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Others in Germany who have contributed to the new theatre are Starke, Fuchs and, of course, the well-known Reinhardt, who has produced not only the most intimate psychological plays on the stage of his smaller theatre in Berlin, but has also created the most monumental performances, such as that of " QEdipus Rex," in which hundreds of people took part, and which was witnessed by thousands of spectators at a single performance. And Reinhardt has not only produced a really marvelous variety of fine performances, including plays by Oscar Wilde, Wedekind, Gorky, Maeterlinck, Herman Bahr, Tolstoy, Bernard Shaw, Strind-berg, Shakespeare, Schnitzler, Tchekov, Ibsen, Singe, Moliere and countless others among the dramatists of all countries, ancient and modern, but he has also influenced the manipulation of the setting profoundly by the use of the revolving stage. This is circular in shape and permits four or five different scenes to be set up upon it at one time, each of them capable of
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being shown in turn by merely turning the central part of the stage around, and thus doing away with the long waits which have so often destroyed the interest of the audience and the continuity of the play.
The David Belasco of the English theatre was Sir Herbert Tree, and he and his followers were nearly as bitter toward the innovators, such as Granville Barker, as Mr. Belasco was originally to the Washington Square Players, at the time that I was acting as their consulting decorator. Mr. Barker produced a number of Shakespearian performances with an almost Elizabethan simplicity of stage, and all his work of the past dozen years has shown the influence of the whole modern continental movement. The Irish Players, also, possessed a certain modern tendency, without, however, developing anything new in the matter of stage settings.
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