The Dramatic Imagination

Reflections and Speculations on the Art of the Theatre, Reissue

Robert Edmond Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135470135
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Acting & Auditioning

The Dramatic Imagination is one of the few enduring works written about set design.
Robert Edmond Jones's innovations in set design and lighting brought new ideas to the stage, but it is greater understanding of design - its role at the heart of theater - that has continued to inspire theater students. The volume includes "A New Kind of Drama, " "To a Young Stage Designer" and six other of Jones's "reflections."

1
A New Kind of Drama

In art…there is a spark which defies fore knowledge…and all the masterpieces in the world cannot make a precedent.

—Lytton Strachey

In the last quarter of a century we have begun to be interested in the exploration of man’s inner life, in the unexpressed and hitherto inexpressible depths of the self. Modern psychology has made us all familiar with the idea of the Unconscious. We have learned that beneath the surface of an ordinary everyday normal casual conscious existence there lies a vast dynamic world of impulse and dream, a hinterland of energy which has an independent existence of its own and laws of its own: laws which motivate all our thoughts and our actions. This energy expresses itself to us in our conscious life in a never-ending stream of images, running incessantly through our minds from the cradle to the grave, and perhaps beyond. The concept of the Unconscious has profoundly influenced the intellectual life of our day. It has already become a commonplace of our thinking, and it is beginning to find an expression in our art.

Writers like James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson—to name only a few—have ventured boldly into the realm of the subjective and have recorded the results of their exploration in all sorts of new and arresting forms. The stream-of-consciousness method of writing is an established convention of literature. It is readily accepted by the public and is intelligible to everyone. We find it easier today to read Ulysses than to read Lord Ormont and His Aminta, and we are no longer bewildered by A Rose Is a Rose Is a Rose Is a Rose.

Our playwrights, too, have begun to explore this land of dreams. They are casting about for ways in which to express the activity of the sub-conscious mind, to express thought before it becomes articulate. They are seeking to penetrate beneath the surface of our everyday life into the stream of images which has its source in the deep unknown springs of our being. They are attempting to express directly to the audience the unspoken thoughts of their characters, to show us not only the patterns of their conscious behavior but the pattern of their subconscious lives. These adventures into a new awareness of life indicate a trend in dramatic writing which is bound to become more clearly understood. But in their search for ways in which to embody this new awareness they have neglected to observe that there has recently come into existence the perfect medium for expressing the Unconscious in terms of the theatre. This medium is the talking picture.

In the simultaneous use of the living actor and the talking picture in the theatre there lies a wholly new theatrical art, whose possibilities are as infinite as those of speech itself.

There exists today a curious misconception as to the essential nature of motion pictures. We accept them unthinkingly as objective transcripts of life, whereas in reality they are subjective images of life. This fact becomes evident at once if we think of some well-known motion-picture star appearing in person on a stage and then of the same star appearing on the screen, a bodiless echo, a memory, a dream. Each self has its own reality, but the one is objective and the other is subjective. Motion pictures are our thoughts made visible and audible. They flow in a swift succession of images, precisely as our thoughts do, and their speed, with their flashbacks—like sudden up-rushes of memory—and their abrupt transitions from one subject to another, approximates very closely the speed of our thinking. They have the rhythm of the thought-stream and the same uncanny ability to move forward or backward in space or time, unhampered by the rationalizations of the conscious mind. They project pure thought, pure dream, pure inner life.

Here lies the potential importance of this new invention. A new medium of dramatic expression has become available at the very moment when it is most needed in the theatre. Our dramatists now have it in their power to enlarge the scope of their dramas to an almost infinite extent by the use of these moving and speaking images. Some new playwright will presently set a motion-picture screen on the stage above and behind his actors and will reveal simultaneously the two worlds of the Conscious and the Unconscious which together make up the world we live in—the outer world and the inner world, the objective world of actuality and the subjective world of motive. On the stage we shall see the actual characters of the drama; on the screen we shall see their hidden secret selves. The drama will express the behavior of the characters set against a moving background, the expression of their subconscious mind—a continuous action and interaction.

All art moves inevitably toward this new synthesis of actuality and dream. Our present forms of drama and theatre are not adequate to express our newly enlarged consciousness of life. But within the next decade a new dimension may be added to them, and the eternal subject of drama—the conflict of Man and his Destiny—will take on a new significance.

2
Art in the Theatre

Art…teaches to convey a larger sense by simpler symbols.

—Emerson

THERE SEEMS TO BE A WIDE DIVERGENCE of opinion today as to what the theatre really is. Some people say it is a temple, some say it is a brothel, some say it is a laboratory, or a workshop, or it may be an art, or a plaything, or a corporation. But whatever it is, one thing is true about it. There is not enough fine workmanship in it. There is too much incompetence in it. The theatre demands of its craftsmen that they know their jobs. The theatre is a school. We shall never have done with studying and learning. In the theatre, as in life, we try first of all to free ourselves, as far as we can, from our own limitations. Then we can begin to practice “this noble and magicall art.” Then we may begin to dream.

When the curtain rises, it is the scenery that sets the key of the play. A stage setting is not a background; it is an environment. Players act in a setting, not against it. We say, in the audience, when we look at what the designer has made, before anyone on the stage has time to move or speak, “Aha, I see! It’s going to be like that! Aha!” This is true no matter whether we are looking at a realistic representation of Eliza crossing the ice or at the setting for one of Yeats’ Plays for Dancers, carried to the limit of abstract symbolism. When I go to the theatre, I want to get an eyeful. Why not? I do not want to have to look at one of the so-called “suggestive” settings, in which a single Gothic column is made to do duty for a cathedral; it makes me feel as if I had been invited to some important ceremony and had been given a poor seat behind a post. I do not want to see any more “skeleton stages” in which a few architectural elements are combined and re-combined for the various scenes of a play, for after the first half hour I invariably discover that I have lost the thread of the drama. In spite of myself, I have become fascinated, wondering whether the castle door I have seen in the first act is going to turn into a refectory table in the second act or a hope-chest in the last act. No, I don’t like these clever, falsely economical contraptions. And I do not want to look at a setting that is merely smart or novel or chic, a setting that tells me that it is the latest fashion, as though its designer had taken a flying trip like a spring buyer and brought back a trunk full of the latest styles in scenery.

I want my imagination to be stimulated by what I see on the stage. But the moment I get a sense of ingenuity, a sense of effort, my imagination is not stimulated; it is starved. That play is finished as far as I am concerned. For I have come to the theatre to see a play, not to see the work done on a play.

A good scene should be, not a picture, but an image. Scene-designing is not what most people imagine it is—a branch of interior decorating. There is no more reason for a room on a stage to be a reproduction of an actual room than for an actor who plays the part of Napoleon to be Napoleon or for an actor who plays Death in the old morality play to be dead. Everything that is actual must undergo a strange metamorphosis, a kind of sea-change, before it can become truth in the theatre. There is a curious mystery in this. You will remember the quotation from Hamlet:

My father!—methinks I see my father.
O where, my lord?
In my mind’s eye, Horatio.

Stage-designing should be addressed to this eye of the mind. There is an outer eye that observes, and there is an inner eye that sees. A setting should not be a thing to look at in itself. It can, of course, be made so powerful, so expressive, so dramatic, that the actors have nothing to do after the curtain rises but to embroider variations on the theme the scene has already given away. The designer must always be on his guard against being too explicit. A good scene, I repeat, is not a picture. It is something seen, but it is something conveyed as well: a feeling, an evocation. Plato says somewhere, “It is beauty I seek, not beautiful things.” This is what I mean. A setting is not just a beautiful thing, a collection of beautiful things. It is a presence, a mood, a warm wind fanning the drama to flame. It echoes, it enhances, it animates. It is an expectancy, a foreboding, a tension. It says nothing, but it gives everything.

Do not think for a moment that I am advising the designer to do away with actual objects on the stage. There is no such thing as a symbolic chair. A chair is a chair. It is in the arrangement of the chairs that the magic lies. Molière, Gordon Craig said, knew how to place the chairs on his stage so they almost seemed to speak. In the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet there must be a balcony, and there must be moonlight. But it is not so important that the moon be the kind of moon that shines down on Verona as that Juliet may say of it:

O, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon
…Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.

The point is this: it is not the knowledge of the atmospheric conditions prevailing in northern Italy which counts, but the response to the lyric, soaring quality of Shakespeare’s verse.

The designer creates an environment in which all noble emotions are possible. Then he retires. The actor enters. If the designer’s work has been good, it disappears from our consciousness at that moment. We do not notice it any more. It has apparently ceased to exist. The actor has taken the stage; and the designer’s only reward lies in the praise bestowed on the actor.

Well, now the curtain is up and the play has begun.

When I go to the theatre to see a play performed, I have got to be interested in the people who are performing it. They must, as the saying goes, “hold” me. It is my right as a member of the audience to find men and women on the stage who are alive. I want to respect these players, to look up to them, to care for them, to love them. I want them to speak well, to move well, to give out energy and vitality and eagerness. I do not wish to look at the physically unfit, the mentally defective, or the spiritually violated. They bring to my mind Barnum’s cruel remark that normal people are not worth exhibiting. I wish to see actors in whom I can believe—thoroughbreds, people who are “all there.” Every play is a living dream: your dream, my dream—and that dream must not be blurred or darkened. The actors must be transparent to it. They may not exhibit. Their task is to reveal.

To reveal. To move in the pattern of a great drama, to let its reality shine through. There is no greater art than this. How few actors live up to its possibilities! Some actors have even made me feel at times that they were at heart a little bit ashamed of being actors. I call this attitude offensive. The right attitude is that of the distinguished old English character actor who, when engaged to play a part, was accustomed to say, “Sir, my fee is so-and-so much,” as if he were a specialist from Harley Street. It is easy, of course, to understand why there are not more good actors on the stage today. The métier is too hard. This art of acting demands a peculiar humility, a concentration and dedication of all one’s energies. But when an actor moves before us at last with the strange freedom and calm of one possessed by the real, we are stirred as only the theatre can stir us.

I am thinking of the company of Irish Players from the Abbey Theatre in Dublin who first gave us the dramas of Synge and Yeats in 1910. As one watched these players, one saw what they knew. I kept saying to myself on that first evening: Who are these rare beings? Where did they come from? How have they spent their lives? Who are their friends? What music they must have heard, what books they must have read, what emotions they must have felt! They literally enchanted me. They put me under a spell. And when the curtain came down at the end of the play, they had become necessary to me. I have often asked myself since that time how it was that actors could make me feel such strange emotions of trouble and wonder; and I find the answer now, curiously enough, in an address spoken by a modern Irish poet to the youth of Ireland—Keep in your souls some images of magnificence. These Irish players had kept in their souls some images of magnificence.

Exceptional people, distinguished people, superior people, people who can say, as the old Negro said, “I got a-plenty music in me.” These are the actors the theatre needs.

I think it needs also actors who have in them a kind of wildness, an exuberance, a take-it- or-leave-it quality, a dangerous quality. We must get clean away from the winning, ingratiating, I-hope-you’re-all-going-to-like-me-because-I-need-the-money quality of a great deal of the acting we find today. I remember Calvé’s entrance in the first act of Carmen. Her audiences were actually afraid of her. Who has seen Chaliapin in the mad scene of Boris? Some of the best actors in the world are to be found on the operatic stage. What a Hedda Gabler Mary Garden would have made! It seems as if these actor-images were set free by the very limitations of opera—the fixed melodies, the measured steps and pauses. They cannot be casual for one instant. They must be aware. They must know how to do what they have to do. They must have style. And they must have voices.

It is surprisingly difficult to find actors who seem to mean what they say. How often one is tempted to call out to them from the audience, “It’s a lie! I don’t believe a word of it!” A deep sincerity, a voice that comes from the center of the self, is one of the rarest things to be found on the stage today. It seems odd that this quality of conviction should be so hard to find in the theatre.

But I have been speaking of actors, not of acting.

Great roles require great natures to interpret ...