11.igen
box 18/1
LIFE, LETTERS
124
Wilde’s Salome at the Budapester
strasse Theater. The hand ofthe repub¬
lican censor is at present laid far less
heavily upon the arts; but, partly for
political reasons, the censor makes
amends bydrastic regulation, which has
almost wiped out the night life of the
capit. l.
Shakespeare is as popular as before
the war. Max Reinhardt has staged
magnificent performances of 4 Mid¬
summer Night’s Dream, A Merchant of
Fenice, and Julius Cesar, althougn his
Hamlet was less successful. The State
Theatre has produced Richard III.
The New People’s Theatre has given
Pericles and the Comedy of Errors
Reinhardt conceived his Midsummer
Night’s Dream as a fairy spectacle, in
three pictures, a treatment of the play
which would probably have delighted
Shakespeare himself, for there is good
reason to believe that he origmally
wrote it for outdoor performance with
the richest mounting possible. The
opening scenewas played before a back¬
ground of heavy curtains, which open¬
ed presently, disclosing a fairy forest.
where curious shapes of ferns and fir
trees loomed fantastically under a warm
dark sky glimmering with a thou¬
sand stars. There was no break in the
performance until the close of Act IV,
when a brief pause prepared Rein¬
hardt’s audience for a production by
that no less famous producer, Bully
Bottom.
Who but Reinhardt could have intro¬
duced the Russian ballet in a Shakes¬
pearean production without giving it a
disastrously exotic flavor! Oberon be¬
comes a dryad, so long of figure and so
green of face that he at first barely
emerges amid the trees. Titania's
crown is wrought of the birch leaves
AND THE ARTS
that form her garment. Puck is brown,
squat, hairy, perhaps more nearly the
Robin Goodfellow of popular tradition
than Shakespeare would have wished.
In the mysterious light, while the sky
lades to gray and silver translucence,
other fairies clad in floating draperies
of diaphanous green dance elfin dances,
wvhich half allure, half tantalize the eye,
so subtly do they merge into their
woodland background.
Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s
Fan, The Ideal Husband, and Salome,
have all had recent performances
Bernard Shaw, who has long been popu¬
lar in Germany, though not in France,
s represented by Pygmalion, The Shew¬
ing Up of Blanco Posnet, The Man of
Desting, and Cesar and Cleopatra (a
Reinhardt production at the Deutsches
Theater)
There have been a number of Ibsen
productions, but the most successful
Scandinavian play was Strindberg’s
Dance of Deuth, in which Tilla Durieux,
who played Eliza in Pygmalion, inter¬
preted the wife, torn by mingled love
and hate. The settings for this produc¬
tion may fairly be charged with mor¬
bidity. The round doors of the turret
dwelling disclosed an interior entirely
black — black furniture, black hang
ings, black costumes — relieved only
y an evil red glow at the window and a
savage gleam from the eyes of a half¬
seen, silently crouching animal. So
evidently unhealthy was this perform¬
ance that a more robust rendering of
The Father at another theatre gave a
zertain relief, even to the admirers of
Strindberg. The intense seriousness
vith which these plays are taken is in¬
dicatedbythetotal absence of applause.
The audiences are mainly young men
and middle-aged women.