Hey there! I’m Mike Rugnetta, this is Crash Course Theater,
and did you think we’d finished with French realism?
Au contraire!
Because remember that whole revolution in playwriting that we looked at last time?
Well, it kicked off revolutions in acting and stagecraft, too.
We’re going to move between France and Germany,
looking at a few of the most influential theater companies.
There will be chainmail and halberds and actual bleeding sides of beef today, mes amis.
Also, a gruesome Thought Bubble.
Bon appetit!
That's, uhh - that's basically all the French I know so you’d better roll the title sequence…
[INTRO MUSIC]
Many European courts had a resident theater troupe.
The bitsy German duchy of Saxe-Meiningen was one of them.
In 1866, Georg II came to the throne—or whatever you call the chair that a duke sits on...
...and looked around at his resident company, the Meininger Hoftheatertruppe
(aka the “Meiningen Court Theater Troupe”),
and he was like,
"Hmm... What if you were… better?"
You see, Georg had traveled around Germany, and he’d seen a lot of players,
including the traveling company headed by Charles Kean that had attempted some
historically accurate Shakespeare plays.
Georg decided that a group of actors rigorously rehearsed and meticulously outfitted with
period-appropriate props and costumes would create more realistic, and exciting work.
That’s how he got the nickname “Theater Duke.”
Yeah, that’s right, “Theater Duke.”
[Mike to Yorick] Huh?
Noooo - I’m much more of, like, a Theater Esquire.
Yeah, I mean, yes, you can be a Theater Gentleman
- that’s fine with me - but you just gotta start acting like one!
Anyway – Theater Duke Georg fired the main director
and asked the actor Ludwig Chronegk to head the troupe.
The Duke was also assisted by his third wife, Ellen Franz, an actress who served as the
troupe’s literary manager and vocal coach.
Because the theater was fully patron-supported, box office was not a concern.
The troupe could choose whatever plays they wanted—
Shakespeare, romantic tragedy, a few modern works.
They could rehearse them for months and perform them only a couple of times a week.
The Meiningen troupe pioneered
rehearsal techniques that are common now.
The actors used actual props and actual costumes almost from the beginning.
And all of the director’s decisions were written down in a prompt book so that the
actors wouldn’t deviate from the blocking once it was set.
You know what you can also thank the Theater Duke for?
Theatrical supply shops!
Georg and his assistants spent a ton of time researching the setting of each play.
They made sure that the actors wore historically
accurate clothes and used historically accurate props.
When this caught on with other troupes, shops sprang up to supply the theaters.
The Duke took costumes and props seriously.
Really seriously.
The actors wore actual armor and chainmail and carried actual swords and axes.
[Mike to Yorick] Not gonna lie pal -
I would prefer to remain in the dark concerning your … provenance.
Every detail of set and lighting was integrated into the whole of the play.
And the Duke tried to replace schlocky stage
paintings with realistic set design and real furniture.
At a time when most of the major theaters in Europe were beholden to a star system,
the Meiningen troupe explicitly worked without stars.
All of the actors in the troupe were expected to participate in every play,
even as spear carriers, for example, if there wasn’t a speaking part available.
And while most directors didn’t bother to rehearse supernumeraries,
which is sorta like a fancy word for EXTRAS, the Duke considered them crucially important.
Each body was placed on stage in a significant way.
Each movement was choreographed.
The composer Richard Strauss, who got his start working for the Duke,
was dazzled by “the direction of the crowd scenes,
in which every move was plotted with the greatest care,
and the stylistic verisimilitude of the staging.”
Maybe that wouldn’t have mattered so much if the troupe had just stuck around the duchy.
But the Duke sent them out on tour, where they were a huge influence on Andre Antoine,
who we’ll meet in a minute, and Konstantin Stanislavsky, the Moscow Art Theater guy who
shows up in a couple of episodes.
Mesdames, messieurs, and sentient skulls, allow me to introduce Andre Antoine,
a Meininger fanboy who became one of the most influential
theater directors of the late nineteenth century.
Antoine began his career as a clerk at a gas company,
but he loved the theater so much
that he used to moonlight as part of the claque at the Comedie Francaise.
Claques were paid groups of spectators who were hired by the theater management
or by individual writers or actors to come to the show and applaud vigorously.
Unless actors and writers were in a fight, in which case they might be hired to come
to the show and boo vigorously.
I know- and you thought YouTube was tough!
Antoine was also heavily involved in an amateur troupe.
One day, he came to them and was like, Guys, I think we should do Zola.
And they were like, Mais non!
So Antoine was like, "Fine, I’m just gonna go ahead and found my own incredibly influential
and daring theater company and just do whatever I want."
And he did!
He rented a room in a pool hall and carted over most of his mom’s furniture,
opening the Theatre Libre in 1897 in Paris.
It was subscription-based,
which meant he didn’t need the approval of the censor.
The group specialized in plays that the other theaters couldn’t or wouldn’t get licensed.
Antoine favored an ultra-realistic style.
He encouraged the actors to sometimes turn their backs on the audience.
He was cool with mumbling.
And he worked to make their gestures look natural.
The actors he worked with were either too young and inexperienced
or too old to be attractive to the major troupes, but he did remarkable things with them.
What people really remember Antoine for, though, is the crazy realism of his sets.
Antoine wanted sets that looked and felt like places in real life.
He had designers create four-walled sets and then decided which wall should be removed.
And his “sets” went far beyond just the walls.
For the play “The Butchers,” he hung dripping beef carcasses in the stage space
and littered the ground with intestines.
For the play “Old Heidelberg,” the set called for a dorm room,
so he went out to an actual dorm room and bought it
and PUT IT ON STAGE.
Some audience members were annoyed by the dark subject matter and the upstage-facing
actors, but most of Antoine’s plays were huge successes.
But… each of them ran for three nights at most, and beef carcasses don’t come cheap.
So maybe this wasn’t the all-time greatest economic model.
The theater closed in 1894, though Antoine would go on to lead
the Theatre Antoine and the Odeon.
For a closer look at the kinds of plays that were upsetting and exciting audiences,
let’s take a look at one of Antoine’s great successes,
Leo Tolstoy’s “The Power of Darkness.”
Light the way, Thought Bubble:
Antoine had been discouraged from doing “The Power of Darkness.”
Tolstoy had written the play in 1886, based on an actual murder.
But the Tsar banned it immediately.
Antoine’s production would be the world premiere, but as an influential critic told him,
the play was way too much of a downer.
The play centers around an irresistible farmhand named Nikita.
First, he impregnates a young orphan girl.
Then, instead of marrying her, he marries Anisya,
who has murdered her rich husband in order to make herself available.
Nikita then seduces Anisya’s stepdaughter, who has his baby.
But Nikita murders and buries the baby so that he can get the stepdaughter married off.
On her wedding day, Nikita tries to hang himself and then confesses his sins.
Yikes.
Antoine played Nikita’s virtuous father.
The rest of the characters were played by clerks, salesmen, an architect, a pharmacist,
a dressmaker, and a bookbinder.
Instead of adapting the play, Antoine commissioned a word-for-word translation and then hired
a Russian speaker to make sure that the slang they were using was correct.
He borrowed costumes and props from the local Russian emigre community.
Here’s a review of opening night.
“...the audience was enraptured.
I never noticed an instant of relaxation or inattention during the whole four hours.
For the first time, a setting and costumes truly borrowed from the daily customs of Russian
life appeared on the French stage without comic opera embellishments and without that
predilection for tinsel and falsity that seems inherent in our theatrical atmosphere.”
Thanks, Thought Bubble.
Accurate representation of Russian life!
Four hours of rapture!
Good job bookbinders!
Antoine wasn’t the only guy gutsy enough to produce controversial stuff,
though he probably was the only guy gutsy enough to cast dressmakers as actors.
Die FreiBuhne in Berlin and the Independent Theater Society in London
were also subscription houses working to bring realistic drama to the people
...who need more plays about child murder and syphilis, I guess?
Can’t argue with the public.
The FreiBuhne or Free Stage was founded in Berlin in 1889 by a bunch of writers including
the writer-director Otto Brahm.
It performed mostly on Sunday afternoons,
when actors would be free from their other engagements.
It never managed to attract any set troupe, but it gave censored plays a hearing.
The company started with Henrik Ibsen’s “Ghosts” and produced several works by
future Nobel winner Gerhart Hauptmann.
It disbanded a few seasons later.
In London, the Independent Theater Society was founded by the Dutch drama critic J.T. Grein.
The Society also performed on Sunday afternoons and also started with Henrik Ibsen’s “Ghosts.”
The Independent Theater Society also produced Zola and Tolstoy,
and were the first company to produce George Bernard Shaw.
They disbanded in 1897.
Now, maybe you’re thinking that all of these realistic plays and realistic settings are
going to demand a realistic style of acting.
And you would be right! Kind of!
Francois Delsarte, who was born in France
in 1811, thought that it was time to take all of these fun new scientific theories and
apply them to the theater.
While working as an opera singer,
he became dissatisfied with how arbitrary most theatrical gestures were.
So he came up with the Delsarte Method, a method of actor training which stipulated
that each internal emotion could be connected to and conveyed by a specific outward gesture.
And if you’re like, Wait, Sanskrit performance got there first, you’re right!
But Delsarte’s method was a little different.
To create his system, he undertook a thorough study of people, noting how they moved and
spoke according to the mood they were in.
“Gesture is the direct agent of the heart,” he wrote.
He even made trips to asylums to observe people undergoing emotional extremes.
Once he’d collected all his data, he systematized it into what he called “the laws of expression.”
And maybe this seems kind of stagey, the idea that each emotion has only one expression,
but this system was one of the first attempts to apply scientific methods to acting.
Here’s what one of his disciples writes: “There is no Delsarte walk,
no Delsarte standing position, no Delsarte way to sit down…
The only way Delsarte sought is Nature’s way.
Man can no more make natural things than can he create truth…
At best he can discover Nature’s way, and live and express correctly the truth.”
What do you think that conveys?
If you guessed that it conveys “WE’RE AT THE END OF THIS EPISODE”,
you nailed it!
Next time, we’ll look at the famous rivalry
between two of Northern Europe’s most renowned playwrights:
Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg.
But until then - a very realistic CURTAIN.
Crash Course Theater is produced in association with PBS Digital Studios.
Head over to their channel to check out some of their shows, like The Art Assignment.
The Art Assignment is a biweekly series hosted by curator Sarah Urist Green.
Sarah highlights artists and movements throughout art history,
and travels the world exploring local galleries and installations.
Crash Course Theater is filmed in Indianapolis, Indiana,
and is produced with the help of all of these very nice people.
Our animation team is Thought Cafe.
Crash Course exists thanks to the generous support of our patrons at Patreon.