reprodtices the wdrk of all those artists who are lending their imagination and their skill to the theatre. Among se Many heautiful images it is hard to distinguish. But it is with peculiar zest that once more we hail the name of the Lyric Theatre, that fountain of pure joy unsealed for. London by its vivacious benefactor, Mr. Nigel Playfair. The pure colours and hard audacious, lines of Lovat Fraser triumphant in 'The Beggar's Opera, the brilliant comprehension of _ Doris Zinkeisen "radiantly-- attiring the incomparable Millamant, the romantic grace of George Sheringham turning The Duenna into • a dream of May and Seville, coloured like green leaYes, young"roses, violets and golden buds, are all among its enchantments. C. R. Ricketts's .wonderful stage pictures in the colours of the kingfisher, so imaginative that they interpenetrate with poetic suggestion even a play in definite prose, are here represented by such figures as that of his noble Doge. Dulac's Mycenaean dancer,. SehYrabe's impressive Tybalt and graciously vestured Juliet, barbarie wild figures by
Paul Shelving, Norman Wilkinson's " Jessamy mention only to show the variety of the designs. Let me but refer to the fascinating beauty of Oliver Messel's masks. They are startling things. As to the prose, it is amusing and
instructive. It is written by specialists like Lennox Robinson, Francis Kelly, Sir -Barry Jackson, Nigel .Playfair, Charles at"-Qyril -1;leahniont ; *and -Max Bccrliohlt: with pen - and penclil delightedly and dekghtfully
duces it.
I have kept Mr. Albert Rutherston to the end because his place in Robes cif Thespis is emphasized by the presence of his Sixteen Designs:- -It is=charming to- see how- this highly individual artist, painting on silk with washes of pale colour, charging a fan with" lying nymphs, brinks .his bright bouquets of columbine-like people to the large composition of the stage. Like Watteau, like Longhi, like Conder, he busies himself usually with the projection of the elegant ,narcissicism of the privileged ; and the slim short-tressed girls of to-day are etherialized into an aery harlcquinade. TheSe designs apply to The Winter's- Tale and Le Revell de- Flore. The Shakespearean play has the fairy tale atmosphere in which Mr. Rutherston's flowery and elvish fancy is at home. The " Hermione " is a gracious statuette. But Pavlova's ballet evokes the subtleties othis art: ,Greekish as `.` Daphnis and Chloe " is ..Greekish, -Botticellian a little, graieful to the point of mievrerie, the figures surprise and insinuate. Perhaps the most attractive is that of Eros, rather like a winged Tanagra Love, but coloured like a daisy. " Fiore " in her simple sprigged gown captivates in a naive angular attitude. This is an art at once candid and sophisticated ; it is as engaging as a child that confides a secret.
With all this genius engaged upon the decor vivant -of the stage, it is necessary to remember firmly that the play really is the thing. Visible beauty here lies waiting for a new poetic drama, a beauty .too strange and imfeeted. to serve our drawing-room comedies - and crook sensations.
RACHEL ANNAND TAYLOR.
Previous page
