The Play and Screen
Skinner, Richard Dana
THE PLAY AND SCREEN By RICHARD DANA SKINNER Mm Le Gallienne's Juliet THE Civic Repertory Theatre has done much fine work during the last three seasons. It has brought classics to life. It has...
...It has shown both courage and discrimination...
...given as a ballet the attention becomes confused and the full effect is lost...
...an art, if it be an art, without fire, without passion, without thought, without beauty...
...Assuming that today he would still wish to exalt his themes by the use of noble blank verse, he would ne 'ertheless revise many portions of his script, telescope many scenes, omit others entirely, meet the conventions of the modern mind half way through elaborating the motivations of the plot, and insist above all on the actors approaching the play with freshness of attack and the conviction that they were relating the story of human beings—not merely the story of famous characters of fiction...
...Stokowski and his orchestra gave a magnificent account of themselves...
...Of the four, perhaps Miss Le Gallienne's work is the most notable because of its complete departure from most of her previous work in manner, diction, emotional force and even in make-up...
...Her tragedy is always that of youth, warm, impetuous and, in the end, almost selffless in its tender abandon...
...It has introduced the charm of modern Spanish writers to New York...
...Miss Le Gallienne emerges as a young, fresh, spontaneous Juliet, quivering with the yearning for love and romance, yet painfully conscious of the adverse forces working about her...
...it is quite frankly bestial...
...Shakespeare wrote for the people—not for scholars...
...She now stirs emotions without being blatantly emotional...
...Le Sacre du Printemps is musically no novelty to America...
...This is precisely the attitude which Miss Le Gallienne has taken toward Romeo and Juliet, and the result is rather more than astonishing—it is entrancing...
...And art devoid of intellect or will becomes not art but deliquescence...
...Thus step by step the play is allowed to build itself, to discover its own emphasis, to weave its own romance and tragedy...
...For some time past, Miss Le Gallienne has made it known in a quiet way that she was conscious of many acting limitations, and would not undertake certain parts until she felt entirely ready for them...
...It is at once an example of skilled direction and sympathetic adaptation...
...Sayre Crawley's Friar Lawrence is also a living human being...
...They know each other's ways and each other's limitations...
...Let us add that the symbolism is leaden-footed and muddy, the pessimism, the pessimism of the neurasthenic, and the decadence, the decadence of spiritual impotence...
...As for the singers and dancers another story might be told, if it were not for the impossibility of determining how much was their fault and how much the fault of the medium in which they were working...
...The interest in its present performance lay in the fact that this was the first time it had been given in its complete form, that is, as a ballet...
...In fact they really see her for the first time through the eyes of Romeo himself, as he singles her out from the crowd...
...The net result of this painstaking adaptation of the best in Shakespeare to the best in modern stage feeling is a play that flows forward with powerful and swift currents...
...But then, Mercutio is one of the most colorful parts in Shakespeare...
...Much of this happy effect is due to that ever-increasing perfection of ensemble which Miss Le Gallienne's" company is achieving...
...In many of the brief scenes before a simple curtain, the characters enter from the orchestra pit...
...The modernistic road in music has been long, and it has led us to more than one great talent, but in Die Glueckliche Hand it has ended in an evil-smelling swamp...
...it has no vitality, not enough even to long for animalism...
...Grenville Vernon...
...It has been played often and has always appealed by its power and rhythmic invention...
...Stokowski should have come before the curtain and included it as an evidence of an American movement toward a synthesis of the arts is inexplicable, for it is neither American nor has it anything to do with art...
...It is safe to say that a hundred small touches are placed with careful intent to use these settings to their full advantage...
...Throughout the whole, one feels the guiding hand of Miss Le Gallienne as director—a hand, incidentally, that has become much firmer and more expert since the earliest trials three years ago...
...Indeed the galvanic jerkings of the dancers, and especially of the soloist, Miss Martha Graham, verged often on the ridiculous...
...That Mr...
...At the Civic Repertory Theatre...
...Freedom and boldness characterize the designs which Mrs...
...Like the settings, it represents intuitive and intelligent compromise...
...The audience hardly sees Juliet, although she is there, moving and laughing among the rest...
...To anyone who has seen Miss Le Gallienne's bitter and morose Hedda, then her masculine egotism in The Master Builder, followed by her sprightly impudence in Peter Pan or her flirtatious charm in The Women Have Their Way, this new revelation of her versatility as a warm, tender and tragic Juliet must dispel forever any thought that she is below the first rank of American artists...
...Die Glueckliche Hand was, however, entirely new to a New York audience...
...First of all, we have a scenic compromise between modern realism and the symbolic freedom of Elizabethan production...
...This was the presentation by the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Leopold Stokowski and assisted by a number of singers and dancers of Arnold Schoenberg's Die Glueckliche Hand and Igor Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps...
...That the Sacre could be danced to the spirit of the music and escape the police is very much to be doubted...
...This entire production is one of the few real delights of the season...
...Simple lines take on new and direct meanings...
...She has all the beauty of adolescence and all the courage of awakening womanhood, abounding with life and love of life...
...Given without visual aid the mind and imagination is stimulated and carried on, if not to the heights, at least to the depths...
...So "the artistic climax" of the music season turned out to be an evening devoted to the delights of the flesh and the disillusions of the nerves, and one of our greatest conductors gave to it his blessing and the service of his splendid orchestra...
...The occasion was as far as concerned the audience one of exceptional brilliancy, and of course Mr...
...The greater task is to make Romeo a man—and that Donald Cameron has done to the hilt...
...It provides motion, color and mood for the casual meeting of Romeo and Juliet— the low hum of voices, light laughter, antique music...
...Donald Cameron accomplishes the impossible in making Romeo a manly and ardent lover, not without a touch of whimsy in lighter moments...
...He wrote in the idiom of his time, and with the stage management of his time in mind...
...But the result is little short of triumphant...
...It lacks all the stilted quality that comes into most performances of the kind, its characters are human, lovable and informal in the best sense, and from this very simplicity there emerges the enthralling and powerful sense of romantic tragedy...
...She is, in short, coming into the full maturity of her powers...
...This is a performance which casts the true spell of the theatre, bringing out values of speech and action which are too easily lost in Shakespearean revivals, and suffusing the whole with the rare glamour of vibrant illusion...
...Bernstein has brought to the scenic setting, yet the result is harmonious, rich, and full of the fiery flavor of the Renaissance...
...Whether it was the stylized direction of the dancing, the quality of the dancing itself, or the impossibility of any adequate visualization of the music, there were few in the audience who failed to realize that Le Sacre du Printemps is far more effective as pure music than as ballet...
...It is a libel on the genius of Greece and Rome to call its spirit pagan...
...The stately dance, for example, in the ball room of Capulet's house does more than create a beautiful picture...
...Truly it is time to return to a sane humanism in more things than literature...
...The dramatic climaxes are graded to the possibilities of the individual actor or actress...
...If this natural entrance of Juliet does violence to the original script by omitting the scene with the nurse, at least it brings the version into line with the modern technique of the theatre...
...It is simply the dying quiver of Schoenberg's overstretched nerves...
...One can—as so rarely in conventional Shakespearean efforts— identify oneself with the characters...
...The music is acrid but appallingly barren, the rhythms tortured but utterly unappealing...
...an art abandoned yet without abandon...
...This is a resolve which requires much determination for an actor-manager to keep...
...Such, he intimated, is to be the art of the future, the thing which we must admire and encourage...
...Leona Roberts takes every last bit of traditional boredom out of the part of the nurse, and makes her a character of vital import to the play...
...Above all, as Juliet, she has the art of reading the all-too-familiar lines in a way that makes them fall freshly and spontaneously and gives them new emphasis and color...
...In short Die Glueckliche Hand is German symbolism at its worst and its most boring...
...But none of its achievements ranks higher than the beauty, color and human richness with which it has endowed Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet...
...The final perfection of this production lies in four outstanding performances—Miss Le Gallienne's own Juliet, Donald Cameron's Romeo, Leona Roberts's Nurse and Edward Bromberg's Mercutio...
...The use of rich draperies and a few simple construction sets provides the atmospheric illusion for the main scenes...
...After her supremely good work in Liliom, several years ago, Miss Le Gallienne seems to have passed through a stage of coldness and critical introspection, only to emerge once more into the full flame of vital and intense artistry governed by forces that have been molded within...
...It is as pretentious as it is uninspired...
...It is the apotheosis of sophisticated man's longing for animalism and as such is a portent of appalling significance...
...Modernism In Extremis WHAT had been heralded as the artistic climax of the New York music season occurred at the Metropolitan Opera House three days after the closing of the operatic year...
...At other times, the curtain is drawn aside from half of the stage only...
...One feels intensely the conflict between the youthful Juliet and her May 14, 1930 THE COMMONWEAL 53 stubborn parents, and the overwhelming courage of her love for Romeo...
...It has literally created an audience to its own temper and taste...
...Name any popular actress you will, and I defy you to select even one who could do so many and such varied parts acceptably, not to say beautifully...
...an art which has no place either for the intellect or the will...
...It is symbolistic, pessimistic, decadent...
...Edward Bromberg is perhaps a trifle more brilliant in his role of Mercutio and a bit more resourceful as an actor...
...This Romeo is no moonstruck calf, and certainly no antique actor in quest of his youth, but a straightforward and sympathetic young man, honestly tortured by his dilemma and exalted by a thoroughly masculine love...
Vol. 12 • May 1930 • No. 2
