141. Ermete Zacconi

Guest performance at the Neues Theater, Berlin

The Italians currently call Ermete Zacconi their greatest actor. For a few days now, we have been seeing him every day at the Neues Theater in Berlin. Before that, he did a guest performance at the Carl Theater in Vienna. The news we received about this guest performance from Vienna bordered on the unbelievable. Not since Duse had thrilled the art community in the city on the Danube had anything similar been experienced there. People fell into a delirium when they saw Zacconi. Eight days ago, a Viennese theater critic wrote in this magazine that for weeks, while Zacconi was with them, the theater-goers of Vienna were preoccupied with the question: what is the secret of the great actor? Now we have also seen him here in Berlin. His first role was that of Oswald in the "Ghosts". The message of the Viennese delirium had so little effect on the Berliners that on the third day of his guest performance, when he played Oswald for the third time, Zacconi produced himself in front of empty benches. And there was absolutely no sign of any excitement about the question: what is the secret of the great actor? And I must confess that I, too, cannot quite understand the excitement in Vienna. Zacconi has taught me only one thing. When the art of acting emancipates itself from drama and appears obtrusive and self-important to us, it becomes repulsive. We want the actor to carry out the poet's intentions. We call an actor great when he succeeds in bringing the poet's intentions to the stage in the purest, most unadulterated way. This is the secret of the great actor for anyone of understanding. There is no other. Zacconi has not given us the slightest explanation of this problem. Basically, his art has nothing to do with this kind of acting. It is ridiculous to argue about whether Zacconi is a great actor in the sense that he aspires to be. He is not interested in poetry. He has become acquainted with Ibsen's drama "Ghosts". He has seen that there is a paralytic in it. Now he plays the course of the paralysis in a masterly way. The way in which he portrays the development of this illness in all its phases is of indescribable perfection. Probably nothing better can be created on stage in this direction. He portrays paralysis in ideal perfection, just as Goethe portrays the type of the noble woman in Iphigenia. He elevates a clinical image to a work of art. 'But Ibsen's drama is none of Zacconi's business. Zacconi is indifferent to what happens in this drama apart from Oswald going mad. The whole plot could go differently than Ibsen portrays it: Zacconi would play everything the way he plays it after all, if only one thing were certain, that Oswald is a paralytic. One could become angry when one sees how the intrusive art of the comedian deals with great poetry. But you don't get angry. And that is the strange thing about Zacconi. His art is again so great that you are drawn into its spell. It is so great that one forgives even his acts of violence towards poets. One says to oneself: Ibsen's Oswald is not portrayed by Zacconi. But what Zacconi portrays is interesting in every turn. You follow every word, every gesture, every movement with the most rapt attention. You say to yourself, if an actor can do something so important, let's enjoy him for once, even if he moves in the wrong direction. Zacconi is also forgiven for appearing in the worst possible plays. Where we are not interested in the poet, we are genuinely interested in the actor.

I was curious about Zacconi as Kean. I told myself I was dealing with an actor who was nothing more than an actor, a comedian. In the silly play "Kean", Zacconi had to play a comedian. I thought that must be his best role. It will show what he can actually do. The actor as a human being, I thought, is what he will bring to the stage. What the comedian suffers and what joys he feels, that's what Zacconi will portray, I thought. And strange! It was precisely as Kean that I liked Zacconi the least. He doesn't portray the actor as a human being, but as an actor. Zacconi's Kean is not only acting when he plays Hamlet on stage; he is also acting when he talks to members of high society in the drawing room; he is also acting when he receives visits from his lovers in his dressing room. In Kean, Zacconi has revealed his nature. He has given his whole personality to the art of comedy. His individuality, his soul, has been absorbed into this art and has completely disappeared. He is no longer human at all; he is just a comedian. And he is a comedian in everything he brings to the stage. That's why we admire his tricks, but we are never moved, never enraptured. We try to figure out how he does this and that, but that's as far as our feelings towards him go. He does not depict human actions, but soulless images of these actions.

Zacconi's acting is an independent art. And an art that loses all justification in this independence. Poets could not write dramas for the stage if all actors played the way Zacconi plays. They would only have to write instructions for the actors. Ibsen should not have written his "Ghosts", but the general outline of a plot in which a paralytic appears. He should have left it to the brilliant actor to carry out this plot in detail. As long as playwrights create as they do at present, Zacconi's way makes no sense.