NEW STAGECRAFT

Evening Post, Volume CV, Issue 132, 5 June 1923, Page 3

NEW STAGECRAFT

PRAGUE AND THE THEATRE REFLECTING THE LIFE OF CZECHO-SLOVAKIA ' No doubt they are all a little mad in Prague, for there the makers and. mountera of plays take their post-war audiences quite seriously, declares a correspondent in the "Manchester guardian." ■They address themselves to it, and are all children of the century together. They seem to think that this business of the world-war, as one of life's little adventures, is more interesting than the family worries or even sex subtleties, and that being alive is the modern miracle which must be commented upon. But— thus they who make the comment seem to reason in Prague—this peculiar view of life is so peculiar to the century that tho manner of the comment must be suitable. So why not try caricature ? Has it not all been a piece of colossal horseplay? Have wo not found that war is a bad joke and post-war peace worse? So let us, the' relicts of this waggery, mock back at the humorous god who has •played our passions so skilfully, by laughing at ourselves. Perhaps we are only'puppets "wangled" by some puppet puppeteer? Perhaps we are machines? Insects? Grotesques? Someone has made us make fools of ourselves, anyhow. So let us admeasure the matter. But let, us make our comment with.caricature 1, for self-mockery presupposes some brave thinking, and we are addressing an audience of post-war courage.

It is not a pretty mood. But then post-war courage is not the pretty thing that pre-war courage was. But it is honourable. And it is certainly the mood of the children of this, century.who walk all parts of the earth—though this mood may break out in many'ways of which caricature is but one. And in Prague, where the men who speak from the public theatre have addressed themselves to these children, the encounter has brought such dignity and energy to both "parties that we, in other parts of the world, are wondering about Prague. Therefore, as a strolling playgoer, I went there, .and as such I am writing about it.

I may be exaggerating dreadfully, for when I went to Prague it was for the first time in my life. I stayed only two weeks and I do not understand a word of Czech. But when you come to think of it, two weeks of day-and-night playgoing in a community where imaginative play production—itself a thing of very modern breeding—is taken as a serious art is not the last satisfactory way of acquiring quick intelligence of that community's mood. For this matter of •playproduction alone is a good touchstone for finding a people's pride of. place in tho century. Here is no time fully to discuss the distaste for photographic detail and decadent decoration which marks Prague production, or how this distaste itself has been aggravated by life lived under, fire. But that plays must be produced imaginatively if they are to commend themselves to the new audience I do not doubt any more than I doubt that Prague producers take the "new, audience" as seriously as they-'take the "new drama" and the "new stagecraft." This creed of play-mounting, by the way, was accredited •by Coleridge a hundred years ago when he said: "How much it were to be wished in playing 'Macbeth' that an attempt should be made' to introduce the flexible charactermask of the ancient pantomime; that Flaxman would contribute his genius to the embodying and making sensuously perceptible that of Shakespeare." Masks are only one of the means the young Pfaguers use for getting the caricaturistic" effect which I have found so typical of their city and their century. But because they do make their meaning so sensuously perceptible that it is not dependent upon spoken language, and because that meaning is so international in spirit that sympathy with it is not dependent upon knowledge of its .provenance, I am rash enough to think my findings, shallow as the searching went, correct enough. . Consider, for a moment, the story oJ irony as it is told in the most popular plays. "K-.U.E."—soon to be published in England—turns men into machines. The Insect Comedy, as we all know, turns 'them into insects. "The Macropoulos Affair;' the latest Capek play, tells how men, being offered a hfe of three-hundred years, found it unacceptable. "Prevrat." the last play I saw in Prague, turns men into grotesques and shows the birth of the Republic of Czecho-Slovakia itself as a pageantry ot political satire. Now, imagine these things drawn on the stage with all the merciless mockery of a master cartoonist. Do you catch their excitement at finding themselves alive, their amazement at a miracle so fragile, their amusement at the absurd use made of it, their mockery of their own excitement? And all the time their consciousness—their selfconsciousness, if you will—of the part their generation is playing in it? Not being able to r^ad even the programmes of the plays I was ; seeing, and finding that, for the sake, I supposo, of old enmities, the German papers were almost as unhelpful, I wrote a formal note to the National Theatre, addressed it to the Director of Drama, and begged therein, that, as a visiting member of their audience. I might bo putin touch with someone who spoke something other than Czech and would answer a question or two. The next morning at breakfast the Director of Drama, was announced! The waiters were unimpressed. But I, never having had anything to do with a national theatre except dream of its un- . attainability, was awed. Tho Director was full of talk. They were glad to see me in Prague. It was a rather dull time of the year, though of course the theatres wero always full. What? Had I Etood up for all. the performances I had seen? And what had I seen? "The Cenci," dons in cubes by the Brothers Capek?'"Othello?" Pushkin's "Boris Godounov"? • Schiller's "Don Carlos"? Had I been to the Municpal Theatre and the two National Theatres? Yea, there were two belonging to the nation, because the first thing the Czechs did when they became a republic was to occupy the old Austrian theatre—and they were still occupying it. Should I like to see the Insect Comedy again? Splendid. He would go with me and explain things, for he himself was the producer. ' Never in my .life having been taken seriously before by a play-producer, I was more awed than ever, and quite questionless. But why question? The director had so much to say that his brain was sizzling and my own thoughts caught fire and kept blazing long after he left, and my wrist was smarting from the way he had tapped it. as though it were the table, as he talked. Trying to remember some of the' things he had said or half said, I found myself spinning statements that banged out after each other like expressionistic rhetoric: We. are children of the century—our Republic make a little heart in the centre of Europe—it was war-born —we are war-born—we are'war-orphans—we want to he. war-orphans—for we want no traditions, no chains, no anything that is not freedom—wo want nothing from/the

culture of other peoples—and in our theatre, the freest institutions we have, we are trying to express all this. . . . Of course ho_ exaggerated his meaning as he talked, just as I exaggerate it as I write. He said splendid impossible absurd things that he' would be horrified to see frozen into a formula, and 1 agreed with everything excitedly, knowingnothing whatever about the matter. But never mind. Out of it all .emerges one hard solid chunk of fact: Because for centuries it was forbidden to give plays in the native language so little of the art of the theatre developed that, when the playhouse did take its place in the Republic of Czecho-Slovakia, its ideas and ideals were just as old as those of. the men and women into whose hands it was given, and no older. Hence the astonishing but entirely logical way i n which it reflects life seen through these latter years, and the wild humours of the children who have grown through them. They are not fair-formed, these children. The years were torturing, challenging^ embittering, years endured so difficulty that their survivors are difficult and- a little queer, because they cannot carry on embittering, years endured so difficulty hearted, for all that, and in Prague, that city of caricature, they make us wonder if they are not perhaps amom* th« most sincere of the earth. °