98 
House Garden 
Haviland. China 
FOOTLIGHTS AND FURNITURE 
{Continued from page 96 ) 
O NE of the many delightful open^stock patterns 
that make choosing so pleasant wherever 
Haviland China is sold. A Grecian border design in 
blue intertwined with floral vine in harmoni2;ing 
tones of yellow and green. Gold handles. 
Since 1837 
our china has enjoyed an enviable 
reputation. In purchasing be sure to 
notice carefully these Trademarks. 
dCCdAAreo ^ 
Uffioget * 
France 
Unless these Trademarks appear on 
each piece,you will not begetting the 
Genuine 
Haviland. China 
Manufactured at Limoges, France 
Haviland China may be found in a profusion of beautiful patterns at all 
6 rst class China or Department Stores. Write for name of nearest Deder 
if you have any difficulty locating one. 
Haviland & C° 
II East 36th Street, New York 
part of the “property plot”. Where 
would our farces be without a bed? 
In Miss Clemence Dane’s “A Bill of 
Divorcement”, when Hilary returns, 
recovered from his shell-shock illness 
of fifteen years, his nervous daughter, 
crouched on the sofa, hears him enter 
through a French window; we know that 
he enters the common room of a country 
house; he must make us feel, as he notes 
the pictures and the hangings, that things 
have changed since he was last in the 
room. The scenic artist must be as 
observant of the smallest action on the 
part of the characters as the interior 
decorator is of the smallest wishes of her 
client. 
But though one may fill all the req¬ 
uisites of a dramatist’s stage directions, 
a room is not quite settled in its stage fit¬ 
tings until the play is actually rehearsed. 
Then are seen technical difficulties to be 
overcome. How is a character to be 
gotten off the scene naturally? The 
arrangement of the furniture might 
interfere. The interior decorator does 
not have to consider this problem in a 
house. If there is an unwelcome guest, 
it doesn’t matter in the least how the 
tables or chairs are placed; social in¬ 
genuity gets him off somehow. But on 
the stage things have to be shifted for 
ease of action. 
THE SUBTERFUGES OF THE STAGE 
Then the stage is full of subterfuges 
which the real home knows nothing 
about. The inset portrait above the 
mantel, as in “The Truth About Blayds”, 
need not be a true Sargent or Shannon. 
The mirrors have to be masked to prevent 
reflection which would annoy the ob¬ 
server “in front”. The grandfather 
clock never chimes, unless the action 
needs it. We know, in Thomas’s “The 
Witching Hour”, when Jack Brookfield 
calls on Justice Prentice, he doesn’t 
have to see a real Rousseau canvas 
over the buffet; it’s not necessary for the 
stage director to denude our museums 
of art for the real thing. 
The slightest little touch will produce 
its desired effect on the stage. The 
decorator is required to suggest passages 
of time, to denote the advance in decora¬ 
tive ideas of one generation over another. 
It is an easy matter to steep the audience 
in an atmosphere of a past period, as 
Mr. Lee Simonson did for the dramatiza¬ 
tion of Howells’ “The Rise of Silas 
Lapham”. But, with the slightest 
variation, where there are successive 
changes to be made, the scenic artist 
must conserve e,xpense, yet intensify 
impression. In Barrie’s “The Will”, 
a lawyer’s office is shown through three 
reigns, those of Victoria, Edward, and 
George. The passage of time is easily 
impressed by the increased age of the 
characters; but the furniture must age 
too, and the pictures must change, 
and office manners must differ. Take 
Mr. Arnold Bennett and Mr. Edward 
Knoblock’s “Milestones”: Act I is mid- 
Victorian; Act II must show the same 
room twenty-five years later, subject to 
the wear and tear of time, and the change 
of taste, and the small conflicts in fur¬ 
nishings which go on between the younger 
and older generations. In the final act, 
the electric age, the last of the mid- 
Victorian flavor has succumbed to 
modernity. The scenic decorator has 
to suggest this at a minimum of dis¬ 
traction and certainly a minimum of cost. 
The difference between American and 
British plays, as they appear on the 
printed page, lies in the fact that the story 
and the people in an English drama seem 
somehow attached to their surrounding; 
they live in homes, they go to their clubs, 
they are part of their landscape. But, in 
American comedies, we feel that the 
action occurs in a room characteristic 
of a type, not of the particular person. 
In Mr. Eugene Walter’s “The Easiest 
Way”, both in the boarding house and in 
the hotel where Laura goes to live with 
Brockton, there is no feeling of personal 
attachment. But only Blayds could have 
lived in the room Geddes built, only 
Captain Shotover could have conceived 
of such a home as we find to be the scene 
for the opening act of Shaw’s “Heart¬ 
break House”. Personality should be 
felt as much in a room on the stage as in 
the home. 
PERSONALITY IN SETS 
If we have merely a room of taste in 
which people move, but to which they do 
not belong, someone is at fault. Under 
the present conditions of taste in decora¬ 
tion, I think it is the dramatist rather 
than the decorator. For the general cry is, 
from scenic artists, that the hardest task 
is to draw flavor from a flavorless play. 
There is interest, of course, in determining 
what sort of a room a “gold-digger” 
would live in, but it is more interesting to 
be more personal. I don’t care for rooms 
that symbolize states of relationship or 
states of trivial mind: the bachelor’s room, 
the college boy’s den, the scrubwoman’s 
kitchen, the courtesan’s boudoir, the jazz 
dance hall: you don’t have to read a play 
to get such an atmosphere. A little more 
exciting is to create the atmosphere for 
“Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines”, 
“Romance”, “Trelawneyof the ‘Wells’”, 
“Pomander Walk”, “Disraeli”, and 
dramas of similar character. But better 
than all is to fit the room to specific 
characters. What is more awful than to 
decorate a room or a home beautifully, 
and to have walk into it a family that 
shrieks, that wants ribbon grass and red 
and pink roses and daisies in a delicate 
vase! Why buy yards of library, however 
well it looks on the wall, for those who 
never read books? 
From the Realist’s point of view, I 
suppose detail of stage set has been 
carried further by the Moscow Art 
Theatre than even by Belasco. But 
such minute furnishings as were shown, 
however crudely, in “The Cherry Or¬ 
chard”, had about them a personal value 
and a palpitant significance far deeper 
than the mere letter of their being there; 
and their multiplicity only added to the 
poignancy of their lemoval at the end. 
There is something to be said for such 
Realism which draws from the spirit. 
Now what has happened in the theater 
is this: the stage decorator is clearly 
demonstrating that our plays are not 
sufficiently atmospheric for him to do his 
best work in; that until richer plays are 
written, the scenic designer will have to 
show his own taste, rather than the taste 
of the play. Sutro’s old-fashioned, but 
well-constructed “The Laughing Lady” 
is the kind of play Pinero used to write 
twenty years ago; but Robert E. Jones 
has given it a stage set more nearly com¬ 
mensurate with the decorative require¬ 
ments of a better play. 
THE COST OF STAGE DECORATIONS 
Were rooms that you see on the stage 
real things, they would wreck the man¬ 
ager’s pocket book more quickly than you 
realize. As it is, production costs enough 
without adding to the expense. It is not 
necessary to fill the linen closets with 
linen, unless a door is to be opened and 
the audience asked especially to look in; 
even then, it is not necessary to have the 
finest linen. It is not necessary to show 
how man\' beautiful dresses the heroine 
has hung up in the closet whose presence 
is merely suggested. When you furnish a 
house you are after the real thing. What 
you buy is an investment. What the 
manager buys is a gamble. 
The moving picture, in its scenic real¬ 
ism, is much nearer life than the play. 
For the moving picture takes its char- 
(Continucd on page 100 ) 
I 
