How a play is produced/The Mise en Scène

by Karel Čapek

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The Mise en Scène

 

WE have described, with great exactitude, what happens when a dramatist writes a play, and has it accepted; and how things turn out at the several kinds of rehearsals, including the dress rehearsal. We have also, in a touching manner, described all that the dramatist feels and experiences when he finally witnesses the various processes through which his word arrives at its theatrical incarnation. We have seen how the play becomes the axis around which the whole business of the theatre begins to revolve. We have been able to observe how creakily, and in what apparent confusion and terrible scramble, everything is put at the service of the exalted Muse to whom, with his play, the dramatist has given an opportunity to manifest herself. At the same time, we have seen how the dramatist, despite his indispensability, (for who but a dramatist can write a play?) feels himself not only superfluous, but even deserted. For he alone, amid all the pandemonium that is now let loose, is the object of neither haste nor rows: his physical person is not lighted by reflectors, nor is it found necessary to make it secure with screws, to treat it with paints, to hang draperies upon it, or to conceal it with a cloth representing a garden-lawn. To his quivering being it is not necessary to affix steps, or to screw doors. There is no doubt that in the interests of the play he would be only too willing to undergo all these tortures, but the fact is, that while he looks on with amazement at the terrible turmoil he has created by becoming a dramatist, it is not concerned with him at all. And, therefore, he feels himself extremely superfluous and in the way, hopping out of the path of the property men who are bringing in a table, and bumping into some scene-shifters who are labouring with a wall. Like a ghost he wanders guiltily through the empty spaces of the theatre, and nowhere is he allowed to prove his usefulness, and willingness to help. He would like to say a word to the producer, but that individual has no time for him; and the actors in their dressing-rooms are talking about fishing, intestinal colic, and how a certain actor played Hamlet at the country town of Hradec Králové thirty years ago. And the dramatist, to act the hero, and to show them that he is not frightened by his own play, timidly joins in.

This, then, is what things are really like. The dramatist had not imagined that he would be such an extremely superfluous person in the theatre. All the work is laid upon other shoulders than his. The producer has formed his own conception as to how the play should really be produced, and finds himself in a difficulty when he sees clearly that the dramatist, with his text, is hampering his free, creative talents. For the producer visualizes an ideal play, which the dramatist, butting in quite inconveniently and harmfully with his text, often seriously threatens. So that, perhaps the best play of all would be the one without dramatist and without text, and, perhaps, without actors, too; for they also tend to threaten the success of the production. The producer’s creative work is, therefore, extremely difficult and tragic, for he struggles all the while to create something better than that which is written, acted, and produced. Thus the producer is a man under a kind of curse, doomed to plait ropes of sand. But he does not let anyone notice this fact.

The producer shares his supreme authority in the theatre with the scenic designers; for painted sets, curtains and costumes are things which it is impossible to do without in the theatre. The scenic designer, too, is sadly hampered by the dramatist’s stage directions. For it is his highest ambition to put the Eiffel Tower on to the stage, with a background of volcanoes, or a Polar landscape in the Cubistic manner, or to conjure up such constructions as have never been seen on the stage before: water-chutes, roundabouts, lighthouses, and suspension-bridges. The dramatist, however, merely requires the modest poorly furnished room of a poor widow or a conventional middle-class sitting-room. Sometimes he endeavours to meet the producer and the scenic designer half-way by various remarks in the text: such as that in the centre there is a door, on the left still another door, leading to the balcony, on the right a door leading to a bedroom, and, of course, on the window-sill, a canary in a cage.

On the other hand, there are, of course, those ambitious dramatists who are lured by visions of marvellous picturesque effects: they require a series of brilliant transformations, where, in a few seconds, a wild forest has to be turned into a royal palace; the royal palace into a country inn, and the country inn again into a rocky glen. These transformations give the producer, the scenic designer, and the foreman of the technical staff an opportunity of racking their brains as to how, under the circumstances, and with the somewhat sorry properties at their disposal, they can make the specified transformation in the short space of time required of them. The scenic designer, therefore, reads the play without paying much attention to the beauty of the words: his main concern is where the doors are to be, and of what kind they must be, and what inconvenient furniture the dramatist has asked for: and eventually, after taking council with the producer, he arranges everything differently. The astonished dramatist then declares that that is exactly how he had meant everything to be. For one of the many peculiar things about the theatre is that things generally turn out differently from what is expected; when the scenery arrives on the stage, the scenic designer is surprised to discover that the properties are always much too big, or much too broad, much too short, much too small, in fact, always different from what he has imagined they would be like; and the producer is always surprised to find that the stage scene is not a bit like his idea of what it ought to be, after handing it to the scenic designer. And so there is nothing to be done about it except to resign oneself to the change; and the strange thing about it all is that, the worse things have panned out, the more praise comes from both the critics and the public; they declare that this time the settings are superb, and a great success.

The scenic designer, then, plans out his ideas for the settings, and brings them to the producer, and both of them then approach the stage-manager, who, after seeing them, wrings his hands in despair declaring finally that they won’t do at all, because the cabinet-makers and the painters have no time to spare for such plans, and that in any case they would have to work miracles to carry them out. Well, finally he allows himself to be persuaded, and although there was no time for them, miracles soon begin to be performed in the cabinet-maker’s shop, and at the painters. Lath is joined to lath, and the curious outlines of woods and rocks arise before one. And in the painting-room a strong smell of paste begins to pervade the whole place, and old-time workmen, who have been connected with the theatre for thirty years or more, with funny little pork-pie caps on their old heads, and long pipes in their mouths, begin to paint “some more of that there rotten Cubistic muck”—as one old veteran puts it, “If only Raphael were to see us now.” You see, things are not what they were thirty years ago, when the painting-room of a theatre was almost a kind of Academy of Fine Arts. Nowadays the paint is merely poured on to the canvas straight out of a bucket, just to get things done quickly, and is spread with a broom; and, lo and behold, from this labour and materials one has charming brocade or a shady wood. Modernism has burst into the theatre with its seven-league boots, and the delicate handiwork of the dear old days is now a thing of the past; most of the painting is now done by means of lighting. Quantity, not quality, is needed most now from the old masters of the painting-room; and the old-time workers have not yet become quite accustomed to the new ways of the theatre.

When the scenic-room begins to work it sets in motion not only the stage tailor, the dressmaker, but also the hairdresser. All of these individuals are extremely ambitious people, for, just as clothes make the man, so does the theatrical tailor’s shop imagine that it makes the actor. “I can’t cut M. Vydra a low waist like that,” cries the tailor to the designer of costumes, who has just gone a little out of proportion. The greatest pleasure is derived from manufacturing the most impossible flute-shaped trousers, swollen backs and fronts, coats too short or too long, tight-fitting or quite loose, just as the character may need them. And if the comedy of the play demands it, the finest sartorial wit and ingenuity is expended on making these clothes fit as badly as possible. Here, silk is made from cheap lining material, and brocade from cheap sacking material, and old Austrian military coats are transformed into jerkins for both nobles and servants in some play by Shakespeare or Molière.

And when the play is being dressed partly or entirely from old materials, then the theatrical wardrobe man is delighted if he can offer the producer, who is making his selections for some play by Shaw, a pair of trousers in which some nineteenth-century actor played in some old nineteenth-century Czech comedy. For there is a strange dearth of modern, civilian clothes in the stock of the theatrical wardrobe. You can be sure to find there fifty angels, ten Indian rajahs, thirty knights, a hundred mandarins or Roman centurions, but not a single, solitary pair of common-or-garden summer trousers. So there is nothing for it but to make the best of a pair of old military trousers with straps, just like those that Eugène Onegin wears in the opera. Nothing pleases the theatrical wardrobe-man’s heart so much as some similar aged article of clothing, consecrated by the various plays in which it has appeared with success on the bodies of the celebrated actors who are the glory of the theatre.

On the first night the men from the theatrical tailor’s shop all crowd into the wings, and their foreman follows with fascinated eyes the tragedian’s every moment. Complications follow complications: no one knows whether there will be a solitary suicide or a whole massacre; the tragedian is tormented by an intrigue; poor innocence suffers; the tragedian acts like a god, places his hand upon his heart, declaims magnificent verses, sits down, stands up, draws his sword, falls, dies, or conquers and ascends the throne, or finally, after all his terrific troubles, marries the leading lady—the tailor hangs upon his every movement, gulps in his gestures, and when the audience thunders applause, he whispers to himself with profound emotion: “How beautifully those clothes act on Mr. X.” For he too had had a part in the success: he had had to run all over Prague to match that flannel; he had stuffed wadding into those breasts with a sculptor’s skill; and he had expended ingenuity worthy of an engineer upon the protruding coat-tails.

Nor must we forget the hairdresser. His workshop, hidden somewhere in the furthermost depths of the theatre, seems like a savage temple in Melanesia, or an Indian wigwam. Here you see lying casually about next to fair, girlish tresses and bald heads of every description, wigs of all kinds and colours, curly, long-haired, black, ginger, iron-grey, and silvery. Severed heads with their necks as pedestals stand about on tables, and nearby are to be found several sorts of noses, the pointed noses of fools and drunkards, and the straight noses of knights and intriguers, shaggy eyebrows, curious beards, moustaches of all kinds, beards for bandits, noble fathers, foresters, and monks. Indeed, the tables are littered with every kind of facial adornment you could think of. Then there are the grease-paints. With these are produced that blood-red freshness of the lips, that thirsty crimson of the leading lady’s lips about which the student and the servant girl in the second gallery dream. On top of this goes powder and rouge, with which is conjured up that all-conquering tenderness of cheeks, and then there is the black pencil for the painting of the eyes, making them so deep and magically lustrous that they almost drive you mad.

Here you find flesh paint of a light hue for voluptuous creatures, while the darker is for poachers, gipsy women, and the human mobs. Here is to be found all those paints and powders and lipsticks that make the player’s face so repulsive at close quarters, dirty, greasy, so different from what the spectator sees from his stall that he would hardly believe it possible that it is the same face. All the deception of the stage is displayed here in broad daylight, that curious deception which is only transformed into beautiful illusion by the enflaming contact with the public. It is terrible at rehearsals, at the dress rehearsal, and on the first night, behind the scenes. Only when the lights go out, and the curtain rises, and the audience “in front” begins to gaze at it, does this deception melt before its eyes, retreat into the background, disappear, turning into the truth and beauty of the spectacle. So that a coarsely painted piece of canvas looks like a wonderful landscape, tin-plate turns into gold, rough tow looks like a prophet’s beard, and carmine turns lips into such desirable objects, that for a kiss from these lovely lips heroes are ready to slaughter each other. As a piece of work, seen at close quarters, it is, no doubt, very rough and imperfect: and yet, when it is successful, the breath of illusion makes it live, and, when it is very successful, makes it live as a beautiful spectacle until the end, accompanying the spectator home, and even further.