The theatre of tomorrow

Front matter

THE TH^^JRE

oftomdSSp

KENNETH MACGOWK

Part I. The New Stagecraft Chapter Pagb

I. The Twentieth Century Theatre 13

Twenty-five years of the new stagecraft. Gordon Craig and Adolphe Appia, the pioneer theorists. Other artists and directors. The principles of the new art of design —style and atmosphere, through simplification, suggestion, and synthesis.

II. The Mechanician 27

The place of mechanical reform in the new stagecraft. The stage machinery of the Greeks. Devices for shifting scenes — swinging stage, sliding stage, shadow stage, revolving stage. Advantages and disadvantages of these devices in relation to the artist. Use of the skeleton setting and forestage.

III. The Electrician 46

Light, the heart of the stage picture. American progress in electrical equipment. Belasco, electrical pioneer. Continental devices — the Fortuny and Ars Systems, the plaster sky-dome. Broken color.

IV. The Painter 64

The easel artist in the new theatre. Bakst, Golovin, Roerich. The older theatre of pretense that came before realism. The Russian artists working within the conventions of the older theatre. Painted perspective on backdrops and wings, sublimated by the painter's genius. The contribution of the Ballet Russe.

V. Appia — The Light as Dramatist 76-

The first theorist of the new theatre. A designer who understood light. The dilemma of the dead setting and the live actor. His analysis of lighting methods anticipating reforms of 1915. The three-dimensional stage. The extension of his theory into stage direction.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PA018

VI. The Accomplishment of Gordon Craig 86

The man of the theatre. His fundamental conception — unity of production. His work as producer. Banishing the actor for the "Ubermarionette." For the theatre, a "creative art of its own." His opposition to footlights and perspective. His prescription for staging Macbeth.

VII. The Plastic Stage 101

The theories of Craig and Appia produce in fifteen years a plastic stage. The case against perspective. When perspective may succeed. Realism and imagination united against painted pretense. How the plastic stage limits the artist physically. Spiritual escapes.

VIII. Expressionism in the Theatre 109

The limitations of the plastic stage avoided through formal design. The application of expressionism to the theatre. The first cubist theatre, the Kamerny in Moscow. Cubism reaches the American stage in 1915. Abstract treatment of light. German expressionist productions. Griinewald's and Andree's experiment in Stockholm. Yevreynoff's dynamic scenery. The Color Organ. Jones' Macbeth. Representation vs. Presentation.

IX. The Formal Stage 126-

The limitations of the plastic stage avoided by turning to structural forms upon the stage. Craig's screens. Hume's adaptable setting. The German experiments of Immermann, Perfall and Savitts with the Shakespeare Stage. Skeleton settings. Littmann's adaptable proscenium.

X. The Actor Re-animated 14.7

The problem of the actor and the auditorium replaces the problem of the setting. Meyerhold and the "theatre theatrical." Arthur Hopkins' theory of "unconscious projection." Copeau's re-animation of the actor.

PART II. THE NEW PLAYHOUSE XI. The Eternal Theatre !6i

.The religious birth of drama. Its progress through twenty-five centuries. The open-air Greek theatre. The

CONTENTS

HAPTEB pAtE

decadent Roman parody. The church as theatre. The mediaeval platform stage. The booths of the guilds. Shakespeare's bear-pit. The street theatre of the cornmedia dell' arte. The Italian opera house and the Inigo Jones masques produce the Victorian theatre. The peep-show stage of today,/

XII. The Movies — The Curtain Becomes the Stage . .17? Putting realism upon the "fourth wall" by means of light. The possibilities of the movies as the theatre of imagination. Their affinity with realism. They may become drama but never theatre.

XIII. The Next Theatre i&fe

Experiments toward a playhouse opposed to realism. The projects of Schinkel and Goethe, of Semper and Wagner. Littmann's influence. Theatres of distinctly new form. The Dalcroze-Appia experiment in Hellerau. Reinhardt's Theatre of the Five Thousand. Projects of the artists. Copeau's Vieux Colombier.

Part III. The New Play

XIV. A Theatre Without Plays 211

The new stagecraft criticised as a movement without plays. Inigo Jones vs. Shakespeare. Why the producers have gone back of the peep-show stage to the classics for dramas of imagination. The Zeitgeist of an imaginative theatre finds its first expression through the most sensitive factor in the playhouse, the artist. The actor's part.

XV. The Twilight of Realism 221

The rise of realism and its form, the three- and four-act play. The breakdown of this form in the past twenty years. The emergence of freak plays : plays within plays, plays told backward, dream plays. The increase in number of scenes. Back to the costume play.

XVI. The Form of the Future 234

The new playwright avoids the distortion of cramming his action into three or four scenes. The influence of the motion picture on playwright and audience. The return of the soliloquy. Rhythmed prose and varying verse.

CONTENTS

XVII. The Content of the Future . . . . . v . . 246 Dramatising the unconscious mind. Experiments in mental drama. Yevreynoff's monodrama. The Italian futurists' synthetic theatre. The German expressionist playwrights. Kaiser's From Morn to Midnight. The heroic figure returns. A drama of the deep instinctive forces of life.

XVIII. A Drama of Intimacy and of Crowds 265

The conflict of the little theatre and the circus, of the real and the aesthetic. Mass drama introduces the "group being." A beginning in Jones's scheme for The Cenci. The mask, the marionette and the open-air theatre.

XIX. The Theatre of Democracy

The possibilities of the theatre as a democratic art. Realism: its cause and cure. The economic basis of the thesis-play. The possibilities of the future when society is released from industrialism. Democracy through art.

A Bibliographical Appendix 283

Index 289

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOR Pelleas and Melisande — Design by Jones Frontispiece

FACING PAGE

King Lear — Design by Geddes 20

Thamar — Design by Bakst 66

Prince Igor — Design by Roerich 72

Petrushka — Design by Benois no

Pulcinella — Design by Picasso 124

Mme. Chrysantheme — Design by Rosse 146

The Song of Roland — Design by Jones 274

ILLUSTRATIONS IN HALF-TONE

FACING PAGE

King Lear — Reinhardt Production 16

Faust as Set by Reinhardt 18

Everyman — Setting by Linnebach 22

The Seven Princesses — Design by Jones 24

Twelfth Night — Urban's Shakespeare Stage 44

Boris Godunoff — Design by Golovin 68

The Blue Bird at the Moscow Art Theatre 70

Die Walkiire — Four Designs by Appia 82 and 84

Macbeth — Design by Gordon Craig . v 98

Liliom — Setting by Simonson 106

Soldiers from a Cubist Salome 114

Expressionist Costumes by Picasso 116

ILLUSTRATIONS

FACING PAGB

Much Ado About Nothing — Expressionist Style 118

Caligari — Expressionism on the Screen 120

Macbeth — Designs by Robert Edmond Jones 122

Hamlet in Craig's Screens 128

Hume's Adaptable Setting 130

The Faithful — Screen Setting by Simonson 132

Richard III — Designs by Jones 134

Immermann's Shakespeare Stage 138

The Munich Shakespeare Stage 140

Shakespeare at the Munich Royal Court Theatre .... 142

The Bonds of Interest — Design by Peters 144

The Dalcroze Playhouse 190

A Hellerau Production by Appia 192

A Reinhardt Circus Production 194

Reinhardt's New Circus Theatre 196

In the Theatre of the Five Thousand 198

The Divine Comedy — Arrangements by Geddes 204

Theatres Designed by Herman Rosse 206

Copeau's Permanent Stage 208

ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT

FAGS

Reinhardt at Rehearsal 17

Dantons Tod — Sketch by Stern 22

Section of a Stage 29

The Swinging Stage 32

The Sliding and Sinking Stage 36 and 37

The Japanese Revolving Stage 38

The Revolving Stage Set for Henry IV, Part I 39

ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGZ

The Revolving Stage in Action 41

The Cloister — A Skeleton Setting 43

Papa — Designs by Geddes 45

The Fortuny System 54

A Modern German Theatre 57

Costumes by Bakst 72

Five Settings in One 130

The Munich Kiinstler Theater 134

Cross-section of a Littmann Theatre 135

La Nave — A Draped Background 137

The English Portals 142

A Greek Theatre 164

A Roman Theatre 165

The Mediaeval Platform Stage 167

The Booth Stage of the Guilds 168

An Elizabethan Theatre 169

The Commedia dell' Arte 171

An Italian Comedy Setting 172

An Italian Court Masque 173

An Inigo Jones Masque 175

Reinhardt's Grosses Schauspielhaus 196

Plan of the Grosses Schauspielhaus 197

Reinhardt's Projected Festspielhaus 199

A Theatre without a Proscenium 203

Plan for The Divine Comedy 205

The Stage for The Divine Comedy 206

Copeau's Stage in New York 209

Part One THE NEW STAGECRAFT

THF THEATRE OF TOMORROW

Chapter I. The Twentieth Century Theatre

THE thing that has been called the new movement in the theatre is a quarter of a century old. It has swept the playhouses of Germany and Russia, touched lightly the French and British stages, and in the last seven years risen to dominance in the serious theatre of America. It is not a simple thing — this stream of theory and effort. Its source is not found in any single mind. Its course is cut ceaselessly by cross-currents, and muddied by alien waters. As with most things so intensely human as the art of the theatre, close definition only confuses. It is complex with experiment and compromise. It goes back to the Greeks and on to a new theatre as different from ours of the nineteenth century as ours is different from the Greeks'. At the moment, I feel, it has completed only part of its work — the development of a technique of production, which we call the new stagecraft. In doing this, it has hinted at a new sort of playhouse and a new (or a very old) relation of play and audience. It seems to me to be going on to the creation of a modern type of drama which will utilize the new technique and express the new relation.

No movement in the theatre has ever been simple enough for the purposes of the pigeonhole. Giants like Hugo and Ibsen may serve as expressions of the romantic and the realistic movements of the nineteenth century. But they have acquired stature through the passage of time, and about them in their own day stood playwrights, actors and producers now forgotten from whom and to whom impulse flowed in the web of contemporary effort. The new stagecraft has its giant — Gordon Craig — a giant who will grow greater in aspect as he and his contemporaries fade into the past. Yet it would be a reckless critic who would lay upon Craig alone the origination of a movement which sprang up in imperfect form at half a dozen points in Europe during the years before and after 1900.

As far back as 1808 a German critic, August Wilhelm Schlegel, gave an admirable summary of what was to be the theory of the new stagecraft, covering a surprising number of the points raised by Craig, Appia and the theorists and artists who followed them : "Our system of decoration was properly invented for the opera, to which in reality it is also best adapted. It has several unavoidable defects ; others which may be, but seldom are, avoided. Among the inevitable defects, I reckon the breaking of the lines in the side scenes from every point of view except one; the disproportion of the player when he appears in the background against objects diminished in perspective; the unfavorable lighting from below and behind ; the contrast between the painted and the actual lights and shades; the impossibility of narrowing the stage at pleasure, so that the inside of a palace and a hut have the same length and breadth. The errors which may be avoided are want of simplicity and of great and reposeful masses ; the overloading of the scene with superfluous and distracting objects, either because the painter is desirous of showing off his strength in perspective or because he does not know how otherwise to fill up the space; an architecture full of mannerism, often altogether unconnected, nay, even at variance with, possibility, colored in a motley manner which resembles no species of stone in the world."

Similar ideas motivated the attempts of Tieck and Immermann in 1840, and of Perfall and Savins in 1890 to construct Shakespearean stages freed from all the folderol of scenic convention. In 1875 Godwin was designing and theorizing in admirable fashion upon stage settings for Shakespeare. In 1880 Anselm Feuerbach, the German painter, wrote : "I hate the modern theatre because my sharp eye always sees through the cardboard and the rouge. From the bottom of my soul

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I hate the misdeeds committed in the name of decoration and everything that belongs thereto. It spoils the public, frightens away the last remnant of artistic feeling, and encourages barbarisms of taste, from which real art turns away and shakes the dust off its feet. The true work of art has enough power within itself to make its situations visible and real without unworthy artificial means, which violate all the canons of art. Unobtrusive suggestion is what is needed, not bewildering effects."

All these criticisms and efforts were vagrant anticipations of an art movement which was to find its ! first constructive theorist and practitioner in Adolphe j, Appia. In 1893/Appia published in French a bjrochure | dealing witrTthe setting of Wagner's operas. In the next few years he made sketches to illustrate his theories, and in 1899 ne published, in German translation, his second and now classic volume, Die Musik und die Inscenierung. This book had an unquestioned effect in Germany, though Appia and his ideas are, even today, far less broadly known the world over than Craig's.

Gordon Craig — whose genius has been the greatest force in the theatre since Ibsen — played from 1889 to 1896 in the company of Henry Irving and Craig's mother, Ellen Terry. When he left Irving he turned to the study of stage management. With the exception of an experiment with a play by deMusset at Uxbridge, he

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4-1 attempted no productions until 1900. He gave no exhibitions of his designs until 1902. He published no connected account of his theories until 1905. Meanwhile William Poel worked ceaselessly upon his recreations of the Elizabethan stage and the re-introduction of Shakespeare properly arranged; and Henry Wilson, an instructor in art in London, designed and presented in The Masque of Beauty in 1899 a considerable share of the ideas and effects associated with the new stagecraft.

During these same late nineties Max Reinhardt, destined to become the most famous of modern regisseurs, was gradually deserting the theatre of Otto Brahm, arch-realist, and the Neue Freie Volksbiihne for a type of vivid dramatic cabaret which he developed definitely between 1900 and 1901 in his Schall und Rauch. In the next few years he brought his more pungent and vigorous realism to a wedding with the newer ideas of Craig and Appia in his Kleines and Neues theatres and later in his Kammerspielhaus. By 1905 he was well launched upon the exploitation of the new methods of staging. With Reinhardt — himself an actor, director and manager— there developed a group of scenic de-

REINHARDT AT REHEARSAL signers. In German theatres producers like Georg Fuchs and Paul Schlenther, artist-directors like Carl Hagemann and Max Martersteig, and designers like Ernst Stern, Julius V. Klein, Alfred Roller, Heinrich Leffler, Willy Wirk, Ludwig von Hofmann, Ludwig Sievert, Ottomar Starke, Karl Walser, Fritz Erler, Czeschka, Emil Orlik and Adolf Linnebach, paralleled the progress of Reinhardt.

In Russia when the Moscow Art Theatre was founded in 1898 by Stanislavsky and Nyemirovich- Dantchenko, the realistic movement fused to a certain extent with the impulse towards unity of production and completeness of emotional expression on the part of the actors, which is a necessary feature of the newer movement. Yet, for all the perfection of ensemble in the Art Theatre and the readiness to experiment with fresh methods, as shown in its production of The Blue Bird in 1908-09 and its invitation to Craig to produce Hamlet with his screen-settings in 191 2, the Art Theatre owed its greater allegiance to realism. For that reason there departed from itsuranks in 1906 a player and producer who was to contribute signally to the forefront of theory of the new "theatre theatrical" — Meyerhold.

In Paris, the home of Antoine, founder of the first "free theatre", the new stagecraft had only intermittent and hesitating interpreters until Jacques Rouche founded the Theatre des Arts in 1907. Before him there was Riviere, Fort, Lugne-Poe; after him, the (' greatest of French regisseurs and a most uncompromising, fecund and creative force — Jacques Copeau.

These are the men who were creating the theory and the technique of the new stagecraft in the opening decade of the twentieth century and pushing it to completion in the years just before the war. They were working partly unknown to one another, partly in cooperation. What precisely were they working upon? What is the technique they evolved?

It is a technique that applies to realistic plays as well ■ as to plays of spiritual emphasis, plays of color, imagination, exaltation, inner truth. It can create illusion as well as understanding. It can perfect the old theatre as well as launch the new. It does in fact range from a beautified realism to absolute, abstract form. Its one definite limit cuts it off from the theatre of , photographic realism. It is always and utterly opposed I to the copying upon the stage of the confusion and de- 1 tail of actuality. Arthur Hopkins, the producer who ' has done most for the progress of the new stagecraft in the commercial American theatre, as Maurice Browne has done most for it in the world of the little theatre, effectively disposes of the photographic setting in his odd, lively and suggestive little book, How's Your Second Act?

"An attempt at exact reproduction challenges the . . . mind of the audience to comparison. ... If a

Child's Restaurant in all its detail is offered, it remains for the audience to recall its memory photograph of a Child's Restaurant and check it up with what is shown on the stage. . . . The result of the whole mental comparing process is to impress upon the auditor that he /is in a theatre witnessing a very accurate reproduction, ! only remarkable because it is not real. So the upshot I of the realistic effort is further to emphasize the unreality of the whole attempt, setting, play, and all. So I submit that realism defeats the very thing to which it aspires. It emphasizes the faithfulness of unreality."

For a positive purpose the new stagecraft sets itself to visualize the atmosphere of a play. Its artists aim 1 to make, in the settings called for by the text, an emotional envelope appropriate to the dramatic mood of the author, a visualization in color, line and light of the dominant emotions to be pictured by the actors.

Broadly speaking the artist achieves this through style. The playwright has his style, the artist must have his also. There is perhaps this difference: The playwright, choosing his subject, may retain a dominant style through all his plays, if only his temperament makes him choose unerringly the subjects suited to his style. The artist has the subject chosen for him — by the dramatist. To some extent he must play the chameleon. He must alter his own natural style of work to suit the play. Some artists can achieve the necessary effect of a fresh and appropriate style while retaining the general characteristics in color, line, or structure that are peculiar to him. Other artists— | Norman-Bel Geddes is a notable example — recreate their own styles, develop an entirely new and distinctive technique for each fresh production. But in spite of a common personal style an artist may vary the method of its expression from production to production and even within a single production. Thus Joseph Urban — who has probably a more distinctive and fixed style than any other scenic designer in America — may practice an enriched and meaningful realism in Le Prophete, a decorative method in Don Giovanni, and abstraction in superficially realistic Nju; or he may run from realism to abstraction and symbolism in a single opera such as St. Elizabeth. t Within the limits of atmosphere and style, what are I the methods of the new stagecraft? What are the j artistic means appropriate to the theatrical problem? i They are simplification, suggestion and synthesis. i Simplification is the test in almost all great art. Simplification of effect always; simplification of means generally. On the stage simplification of both effect and means are essential, because the scenery is not the only thing to be seen. Stage architecture is ; not architecture alone, or stage picture merely stage , picture. The setting is the background of the actor. And it is essential that he shall be properly set off by his background and properly fused in it. He must mean more because of the setting, not less. The case against the old setting is that either its garishness or its detail tends to obscure the actor. On the stage we must have simplification for art's sake. But we must have

From Reinhardt und Seine Biihne

DANTONS TOD — SKETCH BY STERN

As produced by Reinhardt

it even more for the sake of the actor — and therefore of the play.

The complement to simplification is suggestion. Simplify as much as you please; you only. make it the more possible to suggest a wealth of spiritual and xs-

From The Theatre of Today.

EVERYMAN — SETTING BY L1NNEBACH

Through a simplified use of the Gothic, Adolf Linnebach suggests in his production at the Dresden Opera House both the religious atmosphere and the period of the old morality play.

i i thetic qualities. A single Saracenic arch can do more

! ! than a half dozen to summon the passionate back-

j ground of Spanish Don Juan. One candlestick can i I | | carry the whole spirit of the baroque La Tosca; one

j | Gothic pillar build the physical reality and the spirith ual force of the church that looms above Marguerite. On the basis of simplification, the artist can build up by suggestion a host of effects that crude and elaborate reproduction would only thrust between the audience and the actor and the play. The artist can suggest either the naturalistic or the abstract, either reality or an idea and an emotion.

Finally, the dominant quality in modern stage production is synthesis. For modern stage art, in spite of all the easel artists who may care to practice the paint- : ing of backdrops and let it go at that, is a complex and rhythmic fusion of setting, lights, actors and play. ' There must be consistency in each of these, consistency of a single kind or consistency that has the quality of progression in it. And there must be such consistency among them all. Half the portrait, half the landscape, cannot be in Whistler's style and the other half in Zuloaga's. The creation of a mood expressive of the play is, after all, the final purpose in production. It can no more be a jumble of odds and ends than can the play itself.

The achievement of this synthesized suggestion of a play's simple, essential qualities has been sought by u the great theorists in very different ways. Gordon Craig would get it mainly by design, backed by color. I Adolphe Appia fuses his drama in light. Jacques Copeau, whose beliefs and whose work must take a high place in the record of theatrical progress, achieves the play through restriction of means and the re-creation, at each production, of every element from the theatre building to the actor.

I think a single scene of a play produced by two Americans — and a modern, realistic play, at that — can be taken as an example of the working out of the three fundamentals in a fused whole. It is the opening scene of a failure produced by Arthur Hopkins a few years ago, The Devil's Garden. The opening of the play showed a postal clerk hauled up for examination on charges, in the room of a member of that .bureaucracy, the British general post office. The setting was shallow, perhaps ten feet deep. At each end was a door set in a wall at right angles to the footlights. The rear wall was without opening, and its only decoration was a buff-toned map. Three chairs and one desk. And some actors. Simplification.

But that simple room fairly breathed bureaucracy, the thing that was about to grip the clerk. Its walls were a dull gray; its door casings, map frame, narrow wainscoting and furniture were black — the same gray and black of the morning clothes of the officials. These tones and these people made a well-composed

From The Theatre Arts Magazine.

THE SEVEN PRINCESSES — DESIGN BY JONES The skeleton of a Gothic apse, with circular steps, shutting in the characters of Maeterlinck's play. Compare this abstract treatment of architectural form with the simplified but literal representation in Linnebach's Everyman opposite page 22.

harmonious picture, but it was a picture instinct with formality. The colors, the proportions, the map — all simple, suggestions of the reality that ruled the whole great invisible building behind.

For synthesis, there was not only the consistency of this gray and black duotone and its restrained lighting. There was the handling of furniture and people — the stage direction; for while I shall talk a great deal of the artist and the picture because they are new to the stage, it must always be remembered that only through the direction can play, actors, settings and lights be properly fused. The desk and chairs were \ precisely and formally square with the square walls, j The people entered from the , end doors, moved j squarely and formally up to each other, face to face,! 'precise. It was a machine, the machine of government property. That scene, as designed by Robert E. Jones and directed by Arthur Hopkins, was a perfect piece of realism, and a perfect piece of abstraction besides. It showed the possibilities of the new art for the drama of today as well as for the more significant, spiritual, colorful type of play for which so many of us are hoping and of which the new stagecraft and its potentialities seem a portent.

Unquestionably the purpose of the immense fresh effort which has thus poured into the theatre in these twenty-five years is not the perfecting of plays like The Devil's Garden. Three signs forbid this : First, the new stagecraft always achieves its most moving success in plays of another sort, in The Jest as staged by Robert E. Jones and Arthur Hopkins, in A Midsummer Night's Dream as staged by Ernst Stern and Max Reinhardt or by Norman Wilkinson and Granville Barker, in The Blue Bird as staged by V- E. Yegoroff and Stanislavsky. Second, the greatest of the artists tend steadily toward more abstraction in their settings, toward those distinctive qualities of the modern art movement which fuse in "expressionism;" you may see this in Craig's Hamlet done with screens at the Moscow Art Theatre, in Jones's Macbeth. Third, artists and directors alike turn more and more toward the problem of the physical playhouse, toward reforms in proscenium, forestage and setting, which make for a wholly new relation of audience and play, and which demand a type of drama fitted, like the drama of the Greeks, of Shakespeare, of Moliere, for presentation upon a stage where illusion is not so important as emotional intimacy, directness, clarity.

It is the purpose of these pages to set forth the ideas behind the new stagecraft, the reforms in the physical playhouse and the changes in contemporary plays which all point, as I see it, towards a new drama, and to attempt to outline that drama in its broader aspects.

Chapter II. The Mechanician

ACROSS some twenty centuries one factor connects iEschylus with The Follies of IQl8. It is not the actors, not the music, not the spoken word, not even the chorus. It is one of the humbler partners in theatrical production, the mechanician. When the moment came to shift the scenes of Ziegfeld's miscellaneous frevue,; the stage-hands grasped the edges of six or eight huge, triangular prisms of canvas standing in lines down the sides of the stage, and revolved them a third of a turn, thus presenting to the view of the audience, when the front curtain rose, a new side of each with a*new decoration upon it. When it was necessary for the drama of The Eumenides to shift from the temple at Delphi to the temple at Athens, certain functionaries of the theatre of Dionysus in Athens turned just such prisms before the birth of Christ. There were two of these curious objects — the periaktoi — one at each side of what we must call the stage. On their various sides were painted symbolic indications of the settings. A waveline indicated the sea shore ; an appropriate device, the city of Athens. The means was roughly the same as in the work of the artists of our own new stagecraft — a simplified suggestion of plaice or atmosphere. Martin Harvey, the English actor who brought a Reinhardtian production of (Edipus Rex to Covent Garden, London, before the war, utilized two such periaktoi in his production of The Taming of the Shrew, each large enough to make all the setting required at the side of the stage, when combined with an appropriate backdrop. When he designed The Follies of IQI8 Joseph Urban used three or four narrower periaktoi at each side, in addition to his backdrops. In all three cases the ingenuity of the mechanician was at the bottom of the scenic effect, yet it was an ingenuity and a mechanism peculiarly appropriate to an artistic solution of one of the biggest of scenic problems — quick changes of scene.