Continental stagecraft

The book is credited to Kenneth Macgowan. A chapter called The Living Stage says there is something in the nature of the theater that makes Realism a natural and a thoroughly unsatisfactory method of expression. The text says the principal material of the theater, the actor, is too near actuality. A picture caption describes the Redoutensaal, a great and splendid eighteenth-century ballroom in the Hofburg in Vienna, with curved walls, staircases and platforms newly built into one end.

The text says that both Ibsen and Strindberg come out of Romanticism into Realism, and pass on into a Symbolism that is far on the way towards Expressionism. The text says that in Ibsen the new tendency is clearly marked in The Wild Duck (1884) and develops gradually through The Master Builder (1892) to completion in When We Dead Awaken (1899). The text on lighting says that when the little princes enter in Richard III the light shines out more brightly, and that when Othello dies the light grows dim.