THE THEATRE.
STAGE SETTINGS AND COSTUMal.
A GOOD deal of interest has been aroused by the Architectural Association's Exhibition at Bedford Square of designs for stage
settings and stage costumes. There is, of course, still a school which considers that all time spent on stage decoration is time wasted. Mr. Bridges-Adams, of the Stratford New Shakespeare Company, for example, occasionally professes himself one of these, though whether it is his considered view I do not know. His productions are not at present beautiful, but this may easily be due to outward circumstances and not to an inward conviction, and he may be trying verbally to justify inevitable faults. This anti-dress and anti-decoration school seems to consider that there is only so much energy in every theatrical production, and that what you make on the swings you lose on the roundabouts.
That is to say, the decoration and the acting bear a definite relation to one another ; the more attention is .given to the
decoration the worse the acting will be, and they almost come to regard those who desire beauty in the theatre as spoilt children asking for their toys to be made more and more luxurious. They come in the end almost to take a pride in badly combined colours blended in incorrect historical costume, against a messy, would-be realistic background. I cannot help thinking that all this is a piece of false reasoning. Probably the disciples of this school really do not care two beans what they look at, and, like all human beings, try to rationalize their position by giving excellent reasons why it should not matter, and further, being Englishmen, moralizing their point of view so that the other side may be held to be not only mistaken but wicked. But to meet them on their own ground, in the first place they should remember that most human beings do not really entirely separate them- selves from their clothes. When we put on a dress, we put on a little of its nature. If our appearance in a given dress obviously excites wonder and admiration in other people, we by no means give all the credit to the dress. Our fine feathers really do make Us for the moment finer birds. Now, if this is true of ordinary men and women, how much truer it is reasonable to suppose it must be of actors and actresses I They are not only probably by nature more sensitive to this sort of influence, but they have trained themselves to react to it, and therefore the actor or actress whose entrance makes a little stir of pleasure go round the audience will almost certainly act the better for the fine dress. And as I said in discussing the Shakespearean Festival, the pleasure of the eye is one of the notes which make up the chord whose harmony is the peculiar glory of the theatre, that inter- action of several kinds of excellence. We have got to have bodies and to clothe them, and we have gat to have a stage and some sort of background. For Heaven's sake let what we have be beautiful, which is by no means to say elaborate, as the drawings and models at the Architectural Association's FArhibition proved.
Examples of the work of nearly all of our best theatrical artists were to be seen there. Mr. Lovat Fraser was repre- sented by a model setting for La Serva Pedrosa, and some of The Beggar's Opera dress designs ; Mr. Hugo Rumbold showed designs for dresses for Patience ; Mr. Albert Rutherston was represented by dress designs for Pavlova, one an Amazon and one a Doll ; Mr. Benda showed designs of Egyptian dresses for The Naughty Princess; Mr. George Sheringham had dress designs for The Swinburne Ballet and The Sneezing Charm, with neither of which productions was I familiar. There was one amusing model, too, which the young architects who are students at the school had made as a sort of joke. It was a Georgian interior of brown wood with a great four-poster bed in the middle and delightful little silhouette figures of old ladies in powdered hair and orange and old gentlemen in wigs and scarlet. Mr. Rutherston's power of drawing seemed particularly remarkable in this milieu, for many of these drawings, including even Mr. Lovat Fraser's, showed invention rather than executive skill. Mr. Hugo Rumbold's Patience dresses are most amusing, treating the bust, the forward-tilted hat, and the incredibly complicated and abominable draperies of 1880 with both humour and. charm. Mr. Benda's Egyptian dresses are very rich and beautiful, but do not seem to indicate very much taste for archaeology; this may be a good thing.
A good many of the smaller drawings were the work of students of the Architectural Association. Much of their work seemed to me very promising, particularly perhaps that of Mr. A. W. G. Brodie, who showed an admirable poster for the Grand GuignoL It represented a livid green gentleman, with hair awry and shirt front in a tumult, staring before him with a look of fixed horror.
I wish that there had been more models or that the sketches for stage setting had been rather more convincing. A good many of them appeared to me merely water colours, and to my inexpert eye, at any rate, gave no indication of how they could actually be carried out on the stage. Where models were shown it seemed to me that quickness and ease in changing sets and simplicity generally had not always been considered, except, of course, by Mr. Lovat Fraser, whose ingenious Beggar's Opera arrangement of arches and back-cloths solved so many problems. I de hope that these practical points are to have due consideration at the hands of "the coming young men," for long waits and long bills seem at the moment the worst
enemies of good stage decoration. TARN.
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