Theatre Design & Technology - Winter 1991 - 20

It was for this stage that Robert Redingron Sharpe designed
22 productions in the next 11 months during the most
sustained period of productivity in his shorr career,
experimenting with every kind of setting in every kind of style:
realistic, expressionistic, detailed, simplified, sculptural,
painterly, period, futuristic. Sharpe brought visual distinction
ro the Pasadena Community Playhouse in its first year in the
theatre it was ro occupy for the next 45 years, setting a high
standard for the position that many distinguished designers,
including Janis Muncis, were ro occupy.
By the winter of 1926, Sharpe was "slightly weary of the
American way of doing things." He had setrled into a
comfortable life, bustling with work and enjoyable sociery, bur
as satisfYing as it was for his ego, it was not very good for his
art. He was, after all, only 21 and ambitious for adventure.
Several of his friends had gone ro Europe, so he decided he
would give up the security of Pasadena and spend a year or two
poking around on the Continent.
Only once in his career was Sharpe's genius for pageantry
and oriental splendor truly fulfilled. Fittingly enough, it was his
valedicrory production for the Pasadena Communiry Playhouse
where his talents were best recognized. The production was
Hassan, the achievement that initiated his connection with the
Harvard Theatre Collection. Robert Gould Shaw saw Hassan
by chance, but he could not have chosen a more representative,
more rotally realized example of Sharpe's work if he had been
able ro survey the designer's entire career. Here was an
appropriate canvas for Sharpe's riorous color imagination and
his passion for visual lushness. His 26 cosrume drawings in
opaque watercolor embellished with gold and silver are his
loveliest. The colors, shapes and decorations dazzle in brilliance
and variery.
After the Hassan dress rehearsal, there was a parry in the
Green Room, a check and a letter of appreciation from the
Governing Board and then Sharpe was off ro a new life.

s.s.

e sailed from ew York on the
Lancastria at
midnight on 30 April 1926. When he arrived in
Paris, he established himself in a hotel on the Rue
Campagne-Premiere and set abour absorbing all
that the museums and monuments, theatres and music-halls,
cafes and nightclubs, resorts and retreats of Europe could offer.
He got a design job here and there, did an illustration or two,
worked on sketches and projects and rook phorographs. He
met the right people and got his name in the society columns.
He saw Josephine Baker at the Follies Bergeres and Mistinguett
at the Moulin Rouge. Georges Piroeff gave him tickets for the
Theatre des Arts and Gasron Baty complimented him on his
designs for Salome.
After almost a year in Paris, Sharpe decided that Germany
was more in the lead in methods of production and scene
design. So at the end of March 1927, he left for Berlin without
knowing a word of German and with only $25 and a letter of
introduction from Firmin Gemier of the Theatre National de
I'Odeon.
His arrival in Berlin did not augur well. He came in on a
night train and expected ro srop at a major terminal. When the
train seemed ro be passing through the city withour coming ro
a terminal, he got off in desperation at a station in the slums of
the Alexanderplarz and spent his first night in a dingy, spiderinfested hotel. From that i11-omened beginning, Sharpe spent
exactly one year ro the day in Germany. It was, he wrote in his
diary, a year of "much unhappiness but great advance" in his

1991

WINTER

TD&T

work. He discovered that an unfavorable rate of exchange and
high prices made his meager finances even more precarious. He
found very little work and fewer friends and frequently went
hungry.
He went ro the theatre or the opera abour once a week. He
was fascinated with the technical proficiency of the German
theatre and experimented in his own sketches with the spare,
constructivist style he was observing. From the drawings,
however, it is clear that the style did not suit him, since form
and spatiality were never his great interests. His German
drawings are dutiful attempts with no inner conviction.
His best work in Germany, and one of his loveliest sets of
renderings, was a project for the Debussy opera Pelleas and
Melisande. It is in his romantic style, here softened and
saddened by the mood of the opera and his own loneliness.
There are 12 scenes, an act curtain and a false proscenium
painted in delicate watercolor washes. The proscenium depicts
the walls of a fairy-tale castle, with tWO turrets on ei ther side
and a pointed arch in the center. The arch serves as an inner
proscenium opening in which ro hang the act curtain and
drops.
The fragile charm of Sharpe's Felleas and Melisande had no
appeal in raucous Berlin. Sharpe was quite annoyed with the
mania for politicized, anti-decorative theatre and struck back
with a witty parody that he called "Felleas and Melisande as
Piscaror would do it, Berlin."
In the lower right hand corner of the picrure I myself am
found with one of my actual designs; Erwin Kaiser is
saying "Kunstegewerbische," [sic] which means "roo
decorative" and ornamental. So in the center of the
structural setting we find poor Melisande clinging ro a
bell which is clanging loudly; she cries "Je ne suis pas
heureuse"; her lovely long hair is cut from an English
adverrisement for dandruff. Golaud has become a bloated
Capitalist; he is pinching her leg with a cruel pincers,
saying "Zut! vous n'etes qu'un enfanr." Above, the
Proletariat-workers comero the rescue, armed with a red
flag and maces; Pelleas leads them in his underdrawers,
carrying a bomb and saying, "Fireman, save my child i "
The most amusing thing of all about this picture is that
the Germans did not know it was a parody, but thought it
an excellent stage-design!
n the summer, Sharpe traveled throughout Germany,
Austria and Czechoslovakia and then, homesick and tired
of living from hand ro mouth, he began ro think about
returning ro America, even ro Pasadena.
In
Ocrober 1927, however, he got a commission for a revue called
HaIlS im Gliick at the Theater am KurFurstendamm and then
became supervising art direcror there, which carried him
through the winter.
But it was time ro rerum to America. He was out of temper
with the times in Berlin, unable ro penerrate the established
theatres and unwilling ro apprehend the revolutionary
theatrical ferment going on around them. He saw Piscaror's
Good Soldier SclJlveik with settings by George Grosz in January
1928 and it apparently had no effect on him. In Pasadena there
had been a wholesome artistic innocence that accepted Sharpe
as a 19-year-old genius. In Berlin he was just another designer
and not a terribly original one at that.
Sharpe sailed from Cherbourg on April 12, feeling, he wrote
in his diary, "not like an American returning home, but an

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Winter 1991