Note 5 — Chapter VI

Note.—I wish to qualify fundamentally my admiration for the ingenuity of the mechanical features of the modern stage. In fact, I do not believe they can advance the theatre one jot. They are marvelously ingenious in denying the limitations of the stage and in part triumphing over them. Yet I have a persistent feeling that the recognition of the limitations and the acceptance of them is more fundamental in the development of an art or craft than the denial of them and the triumphing over them. Even such a triumph has its ultimate boundaries, and when they have been reached, there is little to do but acknowledge defeat. When matter has been twisted and beaten into the cunningest perversions of its first form, the craftsman is still not satisfied; for his spirit can soar to further reaches where none of the elements can follow. This is truer of the theatre artist, perhaps, than of any other, save the musician (who is, after all, a theatre artist). The theatre has been, these many centuries, the theatre because of the limitations that encompass it, not in spite of them. Likewise is the church (as a field of art) limited, and it is by merit of its limitations that the church has been great. Utter churchliness owes little to the style of architecture of any specific church edifice. And the transcendent theatre art of the Deutsches Theater in Berlin or of the Art Theatre in Moscow does not hang upon the skill with which the one has used a revolving stage or with which the other has devised its scenery. The German theatres have to a remarkable degree increased natural illusion in scenery and lighting; but in spite of that there is about as much bad theatre art in Germany as good. Where greatness is found, where the artist has most truly realized the function of the theatre, it will be seen that his spirit has transcended utterly the possibilities of his physical stage; and, like as not, he has made no effort to strain the capacities of his medium, but has worked utterly within them. One of the remarkable facts about the stage technique of Robert Edmond Jones is that he demands nothing impossible to achieve. His designs are easy to execute, and his scenery easy to handle.

Here, again, is the dilemma which we faced in the discussion of the approach to the stage lighting problem. There are limits to our ability to reproduce on the stage the light effects of nature. But there are practically no limits to the theatrical expressiveness of light, regarded as a medium, per se. There are limits beyond which mechanical skill or inventive genius cannot alter the obdurate confines of the physical stage. But there are no heights to which a human spirit, set in public upon a platform, however narrow and close-walled, cannot rise. In view of this great spiritual fact, I would solemnly warn any little theatre or community house that has money to spend for modernity, not to spend it on the kind of advance stage machinery discussed in this chapter, but to spend it on artists.