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DAVID F. KUHNS. German Expressionist Theatre: The Actor and the Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1997. PP. 311. $64-95
Here, finally, is a book-length study in English of acting in the short-lived but influential theatrical movement of German Expressionism. The book begins to fill a hole in a field where issues of playwriting, scenography, and social, political, and cultural climate have been examined thoughtfully at times, but with little consideration of the challenges faced by performers, who, Kuhns argues, served as the embodying agents of ideas of historical crisis.
Kuhns describes three modes of expressionist acting: Schrei, ecstatic performance, found in the earliest expressionist productions, occurring mostly in Dresden, Munich, and the provincial theatres; Geist, abstraction, concentrated within the Sturm-Buhne/Kampf-buhne coterie directed by Lothar Schreyer in Berlin and Hamburg; and the Emblematic mode of late Berlin Expressionism.
The chief objective of the Schrei drama was emotional expression of both horror at bourgeois institutions and empathy for all human suffering. Dualities as basic as Pascal's opposition of angel and animal were explored and synthesized in ecstatic gesture and speech. In practice, such synthesis required precision...