The Theatre : Yesterday and To-day

The Russian Theatre. By ReneFtilop: Miller_ and Joseph.

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wmen of the nations has made the Most important contribu- tion to the art of the theatre since the twentieth century began? Operi the magnificent volume -by Herr Ffilop Miller and Dr. Gregor, who controls the theatrical collections Of the Viennese National Library, and 'you will answer : "Surely, the Rus- sian!"

- This is primarily a picture-book. And its 48 colour plates and 857 half-tones give us, in a swift inspection, a better understanding of tendencies, ways and means in the Russian theatre than could be conveyed by thousands of words in carefully written description.. One looks and learns, and one Is amazed by the fertility of scenic invention displayed here. Then one remembers the near past.

W hat theatrical influence has most sharply Set its mark upon the period, since some of us were very young ? The Russian opera, the Russian ballet, Russian decoration. Have we already forgotten Diaghilev ? Dare we deny that those cushion-covers in the suburbs, that colour-scheme in the Chelsea flat, were supplied, so to say, by him ? A barbaric surface of shrill tones, shrieks in silk, discords in upholstery— Russia, in odd collision with What were once respectable middle-class interiors. From China to Peru, from Boston to Berlin and (a greater distance morally) from St. Petersburg to Leningrad—the ballet !

Yet this ballet was not a new thing. Historically, many of its inventions merely prolonged the old eighteenth-dentury Court entertainments which a Louis-Quatorze Europe bor- rowed from Versailles. An antique pageantry was renovated, and, shall we say, slightly mocked by cosmopolitan decorations? Alongside this Court entertainment (according to Herr Fillop Miller) came, parallel with political movements, ." signs of change ",---of revolution. Came the naturalistic Moscow Art Theatre, .prompting Diaghilev,'s " stylistic" reaction. He, to the Puritans of Bolshevism,, would seem to be providing mere prettiness for the capitalists ! .Sterner things, then— the theatre of Tairov in Moscow ; the ultimate theatre, carrying logic almost to the verge of a visible insanity, in Meierhold's grim clearance of all vanities. These you may study in a series of blankly mechanized scenes, illustrating the Proletarian Theatre. Art is here no facile means of escape from life. It strives to be as" technical " as the factory. . It abolishes the curtain (as did Pirandello in Six Persons), scenery, and all but a wan symbolicalcostume. Constructions of raw material, in lumps and criss-cross lines, wheels and parallelograms and rhomboids, traverse a lividly illuminated space. Here one closes one's eyes in depression. . Will it come to that ? Will Chelsea Ind Bloom- s'hury get caught in the now unreal and obsolete Euclidean propositions ? Must cushions Alum into, cuneiform wedges ? Where are our sheet-iron window hang ings ? Bring out our geysers for our sofas. In a night-, mare we plunge into proletarianism. It is, of course, no more; proletarian, or popular, than Einstein., It is the directive, attempt of the.theorists to match the stage to the times, or, to mock the old times from the new stage. So regarded, it recalls those often-quoted words of our mild, professorial Matthew Arnold: "The theatre is irresistible—organize the theatre!" Undeniably, the lesson has been learned in. Russia. But what the proletariat can apprehend from. Its extremist manifestations, except lunacy, remains a mystery. ; .

' In England we don't bother about organizing art. All our censors and aediles .ca rj hope is that lack of organization and absence of propaganda (as in the cinema) will not, through, freedom, produce a completecorruption of our infantile minds: For, frankly, we are babies in old amuseinents. Turning with a certain sense of relief to the amenities of-Our " marvellous " Mr. Cochran's bright little book on the 'stage,-OneAnds Mr.. James Agate (always free from cant) genially adMitting our. babyhood. A national theatre ? An art theatre? , Would. these in any sense express our national consciousness, or serve; as in the hopes of Moscow, to guide us anywhere or to keep us in any place ?. Can you imagine a Tory Entertainment Palace ; a Liberal Playhouse, with Whig scenery ? You cannot. And:perhaps you are, glad. Instead, as last Saturday, we have our national circus—Wembley for the Cup Final. " Many. thanks. You can have Moscow."

But other, severer critics, asked by Mr. Cochran what they would.do for the theatre in England,- were money, no object,

suggest vast reforms ; and one of them. (Mr. Ivor Brown) wisely remarks that, instead of one solemn, huge, central theatre, we should aim at a series of three. small ones, each recognizable for specialization in types of drama or enter- tainment; one for shows and music—this would be Mr. Cochran's ; one a prose theatre . for realism ; a third, more personal and adventurous, for experiment. . What dreams ! Hireling dramaiists—Shakespeare. again—would be attached to these houses, and the actor, as other critics here remark, must be given economic security and long-period contracts, which.will keep him from the evils of the long-run and the swelled-headed system.

Acting and the actor ! 'What has become of them, in all this ? Where is the actor in Russia ? Probably cowering in some mass-movement of multitudes under a wheel. The " great " actor is, for the moment, invisible. We have great favourites : that is all.

The better, some say, for the drama. For periods of great acting rarely coincide with those of fine playwriting, and your

virtuoso is apt to do little for plays -except adapt and distort

them to his personality. How little original drama there was here in the days of Garrick, Kemble, Mrs..Siddons and Edmund Kean ; or, for that matter, of Irving I How little in France under the sway of Rachel ; in Italy under Salvini, and Ristori I And Eleanora Duse, greatest of those Whom many living

playgoers lovingly remember—what did she do for theatrical movements ind for the stage ? Very little. Unapproachable in her own style, which was a realism that reached the sublime through perfect sincerity and truth, she spent a melancholy life, here tecontited by Herr Rheinhardt, in 'revealing fritg.

merits of her nature, as ina perpetual public confession. Of plays she made a beautiful haVoC ; 'not merging herself in thein

in the 'effort to impersonate, but throwing- theinntrt of balance by living her Part in each of them ; picking Up What- seemed real-to her hi them ; relinquishing the rest'; of Ibsen, indeed, a little ; -Of the florid arid rhetorical D'Annuniio,,fai too Muth.

Her other 'creations were indeed hers net thOSe of the mainly mediocre dramatists she transfigured ; as, for example, she transfigured the archaic Dame sax Camilias, recently revived in London, by making it an, almost intolerably real picture of a suffering woman in love, sacrificed, renouncing hope and life. Who was this woman ? Not Dumas' heroine ; not any dramatist's. She was Eleonora Duse.

Herr Rheinhardt's book, adoringly romantic in tone, obliges us to follow this great artist's greatly advertised love- affairs ; a thing one may beg to-be excused from doing.

Much of it is copied from earlier works. Whole pages come from a certain celebrated study by Count Primo% contributed

to the Revue de Paris many years ago. The rest is an inter- pretation, in the vie romanede or "novel-biography" style, of supposed processes in the actress's mind. These may be as

accurate, as authentic, as the famous passage which was the

only memorable thing in D'Annunzio's Vulgar self-glorifying book Ii Pima', where the melancholy woman—la donna di- sperata—is allowed to tell her fatuous lover the story of her wandering life. There, possibly, we get an image of the real Duse in later life : one to- be corrected, however, by the more

cheerful picture in Luigi Rasi's excellently illustrated reminis- cences of his own stage association with her. To that book, reinforced by Edouard Schneidees account of her last years,

one may prefer to return: Or one may choose, more wisely, to retain only the memory of the Eleonora .Duse one saw finding herself on the stage, Bitterly, f's she seemed, to rebel against it, her work Was evidently the best and happiest p4it of her restless, Unhappy existence.

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