ABSTRACT
But…the Actor? Is it painted canvases that determine the drama? A play without an actor is a diorama. That plastic, living, moving form…how much care is taken over that? Where do we place it? Ah, that’s it!—the actor is a most inconvenient necessity for our scene painters; they do not exactly resent him, but they make him feel how out of place his presence is in front of their fine painting. Every bit of the painted scenery designed to accommodate the real solid form of the actor, is called ‘practicable’; these are the concessions that painting is willing to make to the free human body. Let us admit for the moment that reasonable concessions have been made. Here then is the actor in front of painting generously cut out on his behalf. To enhance himself, what is there left to him? A plastic form, whatever it may be, exists only by virtue of the light. How is the actor lit? Alas, not at all; the painting has taken all the lighting for itself. Those long rows of electric lamps which run parallel to the slices of scenery, or which even run right round the stage, are designed to let us see the painting clearly. No doubt they also let us see the actor clearly, lit from all sides at once…But is that Lighting? Would a sculptor have thought of lighting in this way his bronze or marble dreams?…
However, if we leave aside painting for a moment and attempt really to light the actor…what happens? All the vast apparatus of the stage would suddenly lose its raison d’être, and the actor would suddenly find himself in excruciating emptiness, in a veritable void. What is called twilight and night lighting on our stages witnesses to that with a crudity we know.
