Cross-aesthetic experiments and international trends

Max Reinhardt takes over Casino

In 1921, the entertainment magnate Frede Skaarup (1881-1942) brought the groundbreaking Austria-German director Max Reinhardt (1873-1943) to Copenhagen. It was an achievement that would leave its mark on the avant-garde of Danish theatre, such as actor and director Johannes Poulsen, playwright Kjeld Abell – and many more young theatre people of the time. At the otherwise light-hearted private theatre Casino, a six-day programme by Reinhardt's own troupe was first shown: Faust, Tordenluft, Stella, Kabale og kærlighed, Købmanden fra Venedig and Spøgelsessonaten. On March 4, 1921, Reinhardt premiered Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld , which was the talk of the town that season. In addition to massive press coverage of the rehearsal process with the Danish actors, where Reinhardt's methods were compared to those of the Russian avant-garde choreographer Fokins, both the audience and critics agreed: It was a huge success:

A milestone in theatre history that meets criticism

However, the non-realistic style did not really catch on. A tour through Holger Damgaard's theatre images shows that Danish theatre was largely dominated by a visual realism, just like the previous decade. When Edvard Gordon Craig (1872-1966), who had made a break with realism with his book The Art of the Theatre (1905), staged Ibsen's Kongs-Emnerne at Royal Danish Theatre in 1926, the production received scathing criticism in the daily press because it freed itself from Ibsen's Norse universe and instead worked expressively with light and shadow and scenic abstractions. The production is one of the few that Craig created and has later gone down in theatre history as a milestone.