Max Reinhardt’s Latest

The Weekly Machen

As an author and actor, Arthur Machen was well-suited to review both books and the stage for the Evening News. The following is an example of the latter with our reporter attending a rehearsal for an ancient play under modern production. Though Machen’s experience on the stage is useful for the article, it is his writing that glows. He vibrantly retells the old story with relish while expertly leading the reader to the dramatic climax with the rhythm of a poet.

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Max Reinhardt’s Latest:
The Production of “Œdipus Rex”
by
Arthur Machen
January 12, 1912

People make all sorts of odd statements in these days. I suppose, indeed, that every age has had this habit but I am really of opinion that, owing to the spread of education, our time is supreme in the art of talking about what it does not understand.

There is Paganism, for example: I have met lots of Pagans—they are mostly Puritans gone wrong—who say that in Pagan times there were no troublesome morals, that you could do exactly what you liked, and the only thing was to be crowned with roses as much as possible.

The same people would, most likely, declare that strict Calvinistic doctrine was totally unfit for the treatment of the stage; and also that the Articles of the Church of England were strangely out of date. “They deal with such questions as Predestination,” these persons would say, “and nobody in his senses has bothered about Predestination since the seventeenth century.”

Quite so; and in a few days a play is to be produced at Convent Garden which will demonstrate the entire falsity of all these propositions. The “Œdipus Rex,” produced by Professor Max Reinhardt, under the management of Mr. Martin Harvey, will show that Pagan Greeks were obsessed by moral questions, that right and wrong were matters of the highest importance to them, that the doctrines of Calvinism have made one of the finest tragedies in the world, and that Predestination is—in the agreeable idiom which we have borrowed from America—a “live topic.”

Stage in the Midst of the Audience

Monday’s audience will be surprised at many things. In the first place the drama will occupy very little of the huge stage of Covent Garden. Under the opening of the proscenium there is a platform with a central flight of steps; behind are the marble pillars which are the portico of the royal palace of Thebes. From this, the ordinary stage level, are steps to right and left which lead down into the orchestra. Not the sunken pit of the musicians which has usurped that name, but the ancient orchestra, the place where the chorus of Greek drama performs its evolutions. It is a wide semicircle, and from it, a way goes right through the stalls, and descends underground. Thus, as at Olympia, the audience will have the sense of being a part of the spectacle. There is no place here for the “fourth wall” doctrine; Thebes is on every side; before and behind and all about those who witness the drama. The people who come to see a play done within the borders of a picture frame will suddenly find the passion and the doom and the lamentation of the ancient city in their very midst; they will see, as Beethoven said, that fate and death knock at every man’s door.

The plot of the “Œdipus,” is simple enough. It is what would be called now an “extremely unpleasant” story; the nearest modern equivalent—or rather analogy—to it is Ibsen’s “Ghosts.”

Laius and Jocasta are told that if they have a son he will murder his father and marry his mother. They have a son; they expose him on a desolate mountain. The infant is rescued and taken away to a distant part of Greece, and adopted by the King and Queen of Corinth. When the child grows up he is informed by the oracle that he is destined to murder his father and marry his mother; and so he flies in horror from his supposed parents, and so, in flying, he accomplishes his destiny. He kills Laius his father in a chance fight, he solves the riddle of the Sphinx at Thebes and is made king of that city, and takes the queen—his mother—to be his wife.

At the Rehearsal

Such is the drama that Mr. Martin Harvey is to present next Monday with austere splendour, with all the solemn apparatus and decoration of great tragedy. I saw an ordinary rehearsal of the play, and I suppose that many people would find something incongruous in the great rolling, rhyming lines uttered by actors in modern clothes, who would smile at the chorus of Theban elders, bearing their staffs and yet wearing silk hats. For myself, I confess these circumstances of rehearsal do not at all disturb me. I am no dogmatist on stage matters, no declaimer against scenery and costumes; and yet such street attire as I have mentioned seems rather to add to the solemnity than to detract from it. I find myself not thinking at all of costume or “decor,” but listening to the voice of fate as the dreadful ancient story is unrolled before me.

Œdipus stands on high, holding the great golden sceptre of Thebes; the seer Tiresias (blind, to signify the opening of the inner vision), is led before him, and standing in the orchestra says, like Nathan, “Thou art the man.” Œdipus, wholly innocent of ill intent, rages against Tiresias as a false prophet; he rages then against Creon, the brother of Jocasta accusing him of having bribed Tiresias to prophesy against his throne.

And then Jocasta intervenes, and from that moment the cloud that has gathered about the pair thickens and blackens and takes on form and substance. Œdipus hears the story of his own exposure, hears the story of the death of Laius; and he wonders if this dead King of Thebes were by any possible chance the man in the chariot whom he had killed in the wayside brawl. So far nothing more awful touches his heart; but then the messenger from Corinth, meaning to reassure him, tells him that the King and Queen of that city were not his father and mother; he was, so the messenger says, a foundling rescued by a shepherd from Mount Cithæran. And Jocasta has just said that the son of Laius and herself had been exposed upon Mount Cithæran!

The Inexorable Decree

There is cold horror upon the heart of Œdipus; he hopes for a moment that there is some mistake. He hopes only for a moment; from the thronging, surging crowd an old man is pushed forward, the herdsman who had exposed him at the bidding of his father and mother; and, as with fire and thunder from heaven, Œdipus and Jocasta are smitten from our sight.

As I have said, I was not dazzled by any splendours: but I shall not soon forget the awful ending of the “Œdipus.” The anguished shriek of a violent death within the palace doors, the hollow voices of the chorus—“Would God I had never seen thy face”—the women who wail horror as they issue forth from the death chamber, the rushing hosts of Thebans who rage frantic with grief and terror and swarm about the porch of the doomed house; and, above all, the sense of an inexorable decree accomplished: these are matters that may be enforced by shining vestments and rich array, but stand clear and tremendous without any apparatus.

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