Continental stagecraft

It is a pity to begin a book by being dull. But a time of change is upon us in the theater, and a time of change is a time for definitions.

There is something in the nature of the theater that makes Realism a natural and a thoroughly unsatisfactory method of expression. Its principal material, the actor, is too near...

The story of the attempt of the theater to escape from Realism is a curious story. As a deliberate effort of the playwrights to see life in the terms of Form instead of accident...

To-day we are thinking more and more of the future of the theater, the future of the play and the playwright, the future of production, of direction and the actor.

Even the past of the old stagecraft. In the same theater in Frankfort where one of the three significant pairs of German directors and artists labors, I have seen _Peer Gynt_ gi...

In the ’eighties and the ’nineties, when electricity came into the theater to take the place of gas, light was only illumination. By the first decade of the twentieth century it...

Four years of war left the elaborate machinery of the German theaters intact. Four years of the purgatory called peace have even seen a sharp advance in electrical equipment. Cr...

Acting is the oldest thing in the theater. It comes before the play, because in the beginning the actor and the playwright are one. Drama originates when two or three people are...

Plays of a new expressionist quality—profound, grave, ecstatic, and as far from the neurotic as from the realistic—may be written in the next few years without the stimulus of a...

The director of the future may not be a director of to-day. He may not be a director at all. He may be one of those artists whose appearance has been such a distinctive and inte...

The outstanding director in the German theater to-day is also the most radical director. And the most radical director is at the head of the Prussian State Theater, the Schauspi...

Prophecy is a risky business in the theater, especially when prophecy concerns itself with personalities rather than tendencies. I find it very difficult to bring myself to say...

Over some fifteen years a growing number of minds have been more or less actively seeking a way towards a new type of theater. They have been abusing the picture-frame stage, st...

Size is no mania with the French. They do not insist on buildings that are taller than those of any other nation, an empire that is larger, ambitions and dreams mightier and mor...

In Vienna on Christmas Day, 1921, there were no matches in the match-stands of the cafés and no paper in the hotel writing rooms. Some of the well-to-do and the recklessly soft-...

Perhaps the gladiators gave it a bad name. At any rate for twenty centuries men have hesitated to put anything more serious than a clown or an athlete in the middle of an audien...

It is hard to escape the belief that this ferment in the theater means something. Something for life and from life; something for art and from art. Something immensely important...