THE TEMPEST WITHOUT SCENERY

Here is Walter Pritchard Eaton's contemporary account of three different productions of The Tempest in New York City in what must have been a rich and satisfying season indeed. Notice the use of a "curtain of steam!"

"The Tempest"-Century Theater, April 24, 1916

The Tercentenary celebration of Shakespeare's death was observed in New York by productions of the poet's plays in no less than three manners-not including, of course, the amateur variations! Sir Herbert Tree, at the New Amsterdam, produced "King Henry VIII" after the late Victorian fashion, with operatic pageants and conventionally excellent scenery. At the Criterion Theatre under the management of James K. Hackett, Richard. Ordynski (pupil of Reinhardt) produced "The Merry Wives of Windsor" in the manner of modern Germany.

The scenery, heavy and markedly composed into pattern of design and color, was painted by Joseph Urban; and an incessant bustle, a driving pace, a fluid and highly mannered series of forming and melting and reforming tableaux, distinguished this production, giving that sense of "style," in the Continental use of the term. Finally, at the Century Theatre (formerly the New Theatre), John Corbin and the actor, Louis Calvert, under the patronage of the Drama Society, put on "The Tempest" in something approximating Elizabethan fashion. The full text is spoken, there are but two intermissions, and the only scenery employed, excepting a few property trees and the like, is disclosed in the little alcove under the Elizabethan balcony at the rear, which serves first as the ship's cabin and later as Prospero's cave.

There could hardly be a better test of Shakespeare's dramatic power. He survives all three methods of treatment, and each brings out something from his work which the other two miss.

Tree's production catches the pageantry. Ordynski's production records the speed and pictorial pattern. But the production on the bare stage we our self like best of all, for it spurns all other aids and stimuli, and compels the imagination by the sheer power of the actor's art and the poet's verbal magic.

There is a great deal of talk about what Shakespeare would do if he were writing today. "Of course, he would employ scenery," people declare.

Therefor, is the implication, let us employ it for him. Undoubtedly he would employ scenery; but he would also employ quite a different technique in the conduct of his story, and he would write in prose.

Should we, therefor, cut his plays to pieces, and reduce his blank verse to common conversation which is what most of our managers and actors between them actually do? . After all, the plays were written for a stage practically bare, and on such a stage they are most effectively performed, just as "Don Giovanni" is most effectively performed in a theatre, not an opera house, with a small orchestra and a harpsichord. Also, they are thus most economically performed, and have the maximum of educational value. Mr. Corbin has done a fine work in returning "The Tempest" to the stage in its integrity, for the first time, he maintains, in three hundred years. After the Restoration, we know , it was dressed up into a kind of opera, and in these latter years, save for a revival at the hands of Augustin Daly in 1897, it has slept the dusty sleep of the admired classics.

In the present revival, several able actors are concerned. Mr. Calvert plays Prospero with something too little of royal dignity, but with an evident love for the poet's metres. Walter Hampden is the Caliban, and a gruesome, grovelling beast he is. Cecil Yapp is the Trinculo, and George Hassell the Stephano. These two men are artists, Hassell especially being almost unrivalled on our stage as an unctious low comedian who, at the same time, holds himself in fine restraint and can touch other stops on occasion with ease and deftness. It is unlikely that the comic scenes between Caliban, Trinculo and Stephano have ever been much better played than in the present production. The romance of Ferdinand and Miranda fades a little, at the hands of a tame actress, before this rich, ripe fooling, just as the fairy spell of Ariel evaporates when Fania Marinoff, the Ariel, speaks or sings.

Ariel is, perhaps, one of the most difficult parts in Shakespeare, because of the diversity of its requirements. The player must be light of foot as a thistle-down, with the tongue of an angel, the voice of a bird, the elfin charm of a Maude Adams.

The goddesses and nymphs in the masque Mr. Corbin caused to disappear behind a curtain of hissing steam, finding his warrant for so doing in Shakespeare's own stage directions and in his investigations of the Elizabethan theatre. There is no cause to quarrel with him. If a woman plays Miranda, we are already not strictly Elizabethan.

A little modern steam may be readily forgiven, supposing it could be proved that Shakespeare didn't employ steam himself. What is here sought is the preservation of the text in its integrity, and the appeal to the imagination through the medium of the poet's verse and story. There is no use denying that in the masque, where an appeal to the eye is frankly made, we miss the richness of the modem stage. But for the rest of the play we miss it pot at all. Shakespeare has his way with us, making of bare boards his magic island, of two box trees in a pot his tangled forest, of actors speaking immortal verse his summons into fairy-land. One at least of Shakespeare's plays ought to be produced each year in this simple manner, with the best actors procurable. It is a splendid stimulus to our pampered imaginations.