The Modern Era III: Independent Theatre Movement, Designers Appia & Craig

The theatres in which this shocking new modern drama began to be played certainly could not be performed at the large legitimate houses. No money would be made, and anyway, the censors would never allow them to be performed. So, small theatres began to be formed throughout Europe and Great Britain, theatres that sold subscriptions. This made them a sort of private club, for members only, which served to keep the censors away. These theatres and the new works they performed have been dubbed by historians the Independent Theatre Movement.

      

We’ve already talked about the first of these -- Andre Antoine’s vitally important and influential Théâtre Libre, in Paris, begun in 1887.  By the time Antoine left this theatre in 1894, he had presented 184 new French or foreign plays.  He also introduced the idea of this sort of theatre to other like-minded people in countries throughout Europe. 

Germany got its first “independent” theatre in 1889, when a group of Berliners led by Otto Brahm formed the Freie Bühne (Free Stage) in the spirit of Antoine’s Théâtre Libre.  The Freie Bühne opened with Ghosts, and performed on Sunday afternoons only, by professional actors on their day off.  This theatre produced some of the finest examples of the new drama, but interestingly featured only 

one important new German playwright.  Gerhardt Hauptmann (1862-1946) was his name, and several of his plays remain in the German and European repertoire today, particularly The Weavers, about desperate workers driven to revolt against their corrupt bosses.  It’s particularly famous for its use of a group protagonist, similar to Fuenteovejuna. The Freie Bühne inspired other independent theatres in Germany, and the demand for new, exciting plays produced new playwrights.          

Shortly after the Freie Bühne opened, England modeled a theatre on both these predecessors, called The Independent Theatre, which opened in 1891 with Ibsen’s ubiquitous Ghosts.  In spite of its subscription-based, censorship-free status, the production of this play caused a furor in London.  The Independent Theatre remained open until 1897, but its artistic director, a Dutchman named J.T. Grein, had trouble finding new English plays, and produced primarily foreign pieces.  The greatest achievement of the Independent Theatre, however, was that it decided to produce a play called Widowers’ Houses in 1892, and so launched the theatrical career of George Bernard Shaw.

Another important British independent theatre was the Court Theatre (now the Royal Court, still very famous, still producing new, cutting edge drama) in London, where the multifaceted actor/director/ playwright Harley Granville Barker, presented many of Shaw’s plays for the first time, 

between 1904 and 1907.   Along with partner J.E. Vedrenne, Granville Barker ran the theatre, directed many of the plays there, occasionally acted in them, and wrote several of his own, including The Voysey Inheritance (1903-05), Waste (1906-07), and The Madras House (1909).  Granville Barker is also known for his Prefaces to Shakespeare, which make thoughtful reading for any director who undertakes a Shakespearean production.  He radically 

changed the style of staging Shakespeare as well, in stark, modernist productions of, among several other plays, Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Ignored for decades, Granville Barker’s own plays are now being regularly revived, especially in England, Canada (primarily and in grand style at the Shaw Festival) and in the U.S.  I recently saw a terrific production of Waste at the American Place Theatre -- a play about a man with a great political future, who makes the mistake of sleeping with a young woman -- topical!

A mightily important event for theatre in the twentieth century was a lunch at the Slaviansky Bazaar in Moscow, in 

which two men, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko (1858-1943) and Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938), ate and drank and mainly talked for 17 hours.  During this time they concocted a plan for a new theatre, similar to the independent theatres that had been forming throughout Europe, but different in that this one was fully professional and open to the public -- The Moscow Art Theatre (MKhAT).  Their first season was 1898, and their greatest hit of that season (the play in fact which allowed the theatre to survive) was a play that had 

failed miserably at its 1896 production in St. Petersburg.   Stanislavsky’s fresh approach to acting, and a real understanding of the complex characters in the play made The Seagull (1896) the first of one of the great theatrical collabora-tions in history -- Stanislavsky and Nemirovich Danchenko’s MKhAT and Chekhov. By the way, I should point out that, like many theatrical collaborations, the partners didn’t always get along -- Chekhov hated the way Stanislavsky interpreted his plays, and after a time Stanislavsky and Nemirovich Danchenko came to loathe each other.

We’ve examined some of the early writers of the modern era, and at the independent theatres in which their work was produced.  Equally important are some of those other theatre 

artists who took the modern drama from the page to the stage. To begin we have to look back to Germany in the 1860s and 70s, specifically to Richard Wagner, who, as well as being the great operatic composer of the Ring cycle, was a theorist on drama.  In his work Wagner saw the greatest theatre as that which combined music and drama about mythic, ideal worlds.  Ideally, productions of 

such plays with music would be controlled by the author-composer, resulting in a gesamtkunstwerk -- a master work of art. Wagner even created a theatre (built 1872-76) at Bayreuth in Northern Bavaria to house his work, and although it utilized standard staging procedures of the mid to late nineteenth century, its auditorium was “classless.”  By this I mean that Wagner rejected the old pit, box, and gallery

system for a democratic fan-shaped auditorium with long rows undivided by a center aisle.  At the end of each row on either side of the auditorium was an exit.  Wagner hid the orchestra completely from view (in a “pit”) and completely darkened the auditorium (one of the first examples of this in theatre history) creating a “mystic chasm” between the real world of the audience and the ideal world of the stage.

      

Wagner’s gesamtkunstwerk demanded a single controlling force -- a director.  In another part of Germany, in the Duchy of Saxe-Meiningen, a company of players, the Meiningen players (also referred to as the “Meininger”), was formed in 

the 1860s that was important for a number of reasons, but perhaps most importantly for its strong central director, who assumed total control over all elements of production.  This was relatively easy at this particular theatre, as the director was also -- the duke!

      

In truth, the duke left most of the day-to-day directing duties to Ludwig Chronegk, and much of the business matters of the theatre to manager Ellen Franz.  By establishing this arrangement the duke, Chronegk, and Franz formed a pattern of leadership that is not dissimilar to many of today’s non-profit theatres in America. 

      

The innovations made by the Meininger included rehearsing for as long as necessary to prepare the production completely -- a luxury most theatres these days cannot afford.  The set was ready by the first rehearsal, as were the costumes, so that actors worked from day one on full sets and in costumes. These sets and costumes were highly realistic. The company was perhaps best known for its ensemble performing, which was insisted on by the duke.  Their crowd scenes were said to be especially impressive, and tremendously realistic.  Among the Meininger there were no stars. If you played the lead one night, you played a supporting role the next.  This was a brand new approach, when the commercial theatre of the era that insisted on “lines of business” for actors.

      

None of these wonderful innovations would have meant much had the Meininger stayed at home. Few except for the duke’s guests would ever have seen them!  But the duke was very proud of his players, and toured them all over Europe, where they were seen by theatre folk interested in experimentation who created independent theatres. The Meiningen company was the model for many of them.  When the Meininger went to Russia, for example, Konstantin Stanislavsky saw them, admired their work and learned from it.

     

Two of the strongest forces in the modern movement were the designers/theorists Appia and Craig.  One of the most obvious changes in modernism was visual.  From the seventeenth century pictorial illusion was the norm on stage, and in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries this illusion became increasingly accurate and realistic.

      

Adolphe Appia (1862-1928) turned the entire theory of pictorial illusion on its ear in his experiments with scenic art. 

He did so using primarily Wagner’s operas in his design work.  Appia wrote about the forest scene in Wagner’s Siegfried:  “We must no longer try to create the illusion of a forest; but instead the illusion of a man in the atmosphere of a forest.” While few people involved in mainstream theatre of the day agreed with Appia, GB Shaw, a supporter of the designer’s innovative notions, critiqued a particularly egregious example of over-realistic settings to similar, if wittier effect, when he wrote the following about Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s production of Midsummer Night’s Dream, which featured tremendously accurate forest settings, including live rabbits (!): “You can’t see the Shakespeare wood for the Beerbohm Trees”!)

      

Appia replaced realistic settings painted on wings with 3 dimensional units -- steps, ramps, platforms -- and emphasized the role of light in fusing all the visual elements into a unified whole.  Rather than literal depictions of a scene, he advocated “suggestion” as the key to visualizing a scene.  As for the paramount importance of light in Appia’s 

new scheme for stage design, here’s what he wrote:

“Lighting is an element in itself whose effects are limitless; set free, it becomes for us what his palette is for the painter...we can achieve infinite modulations...No longer does the actor walk in front of painted shadows and highlights; he is plunged into an atmosphere that is uniquely his own.”

Appia saw how lighting could work with the music to enhance the emotional effect of an opera on an audience:

[the audience] needs to get through its eyes a kind of impression which, up to a given point, can equal the unexampled emotional power of the score.  Light is the only medium which can continuously create this impression and its use is motivated and justified by the score itself.” (Appia, Ideas on the Reform of Our Mise en Scene)

Here’s how it worked in the last scene of Wagner’s Tristan 

and Isolde, via Appia’s design:

As the curtain rises Tristan lies in shadow.  He is dying.  The sunlight, becoming more and more golden, filters through the branches of the great tree and strikes the ground near his feet.  Then slowly, it begins to flow over his body, until, when Isolde comes to him, it sheds its radiance over both of them.  As the Liebestod is sung, the golden light has psssed beyond the dead Tristan. “The light fades little by little, until the scene is enveloped in a darkening twilight.”

Appia, a Swiss citizen working primarily in Basel and Milan Italy, created only a few actual, working designs for theatres in both, but crafted many theoretical drawings. He is the great theoretician of modern design.

      

More at home in the working world of theatre was Edward Gordon Craig, who publicized Appia’s theories and used 

Appia as a starting point.  From Appia’s theories Caig crafted actual settings all over Europe, and also began to create theories of his own, theories more radical than his mentor’s.  Not only did Craig, for example, advocate the cause of the director in artistic control of a production, he insisted on it, saying, “It is impossible for a work of art ever to be produced where more than one brain is permitted to direct.” For Craig, the ideal actor was an übermarionette, or super puppet, agile in body, supple in voice, egoless, able to carry out director’s choices to the letter. 

     

In every possible way, Craig sought to express the inner spirit of the drama.  For example, if a director’s concept of Hamlet was that of a lonely man in a dark place, Craig insisted that the design elements suggest that concept.  The idea of design supporting the director’s concept is artistically sound, and important for all later theatre.  Craig also hammered home the the importance of suggestion versus the literal on stage, to the point that, by the early twentieth century, the suggestion of place finally displaced the pictorial illusion which strove for exact reality:

By means of suggestion you may bring on the stage a sense of all things -- the rain, the sun, the wind, the snow, the hail, the intense heat -- but you will never bring them there by attempting to wrestle and close with Nature in order so that you may seize some of her treasure and lay it before the eyes of the multitude. Actuality, accuracy of detail, is useless upon the stage.

      

Appia and Craig’s suggested spaces (as opposed to realistically depicted spaces) in theatre settings helped to open the door to kinds of plays that are non-, even anti-realistic.  Next time we'll look at these anti-realistic movements in the modern revolution.