The Beginning of Ensemble Acting and the Theater Laws in Late Eighteenth-Century Germany

Abstract

In Germany, the movement to establish theater whose production was based on scripts began to replace improvisational theatre in the eighteenth century. The process naturally presupposed ensemble acting as an ideal of acting, which required all the actors and actresses to share an understanding of the script and to work cooperatively according to a certain artistic principle. In the history of theater, it has generally been said that ensemble acting was established in the second half of the nineteenth century by such theater companies as the one in Saxe-Meiningen under Georg II or the Moscow Art Theater under Constantin Stanislavski. However, we can find the beginnings of ensemble acting in late eighteenth-century Germany. To prove this, in this paper we use theater laws as the main historical documents, and analyze the ideas and practices of Conrad Ekhof (1720-78), who pioneered ensemble acting. We clarify that his ideas of ensemble acting were taken over by the theater companies of his disciples and sympathizers such as those in the Mannheim National Theater and Hamburg Theater, whose theater managers also required their actors and actresses to do systematized rehearsal for ensemble acting. Indeed, by the end of the century, ensemble acting had become necessary because playwrights began to depict individual characters with multiple psychological layers. In addition, playwrights and theater managers needed to overcome the traditional system of “Fach,” or typical roles, and the players were also required to react to the other characters’ words and actions with appropriate gestures and facial expressions even when the scene was silent.