Max Reinhardt: The Irony of a Great Career
The thing that continues to strike me as ironic as I teach the history of directing is that commitment to the theater and only the theater is commitment to a moment, in the now, not to making your mark on the future. The directors that are easiest to study are those who wrote replete theories on what theater, directing, and art should be. But perhaps this obscures the great directors who did just that: directed. They didn't write theories down, they didn't publish books on how to direct, they just did their work.
This is how I feel about Max Reinhardt. He had a massive career. He directed over 300 (and by some accounts closer to 500) new productions in his lifetime. Between 25-40 a year. He was versatile: he did realism, symbolism, expressionism, and most notably he blended these forms together as the play seemed fit. He is credited with putting Wagner's theories of the "total art work" into practice, he tried to make his theater the ultimate form of words, music, visual art, and acting.
But he was so busy doing this, that he didn't write manifestos. Unlike Artaud, who directed very little, but wrote a lot about his ideas, Reinhardt is like a distant echo now in the history of directing. He doesn't have a book that everyone references, he didn't make some extreme mark on theater history with his avant-guarde moment. He was a master of the craft of directing. He was versatile. He did what he believed each play needed. He created work that sounds in written accounts, and looks, in faded black-and-white pictures, like was breathtaking. And he was critically liked. Which isn't something that necessarily impresses us when we look back on the great theater-makers. It makes historians judge the art as being commercial, bourgeois. (Perhaps this is a legitimate argument that anything new isn't accepted well at first, and perhaps this is our own egos hoping that our bad reviews will prove us to be great artists that changed the world.)
And yet, I would say that Reinhardt, while the section on him might bore my young directors in class, is what each of us should aspire to be. Because he wasn't a sell-out commercial director, but he was, indeed, a great artist and crafts person. He had a marvelous career, was the head of major theaters, tried his hand in the "new medium" of film, and continued to push himself and grow at every turn. He directed the classics and contemporary works. And he was a great director of actors.
I think our contemporary example of this is Peter Brook, whose aesthetic has grown and changed with experimentation and following his interest and what has seemed to be what the theater needed in each of the many decades his work has spanned. And while Peter Brook will live on forever because he has written amazing theory and his work has been video documented so well, there isn't one aesthetic thing you can call "Brook", the way you can with more specialized directors. There are things that you can claim to phases of his work, there are certainly movements of theater that we can attribute to works like his 1970 Midsummer Night's Dream (also a breakthrough play of sorts for Reinhardt in 1905), but the tropes aren't true for his entire career.
I look up to Max Reinhardt. I am inspired by his life's work, and I have a great deal of respect for his focus on the present moment. Because ultimately the art form is about what is happening now, in that room, between those actors and that audience. It only exists in that moment. It seems to me that Reinhardt's focus was exactly that.
More on Reinhardt:
http://www.signandsight.com/features/540.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/3553847/Max-Reinhardt-back-in-the-limelight-in-Michael-Frayns-Afterlife.html
http://thethunderchild.com/ActorSites/ConradVeidt/page72a.html
This is how I feel about Max Reinhardt. He had a massive career. He directed over 300 (and by some accounts closer to 500) new productions in his lifetime. Between 25-40 a year. He was versatile: he did realism, symbolism, expressionism, and most notably he blended these forms together as the play seemed fit. He is credited with putting Wagner's theories of the "total art work" into practice, he tried to make his theater the ultimate form of words, music, visual art, and acting.
But he was so busy doing this, that he didn't write manifestos. Unlike Artaud, who directed very little, but wrote a lot about his ideas, Reinhardt is like a distant echo now in the history of directing. He doesn't have a book that everyone references, he didn't make some extreme mark on theater history with his avant-guarde moment. He was a master of the craft of directing. He was versatile. He did what he believed each play needed. He created work that sounds in written accounts, and looks, in faded black-and-white pictures, like was breathtaking. And he was critically liked. Which isn't something that necessarily impresses us when we look back on the great theater-makers. It makes historians judge the art as being commercial, bourgeois. (Perhaps this is a legitimate argument that anything new isn't accepted well at first, and perhaps this is our own egos hoping that our bad reviews will prove us to be great artists that changed the world.)
And yet, I would say that Reinhardt, while the section on him might bore my young directors in class, is what each of us should aspire to be. Because he wasn't a sell-out commercial director, but he was, indeed, a great artist and crafts person. He had a marvelous career, was the head of major theaters, tried his hand in the "new medium" of film, and continued to push himself and grow at every turn. He directed the classics and contemporary works. And he was a great director of actors.
I think our contemporary example of this is Peter Brook, whose aesthetic has grown and changed with experimentation and following his interest and what has seemed to be what the theater needed in each of the many decades his work has spanned. And while Peter Brook will live on forever because he has written amazing theory and his work has been video documented so well, there isn't one aesthetic thing you can call "Brook", the way you can with more specialized directors. There are things that you can claim to phases of his work, there are certainly movements of theater that we can attribute to works like his 1970 Midsummer Night's Dream (also a breakthrough play of sorts for Reinhardt in 1905), but the tropes aren't true for his entire career.
I look up to Max Reinhardt. I am inspired by his life's work, and I have a great deal of respect for his focus on the present moment. Because ultimately the art form is about what is happening now, in that room, between those actors and that audience. It only exists in that moment. It seems to me that Reinhardt's focus was exactly that.
More on Reinhardt:
http://www.signandsight.com/features/540.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/3553847/Max-Reinhardt-back-in-the-limelight-in-Michael-Frayns-Afterlife.html
http://thethunderchild.com/ActorSites/ConradVeidt/page72a.html
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