The Theatre of to-Morrow
by . New York: Boni and Liveright. 1921. 8vo, 302 pp. Illustrated. $5.00.
A GREAT number of the books written about the theatre to-day are perfunctory and ineffectual. Whatever its detractors may say of Mr. Macgowan’s book, they cannot by any stretch of the imagination call it perfunctory. It is the work of an enthusiast, of one devoted heart and soul to the study and furthering of his art. Its pages are full of color and animation, vigorous in their insistence upon the author’s ideals, and staunch in their belief that the ultimate goal will some day be reached.
The aim of Mr. Macgowan’s book is twofold. He first chronicles the movements in the theatrical world which have brought us to the new stagecraft carried on in a new playhouse and which are leading us inevitably toward a new drama. Having given us this foundation of accomplishment, the writer rears a somewhat pretentious, rather shadowy, structure of the play of the future, the walls being of his imagination find the framework the girder-rules forged by the master builders of ‘expressionism,’ ‘formalism,’ ‘presentation’ as opposed to representation, and what you will.
Beginning with the first writhings of the new movement a quarter-century ago, Mr. Macgowan explains the changes and innovations in stagecraft that have revivified the treatment of scenery, costume, and lighting. Clearly and logically he shows the interrelation of color and form, light and movement. Craig, unrelenting, sometimes irrational idealist, is measured against the more practical and understanding, but less wellknown Appia. The estimates of their contribution are just; their influence is studied in the work of numerous followers along the paths they blazed.
The structure of the stages could not continue in the old form. The gradual elaboration from Greek altar and temple, cathedral nave, booth, wagon, and innyard to the complicated proscenium, apron, and footlight arrangement is followed by a return to simpler means and the theatre of intimacy, until, in the Parisian stage of Jacques Copeau, Mr. Macgowan finds ‘the most complete, studied, and yet natural experiment.’ He calls Reinhardt the most ambitious, but both these he terms simply prophetic.
Speculating on the drama yet to be, the author becomes troublesome, for he attributes to ‘new ideals’ a number of quite fine and natural developments in the theatre. Perhaps Mr. Macgowan adjusts facts somewhat to fit his theories; on occasion he seizes upon a thought or phrase and overemphasizes it, stretches it beyond its normal purpose. But his grasp on his subject matter is masterly, his handling deft, for all the vastness of his field. Its limits are unprescribed, since it extends in time from the origin of things even beyond Mr. Shaw’s blank end-wall of imagining, ‘as far as human thought can go.’
To-day we are counseled; ‘Liberty is not lawlessness!’ But oftentimes the realms of the ‘expressionists’ seem unduly anarchic. The idealists and workers for the new art of the theatre claim freedom, and on principle demand that all laws be broken and swept aside. Whereupon our writer, having ‘scrapped’ all the ‘physical and spiritual limitations of the plastic stage,’ having done away with the strictures of the past, sets up new tables of commandments by which the children of his new art are to live: laws these which a Macgowan of a decade hence may relish casting from the mountain-top as much as does our present iconoclastic prophet enjoy smashing those we yesterday considered vital.
JAMES W. D. SEYMOUR.
These reviews will be reprinted separately in pamphlet form. Copies may be had by any librarian, without charge, on application to the Atlantic Monthly, 8 Arlington St., Boston.