In any case, in order to be able to discuss the condition of our theatre, one does not have to reside in the capital. The "provinces"—I place the word in quotation marks since there has never been a "province" in our culturally uncentralized country which corresponds to the bleak sense of the word in French—are not seldom to be taken more seriously in this respect than that gigantic market place in the North. This fact is also known to our dramatic authors, who are certainly not so keen as formerly on having their premiéres in Berlin, but often give preference to one of the smaller state or even city theatres. As to the South-German Centrum, as to Munich, it really never was, in the truest sense of the word, a theatrical city, any more than it was ever a literary city, or more accurately, any more than it was ever a city in which intellectual concerns could lay claim to any special domestic privileges. Yet is it an art city? Certainly; or essentially not so much a city of art as a city of the higher applied arts, of an art which is employed for festivity and is primarily decorative. The Munich type of artist is not the intellectual type; rather, he is a cheerful fellow of sensuous culture, with the instincts of a born arranger of feasts and carnivals. This trait, it will be objected, should be an asset to the art of the theatre in Munich. It is an asset. The Munich Künstlertheater stood for the most complete expression of everything which is meant here by dramatic art. The designer was absolute master in the house, the piece an opportunity to display a culture of applied arts, the actor a spot of colour. The scenic artist forbade the red-robed king in Hamlet from kneeling to make his prayer which never to heaven went. He had to stand upright, and precisely because the artist, as he declared, "needed the red vertical line." That is Munich. In As You Like It, Olivia, on whose very antipathy for the colour yellow the funniest scene of the play is based, wears a canary-yellow dress during the entire evening. This had suited the artist from the colouristic standpoint, and the good man had quite frankly not read the play. That is Munich.
It is not always so bad as that, but what really interests Munich in the theatre is neither the word nor the play, nothing intellectual, that is, but the incidental of the plastic arts. This is even true of our most literary theatre, the Kammerspiele which, under its artistic director Otto Falkenberg, is often able to captivate powerfully the theatre lover. I recently saw there a comedy by the lyric writer Josef von Eichendorff, Die Freier. The evening was stimulating
