Theatre in Europe between World War I & World War II - I: France and Germany

The brutal fact of the Great War, the first WORLD War (as it came to be called after the second), the “war to end all wars,” was impossible to ignore in Europe, whose every wheat field had been turned into trenches, whose beautiful villages and towns were damaged by artillery, and whose people lost approximately half a generation of young men.  According to one historian, 8,300,000 people died and $337 billion dollars was spent on this first disaster of twentieth century proportions.

Artists who had already begun to experiment in the modern mode were forced to ask increasingly difficult questions.  How could the century of the most advanced science and technology in history also wreak the most havoc and destruction?  Artists began to reflect on what had become an increasingly distorted mirror, a world that seemed to have gone mad.  Postwar theatrical movements sought to investigate the era in which they lived. Their experiments were disturbing and shocking, but these avant-garde movements vitally influenced later theatre, mainstream as well as experimental. Paris, which had been established as the hub of the artistic avant-garde experience before the Great War, remained the nucleus of experimentation just after the war as well.  

The next theatrical movements we’re going to examine are disturbing, shocking, and do not flow in the “mainstream” of theatre in their time.  Each of these movements, however, sought to investigate the era in which they lived, and all of them investigated it much more closely than the mainstream theatre, which usually sought to escape the burning questions asked by the theatrical avant-garde. Perhaps most importantly these movements reflected what seemed to be the new world order -- DISorder!

Futurist art - cute

      

Futurist art  - not so cute

One of the earliest of these -isms actually had its start before the war. Futurism was first defined by F.T. Marinetti (an 

Italian writing in Paris) in his 1909 manifesto that founded the movement.  Futurism glorified the energy, speed, and power of the machine age.  This seems reasonable enough, in that astonishing new machines were being constantly created, and in many futurist works of art the feeling of celebration is apparent, as well as good humor about the new machine age.  One theatrical way of expressing

this celebration of speed and power was in the shortest possible playlets, called sintesi (synthetic plays). A typical one is called Detonation, and it takes as long to play as it takes a bullet to detonate! In glorifying the new, however, the movement also rejected the past.  Marinetti called for libraries and museums destroyed, and of course traditional theatres as well.  In place of the theatres came an early form of performance art -- evenings of variety entertainments in cafes and cabarets, calculated to disturb and to provoke audiences. 

A form of futurism, much diluted, is still with us

   

Futurism was adopted throughout Europe.  In Russia in the early teens Victory Over the Sun, a concoction by several collaborators, featured machine-like characters in a geometric, abstract setting with music that jarred in its dissonance.

      

Italian Futurists glorified WAR as the supreme example of the new energy. The movement became very popular among the Fascists in Italy after the war, when Enrico Prampolini wrote futurist pieces such as The Merchant of Hearts (1927).  Mussolini thought futurism the perfect art form to define his new fascist state, and Marinetti wrote a pamphlet connecting the two called Futurismo e Fascismo.  The movement ultimately fell apart, but it strongly influenced later playwrights, including Pirandello and Beckett, and many of its tenets were picked up in the radical theatre movements of the 1960s.  At its best futurism attempted to rescue theatre from being a polite museum-style entertainment.  It confronted and interacted with its audiences. Its anti-literary bias fit in with those (and there were many) who argued that in the twentieth century language had broken down and could no longer really communicate.

      

The Futurists were one of many early twentieth century -isms that may at times seem to merge into one as we discuss them.  There are differences between these -isms (often fought over vehemently by practitioners) but often one -ism comes from an earlier -ism, or breaks from an earlier -ism, and becomes a variation on the theme.  Dada, for example, is very important in itself, but also as the progenitor of surrealism. 

Dada was founded in neutral Switzerland in 1916.  Here a number of artists and political dissenters from throughout Europe gathered during the war.  Among the major figures in 

Dada were Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, and Richard Huelsenbeck, but the acknowledged leader of the movement was Tristan Tzara, who arranged evenings of Dada performance and wrote no less than seven manifestos on Dada between 1916 and 1920, mostly at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich.  He also wrote rather strange Dada plays such as The Gas Heart. In Dada, the world’s true state (embodied in the first World War) seemed to be insanity.  How do you mirror 

this?  Well, to begin with, replace logic and reason with discord and chaos.  Tzara said, “There is a great negative work of destruction to be accomplished.  We must sweep and clean.”  As had the futurists, dada rejected the old institutions -- art, religion, etc.  In a Dada evening performers recited wordless poems!  And when they used words they used them in random order, or backwards.  Short playlets 

and dances were also performed, often several at once.  Often the audience, even the “hip” crowd that this avant-garde form attracted, would begin to scream at the performers, and the evening would end just as the Dadaists wanted it to -- in chaos.  The movement achieved some popularity in Germany, and it received its greatest support in Paris after the war, but it also petered out there after 1920.  It really had nowhere to go, as it dealt exclusively with sweeping out the old.  Elements of Dada were resurrected in the 1960s, but its rejection of “civilized” values and its crazy experiments became absorbed into other movements between the wars, most notably surrealism.

       

Andre Breton wrote the first surrealist manifesto in 1924; however, as far back as Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, elements of 
what would become surrealism were being used in the theatre.  Surrealism, according to Breton, sought to produce “an absence of all control exercised by reason and outside of all esthetic or moral preoccupation.”  Artistic “truth,” for Breton and other surrealists, was best represented by the subconscious mind in a dreamlike state.

      

How do you produce this on a stage?   Well, Guillaume Apollinaire, one of the earliest surrealists, who practiced well before Breton wrote the first manifesto of the movement,

wrote poetry in the surrealist mode, and also wrote a play called The Breasts of Tiresias (first written 1903, revised and produced in 1917), which was actually subtitled “un drame surréaliste.”  The play is about Thérèse, who refuses to have children, and, after releasing her breasts (balloons which float away), is transformed into Tiresias.  As Thérèse has abdicated her natural function, her husband is forced to begin producing babies on his own, which he discovers he’s able to do, by sheer will power!  In fact his will power is strong, as he becomes the parent of 40,000!    
 

      

There were barely a dozen surrealist theatre performances, but, like The Breasts of Tiresias, these few plays were highly influential on later theatre and other arts.  A surrealist 

performance piece called Parade, with music by Eric Satie, sets by Picasso, book by Jean Cocteau, and produced by Diaghilev and members of the Ballets Russes in 1917, was at least as important as Apollinaire’s play.   Cocteau, in fact became one of the greatest writers of the surrealist movement.  His Marriage on the Eiffel Tower (or The Married Couple -- Les Maries -- on the Eiffel Tower) (1921) is a dance with dialogue, the narration provided by two actors costumed as phonographs.  Jean Cocteau also wrote

surrealist versions of classics, including Antigone (1922) and Orpheus (1926).  Perhaps the best way to get a feeling for his work is to see his film versions of Orpheus (1950) -- in which death is a sexy woman who rides a big black motorcycle from hell; or even better La Belle et La Bete (1945), his absolutely gorgeous take on the relatively surrealistic fairy tale.

      

Breton issued a second surrealist manifesto in 1929 after he had joined the communist party and had become “politicized” -- even before this there was much dissent within the movement and it fell apart in the 1930s.   

      

One of those members of the surrealist group that Breton expelled for not towing the party line was Antonin Artaud.  Artaud became one of the most important French avant-gardists (at least to future generations) working between the 

wars.  He began as a surrealist, but formed his own theatre, aptly named the Theatre Alfred Jarry (for the author of the outrageous Ubu Roi), in 1926.  Here Artaud began the practices that would later define Theatre of Cruelty.  He suggested that a model for what theatre should do was a police raid on a brothel. The police flushed out the prostitutes, and the theatre needed to perform a similar “flushing out” action.  Such a theatre, Artaud argued, would have the ability to “drain our abscesses collectively,” and would force the audience to confront itself.  Artaud advocated attacking the senses of the audience by using light that would vibrate and blind, sound that was shrill and shocking, even smells throughout the performance space.  By these means Artaud hoped to show that we had lost the spiritual dimension in civilization, and that we were mired in the excrement of our own making.

      

In 1935 Artaud established a second theatre (the Alfred Jarry had NOT been a success!), which he named the Theatre of Cruelty.  Here he presented an adaptation of Romantic poet P.B. Shelley’s grim play The Cenci. The theatre closed with that, its first offering.  In 1938 a compilation of Artaud’s essays was published under the title The Theatre and its Double, in which Artaud characterized artists as “condemned men, signalling through the flames.”  He spent many of his last years in asylums, but this failed visionary was probably the single most important influence on the great directors of the 1960s, including Peter Brook, Jerzy Grotowski, Roger Planchon, and others.  Here’s the last we’ll say about Artaud...in fact we’ll let him say it:

“The revolution will come soon.  All will be destroyed.  The world must be destroyed.  It is corrupt and full of ugliness.  It is full of mummies, I tell you.  Roman decadence. Death.  I want a theatre that will be like a shock treatment, to shock people into feeling.”

 

Grosz was one of the greatest expressionist painters

Of all the countries in Europe, no place was more decimated than Germany after the First World War.  Out of the rubble came a move-ment that spanned all the arts, called expressionism.  This broad movement sought to express emotional experience rather than impressions of the physical world.  Expressionism emphasized strong inner feelings, and showed life as modified and distorted by the author’s own vision of the world.  It had its roots in the plays of Strindberg,

This play was about "robots" - two are pictured here
Capek coined the term

especially his later, non-realistic “dream plays,” and also in the work of Frank Wedekind.  And although dramatic writers practiced this form in several European countries (the Capek brothers in Czechoslovakia, with R.U.R. and The Insect Play) and in America (some of Eugene O’Neill, most notably The Hairy Ape; some of Elmer Rice, for example The Adding Machine; and Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal), most expressionist dramatists were centered in Germany -- Ernst Toller, Walter Hasenclever, and perhaps most importantly Georg Kaiser, who wrote plays such as Gas I and Gas II, and From Morn to Midnight (1916).

      

This drama distorts reality.  Often characters have no names, but are called the Father, the Captain, or even 1 and 2.  Mr Zero is the main character in The Adding Machine, for example – a good indication of his status. Scenes don’t always follow a logical, cause and effect pattern; and the dialogue is often robotic, impersonal.  To stage expressionist drama required an extraordinary and unique visual sense, 

and the movement’s designers produced incredible images, while its directors, particularly Leopold Jessner, came up with fascinating, non-realistic production techniques: distorted architecture, garish colors, non-realistic, highly exaggerated light sources.  Jessner was fond of using a long flight of steps (jessnertreppen) in his productions, and in his production of Richard III, costumes and lighting went from bold red at the height of Richard’s power to pure white as Richmond took control at the play’s end.

      

An even more influential movement in Germany was begun by Erwin Piscator and was brought to its fullest expression by Bertolt Brecht, who called it “epic” theatre.  This name was partially a reaction against the Aristotelian concept of drama -- and as Aristotle had been THE source on drama for over 2,000 years, this was quite a revolt!

      

Piscator called for a “proletarian” drama for the purpose of teaching and propaganda.  He called for social and political reform in his productions, and often used filmed sequences 

and projections to broaden the scope of the action; cartoons were used to move audiences away from emotional involvement, as they would in Aristotle’s style of theatre.  If Piscator evoked images of pity and fear, it was not to purge them during the play (as Aristotle suggested theatre did and should do), but to force audiences to think and act on social and political injustice.   In Piscator’s productions, the most famous of which was The Good Soldier Schweik (by the Czech writer Jaroslav Hasek) in 1928, the director made use of such a variety of technical effects that it could be called an early multi-media show.

      

Bertolt Brecht worked with Piscator, but refined Piscator’s innovations and defined epic theatre in more detail.  Brecht wanted a theatre that would teach, that would appeal not to audiences’ feelings, but to their reason.  Audiences should not be lulled by the beauty of a piece, and their emotions should not be purged by the play.  (This does not mean, by the way, that there are no “beautiful” passages in Brecht -- he’s one of the great German poets of the 20th century -- it’s the lulling that is not Brechtian)  Instead audiences should stay critical, objective, make judgments based on the play, then leave the theatre and make political and social changes.

   

How is this accomplished? Why, by the verfremdungseffekt naturally (V-Effekt, for short), which means literally to “make strange.”  It’s often translated into English as “alienation,” but I prefer to think of it as  
“distancing.”  Brecht’s idea is to distance the audience from 

emotional involvement so that they will engage their reasons.  Brecht used a variety of devices in this V-Effekt:  audiences were constantly reminded that they were in a theatre -- the stage machinery, light trees, the rope on which the curtain hangs, all in full view of the audience; messages were projected or written on placards to state the 

main thrust of the scene; the action is broken up to keep emotions from being engaged, by an actor making a speech showing the broader implications of a specific scene, or singing a song to explain these broader implications.   And the acting is a less emotive style of performing, in which an actor figuratively stands next to himself and comments on his actions.  In addition to the V-effekt, Brecht used a concept called historification (sometimes historicization) to distance -- he’d place the play in the distant past, or perhaps a distant land rather than in present day Germany. But of course he expected audiences to understand that the action set in Setzuan, or the Caucasus Mountains, or in a sort of mythologized Chicago, referred to current events.  

      

Brecht made use of the V-Effekt in his many plays -- he was quite prolific with his own stories, but very often adapted and updated familiar plays and stories from all sorts of periods (Marlowe’s Edward II, the Saint Joan story, Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer are just a few examples).  Among his 

greatest plays are Threepenny Opera (1928, with music by Kurt Weill -- which is lifted from Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera) and the three most anthologized: Mother Courage (1937), Good Woman of Setzuan (1938-40), and The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1944-45). (More on these when we revisit Brecht after World War II.)  Brecht was a communist, totally anti-Nazi, and like many others, he left Germany in 1933 (spending a good bit of his exile in America – Hollywood, of all places!), returning in 1947.  Brecht was caught in a sort of political trap.  He wrote to show that communist values were those that would save the world, but the communist party rejected many of his plays as too complicated for the revolution.  Perhaps the greatest irony is that Brecht enjoys steady production in that hotbed of capitalism, the U.S., where wealthy audiences applaud politely at productions that too often reek of the museum. This must make Brecht roll over in his grave!  His powerful plays and his innovative staging techniques make Bertolt Brecht one of the most important and influential men in twentieth century western theatre.

Another of Brecht's plays, with music by Kurt Weill, was recently given a star-studded production 

Not all German theatre was expressionist or epic. Cabarets were everywhere, in existence alongside gigantic show 

A theatre for extravaganza on my trip to Berlin, 1999

palaces that featured spectacular and often erotic extravaganzas. In the mode of making important if less radical theatre, Max Reinhardt continued his career as one of the most sought-after and eclectic directors of the early twentieth century. He began the Salzburg Festival in 1920. This annual festival began primarily as a showcase for theatre. The signature production at the first festival was an adaptation of 

Everyman, set on the steps of the Salzburg cathedral, and the play has been performed on those steps at every subsequent festival! While the focus has shifted focus to music, dance and opera, the festival is still going strong today, and still features plays as well. Reinhardt also built the Schauspielhaus, an extraordinary theatre in Berlin, after the war. During his career he produced several productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and his 1935 film version of it can still be seen, though it’s a bit of a hodgepodge, with Mickey Rooney as Puck and Jimmy Cagney as Bottom, along with Dick Powell, pretty awful in the role of Lysander, and Olivia de Haviland much better as Hermia.

More on theatre between the wars next time!