The Director & The Stage

From Naturalism to Grotowski

Edward Braun

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 1986
• ISBN:
  9781408149249
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Regia e produzione teatrale

Beginning with the triple impulses of Naturalism, symbolism and the grotesque, the bulk of the book concentrates on the most famous directors of this century - Stanislavski, Reinhardt, Graig, Meyerhold, Piscator, Brecht, Artuaud and Grotowski. Braun's guide is more practical than theoretical, delineating how each director changed the tradition that came before him.

1. The Meiningen Theatre

In 1866 there occurred a sequence of political events that was to have far-reaching consequences for the modern theatre. In the brief war between Prussia and Austria Duke Bernhard of Saxe-Meiningen, a small and obscure principality in Thuringia, sought to preserve his independence by allying himself with Austria; following the Prussian victory he found the Residenzstadt of Meiningen occupied by Bismarck’s troops, and was forced to abdicate in favour of his son, Duke Georg II. At forty, Georg had been allowed little experience of government by his father and for some years had served in the Prussian Royal Guards. At his accession he was ready enough to acknowledge the sovereignty of Prussia over the nascent German Empire, and to devote himself to internal reforms, and to patronage and practice of the arts in the Duchy of Meiningen.¹

With time on his hands during his father’s reign, Georg had been free to develop his considerable talent as a graphic artist, and was greatly influenced by the current German school of historical realism, exemplified by the paintings of Kaulbach, Piloty, Menzel and Makart. At university he also studied history and archaeology, and developed a great interest in the theatre, which took him as far afield as London in the 1850’s to see the celebrated Shakespeare ‘Revivals’ staged by Charles Kean at the Princess’s Theatre. As the principal exponent of historical reconstruction, Kean represented the culmination of an English tradition inherited directly from Macready and originating with John Philip Kemble in the late eighteenth century. Although he never toured abroad, Kean’s influence on the German theatre was considerable, and there is no doubt that initially at least Duke Georg was greatly indebted to what he had seen in London.² More immediately, there was the example of Friedrich Haase’s staging for the Duke of Saxe-Coburg in 1867 of The Merchant of Venice, modelled closely on Kean’s London production of 1858. Shortly after his accession, Georg took his newly-appointed artistic director, Friedrich Bodenstedt, to see Haase’s production, and subsequently its designers, Max and Gotthold Brückner, were employed at Meiningen.

The historical development of Germany, and in particular the catastrophic Thirty Years War (1618–1648), had impeded the emergence of a national German drama until the second half of the eighteenth century. But these same historical factors furnished a source of strength that remains to this day: beginning with Gotha in 1775, resident court theatres sprang up all over Germany, nourished by local pride and the rivalries of the numerous petty dukes and princes. Thus, by the time national unity was imposed by Bismarck in 1866, there was scarcely a town of any size that lacked a theatre and permanent companies performing drama, opera and ballet, to say nothing of a full-scale orchestra. Thus, a permanent theatre for drama and opera was opened in Meiningen^* in 1831, and for the next forty years functioned successfully, unknown to all but the 8,000 inhabitants and completely overshadowed by such companies as Weimar, Dresden, Vienna and Munich.

Shortly after his accession Duke Georg signalled the seriousness of his artistic ambitions by dissolving the Court Opera in order to concentrate all his resources on the Court Orchestra (directed by Hans von Bülow) and Court Theatre. Bodenstedt, his new Intendant (artistic director), a poet and translator of English Renaissance drama, found the Duke’s favour thanks to his advocacy of Shakespeare performed uncut and unadulterated. However, he was equally an adherent of Goethe, who as Intendant at the Court Theatre of Weimar had promoted the classical virtues of restraint and balance in production, and had valued correct diction more highly than stage effects. By 1870 the Duke found it impossible to work with Bodenstedt, and for the next five years he functioned as his own Intendant.

Duke Georg was assisted in the artistic direction of the company by Ellen Franz and Ludwig Chronegk. The former was an actress recruited from Mannheim in 1867, who retired from the stage in 1873 when she became the Duke’s wife. Henceforth she shared in the selection and adaptation of texts and was responsible for schooling the company in interpretation and delivery. However, being herself trained in the strictly formal style developed by Goethe at Weimar, she never succeeded in encouraging the naturalness of speech that the Meiningen style demanded, and in this respect the company was often found wanting by critics. For instance, when they came to London in 1881, The Saturday Review found their acting in Julius Caesar ‘distinctly stagey and their elocution monotonous’, suggesting ‘a lesson mechanically repeated after a master’; The Athenaeum considered their ‘declamatory and scholastic style’ more suited to Goethe than Shakespeare; Clement Scott in The Daily Telegraph compared their ‘over-emphasis and over-gesticulation’ unfavourably with ‘the new and more moderate method’ preferred on the English stage.³ Similarly, when the French director Antoine saw them in Brussels in 1888 he was much impressed with the crowd work, but reported that the actors were ‘adequate and nothing more’ and their training ‘generally of the most rudimentary sort’.⁴ Finally, Stanislavsky, who did not miss a single performance when the company paid their second visit to Moscow in 1890, found that ‘the Meiningen Players brought but little that was new into the old stagey methods of acting’, and that much depended on the organising genius of the stage director, Ludwig Chronegk.⁵

There is no doubt that Chronegk was the crucial member of the Meiningen production team. He had joined the company as a comic actor in 1866 and soon impressed everyone with his good humour and keen intelligence. However, he had little literary education, so it came as a great surprise when shortly after the Duke’s wedding to Ellen Franz he was appointed as stage-director. But so successful was he, that in 1875 he took over from the Duke as Intendant and continued to hold both posts until his death in 1891.

The artistic relationship of the Duke and Chronegk was an unusual but harmonious one: whilst the overall interpretation and visualisation of the play was the Duke’s, Chronegk had the job of running the company, conducting rehearsals, and translating Georg’s impressionistic instructions and illustrations into the language of stage action. A similar relationship existed between the Duke and his designers: he would carry out research and produce detailed drawings, which they would realise in plastic terms. During the lengthy rehearsal period of a play at Meiningen the Duke was invariably present to ensure that his conception was faithfully interpreted, but once on tour, Chronegk was in sole charge. In fact, between 1874 and 1890 affairs of state allowed the Duke to see only three performances away from Meiningen. It was Chronegk’s idea originally to display the company’s achievements in Berlin in 1874, and between then and the final tour to Russia in 1890 they gave over 2,500 guest performances in eighty-one appearances throughout Europe. Far more than the ducal purse, it was the revenue from these tours that financed the productions of some forty plays, most of them with large casts and demanding lavish period costumes and settings.

The company numbered about seventy, but was frequently boosted to as many as two hundred by the employment of local extras. Chronegk’s disciplined conduct of the company’s rehearsals became legendary. Stanislavsky, who watched him at work in Moscow, was deeply impressed and confesses to becoming a despotic director in imitation of Chronegk. In his opinion, Chronegk, the most genial of men outside the theatre, was obliged to enforce iron discipline in order to achieve the precise coordination of resources that the Duke’s complex scenarios demanded. It was this, he felt, that led to a neglect of work with individual actors, who in consequence remained indifferent performers. But in any case the recruitment of star actors was avoided at Meiningen, for fear that outstanding talents might impose themselves and destroy the overall ensemble. On occasions famous artists were employed to play particular roles, but they were designated ‘honorary members’ of the company, never ‘guests’, and were expected to fit in with Meiningen production methods and conform with company discipline.⁶ In his memoirs Ludwig Barnay recalls his initial reaction when he first came to Meiningen in 1872 to play the Marquis de Posa in Schiller’s Don Carlos:

I was both amazed and furious with the rehearsals, since I felt that they wasted a great deal of time on absolute non-essentials: the loudness or quietness of a speech, the way some non-speaking actor should stand, getting a tree or a bush in the right spot, or effectively lighting it. The actors were given long lectures, virtual treatises on the mood of a scene, the significance of a specific incident to the drama, yes, even on the emphasis of a single word. This caused the rehearsal to be stretched out endlessly in a manner quite unfamiliar to me, since other directors staging Don Carlos were satisfied with telling an actor whether he should enter and exit right or left and on which side of another actor he should stand. The rest was left to the will of God and the power of Schiller’s genius.⁷

However, once Barnay had seen the results of this painstaking process in performance, he was completely won over; he soon returned to Meiningen to play Hamlet, followed by many further leading roles over the next twenty years. Amongst his celebrated performances was Mark Antony in Julius Caesar, the first production ever to be presented away from Meiningen.

Julius Caesar originally entered the Meiningen repertoire in 1867, and was a striking example of Duke Georg’s concern with historical accuracy. The designs were based on sketches by Visconti, the Curator of Ancient Monuments and Director of Archaeological Research in Rome. Not only the settings, based on the remains of the Roman Forum, but statues, armour, weapons, drinking cups and the rest were all modelled faithfully on Roman originals. Just as Charles Kean proudly documented his authentic designs in his programmes, the Duke urged his Intendant to publicise the historical credentials of Julius Caesar in the local press, as though the stamp of authenticity would validate the work in advance.⁸

However, as we have seen from Barnay’s account of rehearsals, this concern with historical accuracy was only one aspect of the Meiningen method. Julius Caesar was refined and revised for nearly seven years before it was considered ready to expose to a wider public. Once Karl Frenzel, the leading Berlin critic, had been summoned to give his final approval, arrangements were made and on 1 May 1874 Julius Caesar was given its Berlin premiere at the Friedrich-Wilhelmstädtisches Theatre. The impact of the obscure provincial company on the sophisticated Berliners was immediate and extraordinary, and the planned four-week season had to be extended by a fortnight to meet the demand for seats. Julius Caesar was performed twenty-two times, and over the next seventeen years was given in every city where the company appeared. Critics who believed the essence of theatre to consist in star performers acting great roles spoke slightingly of the mediocre talents of the individual actors, and felt that too often on stage the principals were obscured by the mass; but others were overwhelmed by the company’s discipline, its strength in depth, and the coordination of effects in the production. Karl Frenzel wrote:

The treatment of the masses is here brought almost to perfection. When Casca deals the blow to Caesar, the crowd gathered around the Curia emit a single heart-rending cry; then a deathly silence sets in. The murderers, the senators, the people stand a moment before the body of the once-powerful leader, as if paralysed or enchanted. Then a storm breaks forth. One must have heard its tumult in order to know how powerful, how high and how deep the effect of dramatic art can reach. In the following scene in the Forum, magnificent and amazing moments vie with one another - as Antony is raised on the shoulders of the crowd and thus amidst the wildest demonstration reads aloud Caesar’s will; as the enraged mob seize the bier with its body and others with torches rush to join them; as at last Cinna, the poet, is killed in the wildest tumult. One feels oneself present at the beginnings of a revolution.⁹

The opposing view is effectively represented by the critic of The Saturday Review on the occasion of the company’s visit to London in June 1881:

The admirably drilled crowd has been much and justly praised, but in the earlier scenes it was used too freely. It was allowed to call off the attention of the audience from those who are carrying on the dramatic action of the tragedy. In the scene of Caesar’s murder it almost hid the conspirators and was wholly out of place: none but senators should have seen the deed. Loafers, women and children were not allowed to cover the floor of a Roman Curia.¹⁰

Antoine never saw Julius Caesar, but he was deeply impressed by the crowd effects in Schiller’s William Tell, and shortly afterwards applied similar methods to his own productions at the Théâtre Libre.^* What struck him was the capacity of the extras to suggest individual characters rather than a regimented mass, whilst never distracting attention from the salient features of a scene. This he ascribed to the practice of breaking the crowd down into small groups in rehearsals, each of them being led by a member of the company, who frequently included those who played major roles.¹¹ Their success abroad is the more surprising, given that Chronegk had no language other than German in which to coach a crowd recruited on the spot, often from the local military garrison. Nor was there always much time: when they came to London in 1881 they arrived on the Friday and opened with Julius Caesar the following Monday.¹²

As we have seen, enthusiasm for the Meininger in London was far from unanimous; some older critics looked back twenty years or more to Charles Kean and claimed that he had done it all before; others, in a country that still spoke of the ‘stage manager’ rather than the producer or director, saw the actor’s theatre under threat; others were ready enough to indulge their anti-German sentiments with patronising references to ‘teutonic thoroughness’ and ‘military precision’. However, the six weeks’ season at Drury Lane aroused lively interest and, whatever the English precedents, it undoubtedly left its mark on the crowd work and lighting of Irving, and on Frank Benson, who in forming his Dramatic Company in 1883 announced in his programme that it would be ‘conducted on the Meiningen system’.¹³

The influence of the Meininger on Benson was limited by the small scale of his actor-managed touring company, and hardly extended beyond the sharing of minor roles by all the actors (Benson himself excluded). The deeper impact of Duke Georg’s methods was observed on the continent - particularly, as we shall see, in the work of Antoine and Stanislavsky, and also at the Freie Bühne, which opened in Berlin under Otto Brahm in 1889.¹⁴ Meiningen’s originality is precisely assessed by Lee Simonson, the noted American designer and director:

His career inaugurated a new epoch in theatrical production and made the subsequent development of modern stage-craft possible because he eventually convinced every important director in Europe … that the fundamental problem to be answered by the scene-designer is not, What will my setting look like and how will the actor look in it? but, What will my setting make the actor do? More than this, he made plain that the dramatic action of a performance was an organic whole, a continuous pattern of movement, complex but unified like the symphonic rhythms of orchestral music. At the end of his career the dynamic relation of a mobile actor and an immobile setting in continuous interaction was an accepted axiom. And it is upon the assumption that experiments in production have proceeded since his day.¹⁵

The vital principle that the Duke established was that ‘the primary function of the theatre is to depict movement, the relentless progress of the action’.¹⁶ This may seem to be stating the obvious unless we consider the prevailing method, which was to have set speeches interspersed with moves designed more or less arbitrarily to shift the actors around or off the stage, or spectacular interludes regularly punctuating historical plays. Whilst it is true that such scenes at Mark Antony’s funeral oration in the Meiningen Julius Caesar were admired as sheer spectacle, they proceeded logically from the dramatic action; by contrast, the triumphal entry of Bolingbroke into London that Charles Kean inserted as an entr’acte into his 1857 production of Richard II was prompted by no such demand in Shakespeare’s text.

It has been suggested that much of the resistance encountered initially by the Meininger in Germany was born of critics’ desire to protect the reassuring calm and symmetry of Classicism against Romantic turbulence and disorder.¹⁷ The Duke’s production sketches give a clear idea of the restless compositions that he sought on stage, and he was precise in setting forth the principles he wished to see followed:

In the positioning of actors in relation to each other parallels are bad. If the placing of one single actor pa...