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THE ART
[[italics]] of the [[/italics]]
THEATRE
[[italics]] by Robert Edmond Jones [[/italics]]
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Excerpts from "THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION," by Robert Edmond Jones
Published by Duell, Sloane and Pierce ―― Price $2.00

There seems to be a wide divergence of opinion today as to what the theatre really is. Some people say it is a temple, some say it is a brothel, some say it is a laboratory, or workshop, or it may be an art, or plaything, or a corporation. But, whatever it is, one thing is true about it. There is too much incompetence in it. The theatre demands of its craftsmen that they know their jobs. The theatre is a school. We shall never have done with studying and learning. In the theatre as in life, we try first of all to free ourselves, as far as we can, from our own limitations. Then we can begin to practice this noble and magical 'art.' Then we may begin to dream.

  When the curtain rises, it is the scenery that sets the key of the play. A stage setting is not a background; it is an environment. Players act in a setting, not against it. We say, in the audience, when we look at what the designer has made, before anyone on the stage has time to move or speak, 'Aha, I see! It's going to be like that! Aha!' This is true no matter whether we are looking at a realistic interpretation of Eliza crossing the ice or at the setting for one of Yeats' [[italics]] Plays for Dancers [[/italics]], carried to the limit of abstract symbolism. When I go to the theatre I want to get an eyeful. Why not? I do not want to look at one of the so-called 'suggestive' settings, in which a single Gothic column is made to do duty for a cathedral; it makes me feel as if I had been invited to some important ceremony and had been given a poor seat behind a post. No, I don't like these clever, falsely economical contraptions. And I do not want to look at a setting that is merely smart or novel or [[italics]] chic, [[/italics]] a setting that tells me that it is the latest fashion, as though its designer had taken a flying trip like a spring buyer and brought back a trunk full of the latest styles in scenery.

  I want my imagination to be stimulated by what I see on the stage. But the moment I get a sense of ingenuity, a sense of effort, my imagination is not stimulated; it is starved. That play is finished as far as I am concerned. For I have come to the theatre to see a play, not to see the work done on a play.

  The sole aim of the arts of scene-designing, costuming

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lighting, is, as I have already said, to enhance the natural powers of the actor.

  Professor Max Reinhardt once said, I am told, that the art of lighting a stage consists of putting light where you want it and taking it away where you don't want it. I have often had occasion to think of this remark--so often, in fact, that with the passage of time it has taken on for me something of the quality of an old proverb. Put light where you want it and take it away where you don't want it. What could be more simple?

  But our real problem in the theatre is to know where to put the light and where to take it away. And this, as Professor Reinhardt very well knows, is not so simple. On the contrary, it demands the knowledge and the application of a lifetime.

  The creative approach to the problem of stage lighting--the art, in other words, of knowing where to put light on the stage and where to take it away--it not a matter of textbooks and precepts. There are no arbitrary rules. There is only a goal and a promise. We have the mechanism with which to create this ideal, exalted, dramatic light in the theatre. Whether we can do so or not is a matter of temperament as well as of technique. The secret lies in our perception of light in the theatre as something alive. 

  Does this mean that we are to carry images of poetry and vision and high passion in our minds while we are shouting out orders to electricians on ladders in light-rehearsals?

  Yes. This is what is means.

[[photograph of the author]]