Encyclopaedia Britannica Online
Theatre
art
Alternative Title: drama
Table of Contents
Introduction
General considerations
Theatre as expression
Elements of theatre
The place of theatre in contemporary life
Theatre, also spelled theater, in dramatic arts, an art concerned almost exclusively with live performances in which the action is precisely planned to create a coherent and significant sense of drama.
Though the word theatre is derived from the Greek theaomai, “to see,” the performance itself may appeal either to the ear or to the eye, as is suggested by the interchangeability of the terms spectator (which derives from words meaning “to view”) and audience (which derives from words meaning “to hear”). Sometimes the appeal is strongly intellectual, as in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but the intellectual element in itself is no assurance of good theatre. A good performance of Hamlet, for example, is extremely difficult to achieve, and a poor one is much less rewarding than a brilliant presentation of a farce. Moreover, a good Hamlet makes demands on the spectator that may be greater than what that spectator is prepared to put forward, while the farce may be enjoyed in a condition of comparative relaxation. The full participation of the spectator is a vital element in theatre.
There is a widespread misconception that the art of theatre can be discussed solely in terms of the intellectual content of the script. Theatre is not essentially a literary art, though it has been so taught in some universities and schools. For many years the works of the Greek dramatists, Shakespeare, and other significant writers such as Friedrich von Schiller were more likely to be studied than performed in their entirety. The literary side of a theatrical production works most effectively when it is subordinated to the histrionic. The strongest impact on the audience is made by acting, singing, and dancing, followed by spectacle—the background against which those activities take place. Later, on reflection, the spectator may find that the meaning of the text has made the more enduring impression, but more often the literary merit of the script, or its “message,” is a comparatively minor element.
Yet it is often assumed that the theatrical experience can be assimilated by reading the text of a play. In part, this is a result of the influence of theatrical critics, who, as writers, tend to have a literary orientation. Their influence is magnified by the fact that it is difficult to make serious theatre widely available; for each person who sees an important production in a theatre, thousands of others will know it only through the notices of critics. While reviewers in the mainstream press may give greater credence to such elements as acting and dancing, critics in the more serious journals may be more interested in textual and thematic values. Such influences vary from country to country, of course. In New York City a critic for one newspaper, such as The New York Times, may determine the fate and historical record of a production, assuring it a successful run or forcing it to close overnight. In London, however, audiences have notoriously resisted the will of the critics.
This is not to say that the contribution of the author to the theatrical experience is unimportant. The script of a play is the basic element of theatrical performance. In the case of many masterpieces it is the most important element. But even these dramatic masterpieces demand the creative cooperation of artists other than the author. The dramatic script, like an operatic score or the scenario of a ballet, is no more than the raw material from which the performance is created. The actors, rather than merely reflecting a creation that has already been fully expressed in the script, give body, voice, and imagination to what was only a shadowy indication in the text. The text of a play is as vague and incomplete in relation to a fully realized performance as is a musical score to a concert. The Hamlets of two great actors probably differ more than two virtuoso renditions of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations possibly can. In general, the truly memorable theatrical experience is one in which the various elements of performance are brought into a purposeful harmony. It is a performance in which the text has revealed its meanings and intentions through skillful acting in an environment designed with the appropriate measure of beauty or visual impact.
This article contains a treatment of the art of theatre in the most general terms, an attempt to illuminate what it is and why it has been regarded as a fundamental human activity throughout history. An extensive treatment of the elements of theatre can be found in theatrical production. For the relationship of theatre to music and dance, see theatre music, opera, and dance. For historical treatment of Western theatre, see Western theatre. The theatrical traditions of other cultures of the world are considered in articles such as African theatre, East Asian arts, Islamic arts, South Asian arts, and Southeast Asian arts. For a general survey of dramatic literature and its tragic and comic forms, see dramatic literature. Dramatic literature is also treated in articles on the literatures of particular languages, nations, or regions—e.g., African literature, Belgian literature, English literature, French literature, German literature, Russian literature, and so on. General considerations
Exactly how the theatre came into being is not known. While it is indisputable that the traditions born in ancient Athens have dominated Western theatre and the theories of Western drama up to the present, it is impossible to state with certainty what the theatre was like even a few years before the appearance of Aeschylus’s earliest extant play, Persians (472 bce). Legend attributes the invention of the dithyramb, the lyrical ancestor of tragedy, to the poet Arion of Lesbos in the 7th or 6th century bce, but it was not until the creation of the Great Dionysia in Athens in 534 that tragic drama established itself. The Dionysiac festivals were held in honour of Dionysus, a god concerned with fertility, wine, and prophecy. Dionysiac celebrations, held in the spring, were traditionally occasions for frenzy, sexual license, and ecstatic behaviour welcoming the return of fertility to the land after the winter (reflected dramatically in the Bacchants by Euripides). The Great Dionysia was a more formal affair, with its competition in tragedy, but its religious purpose is often cited as a pointer to the origin of drama itself.
In the theories that see drama as a development from primitive religious rites, the dramatist is often described as a descendant of the priest. Theatrical representation could have arisen first from the substitution of an animal for a human sacrifice, say, a goat for a virgin or a young warrior. In time, the formula of the sacrifice might have been enacted ritualistically without the actual sacrifice of the animal. (The word tragedy is descended from the Greek tragōidia, meaning “song of the goats.”)
Considered in such a way, the most famous of Greek tragedies, Oedipus the King by Sophocles, can be seen as a formalistic representation of human sacrifice. Oedipus becomes a dramatic embodiment of guilt; his blinding and agony are necessary for the good of all Thebes, because it was by killing his father and marrying his mother that he first brought the gods’ curse upon his people. Aristotle felt that the representation on stage of Oedipus’s suffering was a means of catharsis—vicarious purgation or cleansing—for the spectators.
However, other explanations for the origin of drama have been offered. Mimesis, the artistic representation or imitation of an event, has been discerned in such rituals as war dances, which are intended to frighten the enemy and instill courage into the hearts of the participants. These dances may imitate the action of battle itself, or at least the way in which the participants hope to see the battle develop.
The origins of drama have also been attributed to simple storytelling, as when the storyteller adopts a false voice or adds characterization through movement and costume. In such terms, the art of theatre could be described at its most fundamental as the presence of an actor before an audience.
Whatever the primary motivation, the first systematic elaboration of theatre can be seen through the work of the Greek playwrights of 5th-century-bce Athens. Aeschylus apparently inherited a form that consisted of a single actor responding to or leading a chorus. His innovation is generally considered to have been the use of a second actor, and it was either Aeschylus or Sophocles who added a third actor as they competed each year for prizes in the Great Dionysia. Once a third actor appeared, the chorus gradually declined, and it was the multiplying individual characters who assumed importance. In this way, ancient Greece left to posterity a measure of specialization among theatrical performers.
Beyond these formal elements, however, Classical drama offers a pattern of development that has been reenacted continually in other cultures throughout history. The rapid rise and decline of drama in ancient Athens paralleled the rise and decline of Athenian civilization itself. Great periods of achievement in theatre have tended to coincide with periods of national expansion and achievement, as in Elizabethan England. Conversely, periods of excessive materialism, such as those during which ancient Greece or ancient Rome declined, tend to produce theatre in which ostentation, spectacle, and vulgarity predominate.
Probably more than in other arts, each theatrical style represents an amalgamation of diverse heritages. Greek theatre has long had the most direct influence on Western culture, but in the late 20th century Balinese and Japanese arts were frequently adapted in the West. Chinese and Indian theatrical practices have had wide influence in Asia. A fundamental difference between borrowings from Greek theatre and borrowings from Asian traditions is that the techniques of Greek performance have not been handed down with the texts. Most of what is known about the actual performance of Greek plays is the result of scholarly and archaeological research. Information about the nature of the music and of choral dances, for example, is very skimpy.
In Asian theatre, on the other hand, techniques as well as texts have survived. For example, the Noh theatre of Japan has been handed down through families of performers with few changes for hundreds of years. In addition to the instructions for performers contained in India’s Natya-shastra, there is a major descriptive treatise on music, giving guidance on musical techniques. The Natya-shastra, which may be as old as Aristotle’s Poetics (4th century bce), is a book with very specific injunctions to performers, including dancers. Some of its techniques may be found in surviving theatre forms such as the Indian kathakali dance. In turn, some of these techniques were assimilated during the second half of the 20th century by such Western directors as Jerzy Grotowski, Peter Brook, and Eugenio Barba. Other writers and directors created new relationships between Eastern and Western theatre by consciously exploiting techniques and traditions from such forms as Kabuki and Noh.
There is little doubt that the Greek theatre—and especially the study of its literature—has provided Western theatre with a sense of continuity in stories, themes, and formal styles. The plays themselves are regularly revived, with discernible references to specifically modern concerns. It is also notable that the Greek theatre has served as a model for a wide range of great writers, from Jean Racine and Pierre Corneille in 17th-century France to Eugene O’Neill in the United States during the 20th century. When Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) touched its audiences with awe and pity in the manner of Aristotle’s prescriptions, critics debated whether the play could be genuinely tragic in the Greek sense, given that it had no nobler a protagonist than the salesman Willy Loman. Theatre as expression Mimesis in theatre
The art of the theatre is essentially one of make-believe, or mimesis. In this respect it differs from music, which seldom attempts to imitate “real” sounds—except in so-called program music, such as Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, which suggests the sounds of a battle. In this respect the art of narrative in literature is much closer to that of the theatre. In a story, considerable attention must be paid to plausibility. Even if the story is not intended to be believed as having actually happened, plausibility is essential if the story is to hold the auditor’s attention. The principal factor in plausibility is not precise correspondence with known facts but inner consistency in the story itself.
Drama also requires plausibility, but in drama it must be conveyed not by a narrator but by the actors’ ability to make the audience “believe in” their speech, movement, thoughts, and feelings. This plausibility is based on the connection between the impression made by the actors and the preconceptions of the auditors. If the character Hamlet is to be plausible, the actor must make an audience believe that Hamlet could conceivably be as he is presented. This does not mean that the actor must make the audience believe that he (or she) literally is Hamlet, merely that he is plausibly and consistently making-believe to be Hamlet. The aim of a performance is not to persuade spectators that a palpable fiction is fact, that they are “really” there, out on those bitterly cold battlements of Hamlet’s castle at Elsinore. Indeed, they are far freer to appreciate the play and to think about it if they are not “really” present. Knowing all the time that it is a figment, they are willing to enter into the make-believe, to be transported, if it is sufficiently convincing. Yet they know that, however thrilling or pleasurable the rapture, it may be shattered at any moment by some ineptitude or mistake on the stage or by a coughing neighbour in the audience.
That is the basic rule, or convention, of the make-believe of the theatre. The actor breaks the basic rule of the game if he forgets his words, or laughs at private jokes, or is simply incompetent, or is unsuited to his part. No modern audience can accept a vulgar, lumpish, elderly Hamlet, because Hamlet is a young prince whose lines are consistently thoughtful and witty. Yet it is not necessary that the actor playing Hamlet should “really” be all these things; he need only give the impression of being princely, witty, elegant, and young enough to sustain the credulity of the people sharing the make-believe. That credulity can extend a considerable way; the actress Sarah Bernhardt played Hamlet several times in her old age.
Sarah Bernhardt in the title role of Hamlet, lithograph poster by Alphonse Mucha for a French production of the play.The Granger Collection, New York
Thus, in every performance there must be realism in some degree. At certain epochs and in certain kinds of plays, the aim has been to be as realistic as possible. But even the most realistic production (e.g., Anton Chekhov’s play The Cherry Orchard as first produced by Konstantin Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1904) made immense concessions to theatrical artifice. Conversation in real life often leads nowhere; it is full of inconclusive, meaningless, boring passages. It does not necessarily attempt, as every word in Chekhov’s play must, to fit into a story, to be part of the expression of a theme, or to introduce and reveal a group of characters.
Though most commercial, light comedies continue to be written and acted realistically, realistic theatre fell out of fashion in the first half of the 20th century in response to a host of avant-garde theatrical experiments and the advent of motion pictures. Just as realistic painting declined when photographs began to achieve similar effects mechanically, so did staging that attempted to reproduce the actual world in every detail lose artistic status when such effects became commonplace in films.
Even before the introduction of motion pictures, the theatre was moving toward extravagantly nonrealistic theatrical effects, from the puppet-inspired theatre of Alfred Jarry, author of Ubu roi (1896; “King Ubu”), to the Symbolist dramas of Maurice Maeterlinck, the concept of the Übermarionette (“Superior Puppet”) developed by Edward Gordon Craig, and theatrical Surrealism. The most unrealistic productions, however, inevitably retained certain realistic features; the actors still had to be human, no matter how fantastic the script and settings might be. Theatre as social expression
In different contexts, various aspects of humanity have seemed important and have therefore been stressed in Western theatrical representation. Much Renaissance drama, for instance, emphasized the individuality of each character, while in later 17th-century theatre, which was much more restricted in its philosophy and in its setting, a character was presented not as a creature who occupied a unique place and status in the universe but rather as someone adapted to and determined by the quite limited environment of 17th-century society. The greatness of the Elizabethan theatre was the universality of its outlook and the breadth of its appeal. Since the latter part of the 17th century, the art of the theatre has been concerned with smaller themes and has aimed at a smaller section of society.
From the 17th through the 18th century, the theatre’s leading characters were almost exclusively persons of breeding and position; the “lower classes” appeared as servants and dependents, mostly presented in low comedy. Rustics were almost automatically ridiculous, although sometimes their simplicity might be endearing or pathetic. The 17th-century plays of Molière are a good deal more egalitarian than English plays of similar date or even of a century later; but even Molière never allowed the audience to forget that his plays were about, and for, persons of high station. A very clear line is drawn between employers and employed in these plays, and the latter, though often more intelligent, never seem to belong to even the same species as the former. However, such English plays as John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728) and George Lillo’s The London Merchant; or, The History of George Barnwell (1731) were influential and theatrical successes that stood out against the norm.
By the early 19th century, European theatre had become at least as much a middle-class as an aristocratic entertainment. Nevertheless, it was still thought important, especially in London, that the actors suggest gentility. George Bernard Shaw, in Our Theatres in the Nineties (1932), remarked that, to be employed in a good production, it was far less important that a young actor be talented than that he speak “well” and be beautifully dressed. The plays that succeeded throughout Europe were plays about men and women of good social position, and the plots were concerned with some infringement, usually sexual, of the genteel code of behaviour; The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (1893) by Arthur Wing Pinero is an example. The melodrama that dominated 19th-century European (and especially British) theatre championed the values of the middle class. However, the new literary drama of Henrik Ibsen that emerged during the second half of the century challenged those values.
After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Soviet theatre broke with gentility. The heroes and heroines of Soviet theatre were muscular, idealistic workers. In western Europe, however, gentility continued in the 1920s and ’30s to be the dominant aim of the fashionable theatre. In New York City it received a setback at the time of the Great Depression of the 1930s. At a famous series of productions at the Group Theatre, the director Harold Clurman was in conscious revolt against the oppressive bourgeois gentility of the day. The Group Theatre was not spectacularly successful, however, and it stayed in existence for no more than a few years.
In Europe after World War II, the theatre made more-concerted efforts to reflect and to interest a wider section of society. By that time, however, audiences at all levels had lost the habit of theatregoing and were fast losing the habit of moviegoing, as television was becoming the popular medium of drama—indeed, of all entertainment. Theatre began to be directed not to any one class in society or to any one income group but rather to anyone who was prepared for the energetic collaboration in the creative act that the art demands. By the end of the 20th century, the emergence of digital technologies that enabled the use of high-quality recorded video and sound in theatres had sparked a debate over the “liveness” of theatre and whether the nature of theatre itself had become fundamentally altered by these technologies. Elements of theatre The theatrical hierarchy
Theatrical art demands the collaboration of the actors with one another, with a director, with the various technical workers upon whom they depend for costumes, scenery, and lighting, and with the businesspeople who finance, organize, advertise, and sell the product.
Collaboration among so many types of personnel presupposes a system that divides duties. In the commercial theatre the most powerful person is usually the producer, who is responsible for acquiring the investment that finances the production. The rehearsal of the play is conducted by the director, who is responsible for interpreting the script, for casting, and for helping to determine the design of the scenery and costumes. Under the director’s general direction, a stage manager, possibly with several assistants, looks after the organization of rehearsal and the technical elements of the performance—light and curtain cues, properties, sound effects, and so on.
Naturally, the hierarchy varies somewhat in different circumstances. In the state-subsidized Royal National Theatre of Great Britain, for example, the apex of the pyramid has traditionally been occupied by an artistic director, who is more concerned with guiding the policy of the theatre than with details of administration or the preparation of any single production—though the artistic director may, of course, also assume responsibility for the preparation of a number of productions. In regional theatres, implementation of artistic policy may be subordinate to a board of directors that is ultimately responsible for overseeing costs.
The dominant expression—so far as the audience can tell—is nearly always that of the actor. It may therefore be wondered why theatres are no longer dominated by the actor-manager system, as they were during the 19th century in Europe and the United States. In London, for example, Sir Henry Irving managed the Lyceum for 21 years (1878–99) as its artistic director, administrator, producer-director, and leading actor. After Irving’s day, theatrical business became infinitely more costly and complicated. Budgets in Irving’s time were only a fraction of what they are today. A single Broadway musical can now cost many millions of dollars, while the running costs of organizations such as the Royal Shakespeare Company are tens of millions of pounds each year. In addition, negotiations with trade unions make oversight of a theatre significantly more complicated.
Although the leading actor seems to dominate a performance completely, that actor is often only a mouthpiece: the words spoken so splendidly were written by someone else; the tailor and wigmaker must take some credit for the actor’s appearance; and that the actor should play the part at all was usually the idea of a producer or director.
Even before the actors assemble for the first rehearsal, the producer, director, designer, and—if available—the author have conferred on many important decisions, such as the casting and the design of scenery and clothes. In the commercial theatre, the capacity of the theatre that is selected and the anticipated number of the show’s performances determine the budget and therefore the scale of the production. (Different considerations affect the planning of programs in the subsidized theatre, including responsibility to new writing, to the national heritage, and to a balanced repertoire.) Certainly the most lively part of the work still lies in the period of rehearsal, but much of the artistic imprint has been determined before rehearsals. The role of the audience
The theatre depends more than most arts upon audience response. If the house is not full, not only does the performance lose money but it also loses force. It is unusual—but not impossible—for new ideas, even for new ways of expressing old ideas, to achieve wide commercial success. With few exceptions, people apparently do not go to the theatre to receive new ideas; they want the thrilling, amusing, or moving expression of old ones.
If a performance is going well, the members of its audience tend to engage in collective behaviour that subordinates their separate identities to that of the crowd. This phenomenon can be observed not only at the theatre but also at concerts, bullfights, and prizefights. The crowd personality is never as rational as the sum of its members’ intelligence, and it is much more emotional. Members of an audience lose their powers of independent thought; unexpected reserves of passion come into play. Laughter becomes infectious; grave and solid citizens, as members of an audience, can be rendered helpless with mirth by jests that would leave them unmoved if they were alone.
While an audience may typically be a passive participant in a modern theatrical performance, this norm is neither universal nor transhistorical. Until the late 19th century, when auditoriums were first darkened, audiences were highly responsive, demonstrating disapproval as boisterously as approval. This type of involvement is still evident in British pantomime, which is produced annually during the Christmas season. During the 20th century, audience passivity was challenged through the theories of drama associated with Bertolt Brecht and Augusto Boal and through the breaking of various social codes, as occurred in the Théâtre Action in France or the Théâtre Parminou in Quebec. Such interactive relations with the fictional stage world—either bringing audience members onstage to interrupt and redirect action or involving the public unwittingly as witness to a theatre event—are typically engineered to challenge individuals’ political beliefs as well as a society’s norms. The effect of theatre structure
From the 17th to the early 20th century, few dreamed of building a theatre in other than the traditional proscenium style. This style consists of a horseshoe shape or rounded auditorium in several tiers facing the stage, from which it is divided by an arch—the proscenium—which supports the curtain. Behind the curtain the backstage machinery facilitates quick changes of illusionistic scenery. This type of theatre was developed for Italian opera in the 17th century. From the proscenium theatre’s introduction, productions of plays of all themes have tended to exploit the audience’s pleasure in its dollhouse realism.
The theatre of the Auditorium Building, Chicago, by Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan (1889), a horseshoe-shaped theatre with a proscenium stage.Elliott Erwitt/Magnum
Whereas today’s proscenium theatre separates the audience from the performers, the theatres of Elizabethan England and 16th- and 17th-century Spain were open stages (also called thrust stages), structured so that the actors performed in the very midst of their audience. English theatres had evolved from the courtyards of inns, while Spanish theatres took corrales (courtyards enclosed by the backs of several houses) as their model; in both a raised platform was erected for a stage. Some members of the audience stood around it while others watched from windows and galleries surrounding the courtyard.
In the early years of the 20th century, the English actor-manager William Poel suggested that Shakespeare should be staged so as to relate the performers and the audience as they had been on the Elizabethan stage. His ideas slowly gained in influence, and in 1953 just such a stage, with no curtain and with the audience sitting on three sides of it, was built for the Stratford Shakespearean Festival in Ontario, Can. A considerable success, it had a strong influence on subsequent theatre design. The Globe Theatre was rebuilt in London in the 1990s along even more rigorous reconstructive principles.
Celebratory performance marking the opening of the Globe Theatre in London, June 12, 1997.ROTA/AP Images
The open stage proved suitable not only for Elizabethan plays but also for a wide repertoire. It will probably never completely replace the proscenium, which remains more suitable for the countless plays that were written with such a stage in mind, including the highly artificial comedies of Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Oscar Wilde. On the other hand, the more realistic plays of Ibsen, Shaw, and Chekhov, all written for the proscenium theatre, lend themselves well to the open stage.
There are a number of reasons for preferring the open stage. First, more people can be accommodated in a given space if arranged around the stage instead of just in front of it. This is important not merely for the economic advantage of a larger capacity but also for artistic reasons—the closely packed audience generates more concentration and a greater sense of unity.
A second reason for preferring the open stage is that the actors are nearer to more of their audience and can therefore be better heard and seen. This point is contested by adherents of the proscenium stage, who claim that the actor at any given moment must have his back turned to a large part of the house and, as a result, must be more difficult to see and hear. If the open stage is used efficiently, however, the actor’s back will never be turned to anyone for more than a few seconds at a time. Likewise, an open stage allows actors to be more aware of their audience.
After the arguments for the open stage were first made and gained popularity after the middle of the 20th century, many theatres—such as the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C.—were designed “in the round” so that the audience completely surrounded the stage. Other theatres followed the example of Grotowski’s Polish Laboratory Theatre by taking as the starting point an “empty room,” in which a different environment may be constructed for each production, radically altering the relationship between actors and audience for each play. The proliferation of “black box” spaces from the 1960s onward demonstrates the popularity of this configuration, in which a neutral space—a theatrical tabula rasa—can be, through spatial reconfiguration and minimal scenic detail, redesignated again and again in infinite variety.
The proscenium has come to be associated so closely with creating “illusion” that, its critics argue, it has led to a misconception about the function of drama and to a misdirection of the energies of dramatists, players, and audiences. A single-minded attempt by the actors to create, or by the audience to undergo, illusion reduces drama to a form of deception. By the end of the 20th century, proscenium theatre had become a term used to denigrate an art form dominated by bourgeois aesthetics and dismissed as not innovative.
The art of the theatre is concerned with something more significant than creating the illusion that a series of quite obviously contrived events are “really” happening. King Lear is far more complex and interesting than that. Art is concerned not with deception but with enlightenment. The painter’s art helps its audience to see and the musician’s art helps it to hear in a more enlightened way: Rembrandt and Bach are trying not to deceive their audiences but to express and to share their deepest thoughts and feelings. Similarly, the art of the theatre is concerned with expressing the most profound thoughts and feelings of the performers about the story they are enacting, so that the audience may partake in the ritual event. The actual configuration of the stage and audience spaces may be less important in this respect than the performances themselves. The influence of writing and scholarship
Like the other arts, the theatre has been the subject of a great deal of theoretical and philosophical writing, as well as criticism, both of a journalistic and of a less ephemeral character. Members of the theatrical profession have probably been influenced by the work of scholars and theorists more than they realize. Scholarship has made Shakespeare’s work, for example, far more intelligible and coherent. On the other hand, many of the scholarly debates over small points seem irrelevant in the theatre.
A commendable example of scholarship is the emendation by the 18th-century editor Lewis Theobald of Mistress Quickly’s description of Falstaff’s death in Shakespeare’s Henry V (Act II, Scene 3) from “a table of green fields,” which, in the context, seems unintelligible, to “a [i.e., he] babbled of green fields,” which is not only comprehensible but touching. But it scarcely alters the way in which an actor will speak this phrase. It is one descriptive phrase among five or six others relating Falstaff’s fumbling with the sheets, playing with flowers, and smiling at his fingers’ ends. It may be among the greatest descriptions of the moment of death in all Western literature; in the course of performance, however, an audience does not follow even so great a passage as this word by word. Likewise, a compelling actor playing Hamlet can ask whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the “eggs and bacon” of outrageous fortune, and few will be aware that he has not said “slings and arrows.” And, if Mistress Quickly says “a table of green fields” with good accent and discretion, the musical flow and emotional effect of this marvelous speech will hardly be diminished.
From the late 19th century, theatre attracted considerable attention from scholars. The German tradition of Theaterwissenschaft (“theatre science”), following the work of Max Herrmann, was particularly influential during the last decades of the 19th century in defining theatre studies as distinct from literature. Brander Matthews pioneered the teaching of playwriting in universities in the United States at the turn of the 20th century, and, as a result, today all the theatre arts garner respect as academic disciplines. Beginning in the 1940s, Alois M. Nagler trained generations of students at Yale University to value original documents and historical data in the study of theatre, an approach that considerably expanded knowledge of performance style and production circumstances across historical periods and around the world.
From the 1980s onward, theatre scholarship—like almost all scholarship across the humanities—showed the influence of deconstruction, postmodernism, and interculturalism (an analytic approach that emphasizes the relationships between cultures). Cross-cultural approaches by both scholars and theatre artists also reflected the tremendous influence of anthropology on the field. The result was that, by the turn of the 21st century, theatre was no longer studied as an art form isolated from other social practices; instead, performance was regarded as something that exists along a continuum that includes theatrical performance—what is conventionally “on the stage”—as well as everyday life, religious devotion, a multitude of rituals, and many forms of spectacle presented by (and by way of) the mass media and other elements of a culture’s media network. Scholarship of the mid-20th century often emphasized the work of “great” artists in various disciplines (playwriting, acting, directing, design, and so forth); in the first decade of the 21st century, scholars tended to disregard the biographies of these individuals and instead to emphasize aesthetic achievements in theatre as culturally relevant statements with meaning that is determined not just by the artists but also by those who watch and listen. Theatre came to be studied not primarily as an elite form but as one pursued in and by communities of all kinds. Within this environment, performance studies emerged as a discipline alongside theatre studies and pushed many scholars toward a more inclusive approach (aesthetically, socially, and transculturally).
Yet until the late 20th century, scholars and professionals in the English-language theatre lived almost completely segregated from one another. The tradition was rather different in continental Europe, where for many centuries the dramaturge was a vital part of the state theatre companies. A dramaturge is usually a writer, critic, or scholar who advises a theatre on literary points, as well as editing classic texts and perhaps translating foreign plays. With the establishment of the National Theatre of Great Britain in 1962, the idea of a dramaturge was transplanted to Britain, the critic Kenneth Tynan becoming part of the theatre management in 1963. Other British theatres, such as the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre, fruitfully married scholarship, in the form of a dramaturge, to their planning of productions. The place of theatre in contemporary life Work, leisure, and theatre
In general, human beings have regarded as serious the activities that aid in survival and propagate the species. At all levels of sophistication, however, serious human pursuits offer opportunities for entertainment. Perhaps members of the human species have never made a clear-cut distinction between work and play. All kinds of work may be enjoyed under the proper circumstances, be it surgery, carpentry, housework, or fieldwork. The best workers engage themselves in work that permits, even demands, an expression of their invention and ingenuity. Indeed, the most valuable workers are often not the most strenuous but rather the most ingenious and resourceful, and as their tasks increase in complexity and responsibility, the need for intelligence and imagination increases. These qualities are also expressed in the play of such people.
In the times and places in which theatre has become frivolous or vulgar or merely dull, the more educated theatregoers have tended to stay away from it. This was the case in London during the first half of the 19th century. A similar movement away from the theatre by the intelligentsia occurred in New York City in the middle of the 20th century, as fewer and fewer serious dramatic productions were undertaken. While Broadway became devoted primarily to musicals or star vehicles, interest in serious theatre developed in the smaller and more specialized Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway theatres and in regional theatres.
Of the many theories and philosophies propounded about the purposes of theatrical art, from the Poetics of Aristotle onward, most presuppose that the theatre is directed toward an elite consisting of the wealthier, more-leisured, and better-educated members of a community. In these theories, popular theatre is assumed to be noisily cheerful and egregiously sentimental, with easy tunes, obvious jokes, and plenty of knockabout “business.” In the 20th century, however, the distinctions between social classes in the West became more blurred. Egalitarian manners became fashionable, indeed obligatory, and the theories that gave serious art a role exclusively for the upper classes lost much of their force. Likewise, elite interest in “folk” forms generated new audiences for such forms and helped save traditions around the world that might otherwise have succumbed to industrialization and cultural globalization.
Paradoxically, while more people in industrialized nations are enjoying more leisure than ever before, there has not been a proportional increase in theatrical attendance. Those engaged in white-collar professions or employed in a managerial capacity, unlike the aristocrats of earlier times, generally allow themselves little leisure time. Of those engaged in industry, whose leisure time has increased, a significant proportion do not choose to attend the theatre regularly. Moreover, the theatre’s efforts to appeal to the whole community generally have been futile. There exists an ever-widening gulf: on one side, a small, enthusiastic, and vocal minority clamours for art galleries, symphony concerts, and drama; on the other side, the majority is apathetic with regard to these cultural pastimes and institutions. The apathy—or even hostility—felt by the majority was evident in the 1980s and ’90s in controversies over state support for the arts, centred especially on the National Endowment for the Arts in the United States and the Arts Council of Great Britain. The role of subsidy
In most countries at the turn of the 21st century, a serious theatre, with or without massive public attendance, had to be sustained by financial support that went beyond box-office revenue. Public funds were—and continue to be—used for this purpose throughout Europe and in much of Asia and Africa. The assumption behind such a subsidy is that a serious theatre is simply too costly to pay its way. Usually, national theatres in urban settings are the recipients of support.
In Great Britain in 1940, under the threat of imminent invasion in World War II, the national government took the first steps toward subsidizing theatre by guaranteeing a tour of the Old Vic theatre company against loss. Subsequently, with the establishment of the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1946, its support of theatre increased continually. By the 1970s many millions of pounds were committed each year to supporting a network of regional theatres, small touring groups, so-called fringe theatres, and the “centres of excellence,” meaning the Royal National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, the English National Opera, and the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden. Subsidy in Britain was the means by which the British theatre industry became the strongest in the world, both as a significant export and as a chief tourist attraction. Under successive Conservative governments, however, such subsidy was slashed, and by the 1990s funds derived from a national lottery were substituted for direct government support.
Until the middle of the 20th century, private patronage and box-office revenue were still the sole supports of legitimate theatre in the United States, but eventually charitable support was encouraged by a structure of tax allowances and by philanthropic organizations such as the Ford Foundation. With few exceptions, however, professional theatre in the United States remained strictly a commercial business. In the West in the late 20th century, only in Germany did there exist a truly generous level of federal and civic support for the arts.
At the turn of the 21st century, private money compensated for decreasing public subsidy in both the United States and Great Britain. Corporate sponsorship became increasingly important in underwriting theatre companies as well as specific shows. Such a means of funding tended to be more conducive to large-budget theatre and well-established companies (particularly opera, ballet, and regional theatres) with strong ties to local philanthropic and corporate communities. Start-up or smaller companies were less likely to be sustained by corporate sponsorship; such funding was also often considered anathema by companies committed to political critique. Academic theatre
From the second half of the 20th century onward, there was a significant amount of theatrical activity conducted by American and European universities with departments of drama. Their theatres, sometimes handsomer and better equipped than professional houses, presented plays of all sorts to communities often beyond the reach of regional or touring companies. Today millions of people attend performances in university theatres each year, and, in planning and choice of programs, the academic theatre’s standards frequently rival professional theatre, since the aim is educational. However, many leading parts, whether in classics or in potboilers, call for assured and authoritative actors between 35 and 50 years of age. Academic theatre, therefore, is handicapped at the outset by the lack of experience of most of its student-actors, though professional actors are sometimes hired for special productions or to become actors-in-residence.
A more serious drawback is that the direction of drama departments and of university theatres is often entrusted to theatrical professionals who, in order to fulfill teaching obligations, often cannot devote much time and energy to the theatre. Furthermore, most college theatres operate on extremely low budgets, and, while money without taste and intelligence cannot create good theatre, taste and intelligence without money can seldom do so either. The highest standards can in certain instances be achieved by sheer ingenuity, but, in general, shoestring budgets result in that desperate air of “making do”—almost a trademark of academic theatre.
It is a common error in colleges and universities to suppose that the mere production of a masterpiece must amount to an educational experience for players and audience alike. It is not so. Incompetent acting and direction can reduce the greatest masterpiece to suffocating, excruciating tedium. Moreover, in many schools the theatre must be economically self-supporting, and each season one of the successful Broadway musicals of yesteryear is put on to redeem the losses incurred by Shakespeare, Molière, and O’Neill.
Nevertheless, the staff and actors of the majority of professional theatres today gain much of their early experience in academic theatre. Internship programs often help students’ transition from undergraduate or graduate programs into the professional world. The search for an audience
Throughout the world, government and private funds have been applied in varying fashions to attract wider audiences to the theatre. Theatre-in-education troupes, as adjuncts of regional theatres, frequently tour schools and perform classics, children’s plays, or new drama. Many programs also exist to bring young people to the theatre. Regional and international tours are also undertaken by theatres such as the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Taganka Theatre of Moscow, and countless others. The late 20th century also saw the worldwide development of performing arts festivals modeled on the Avignon Festival in France and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe; these provided a venue for a great variety of international performing artists while also boosting local economies through tourism. At the turn of the 21st century, theatre was also being used as a development tool. Funded by international aid agencies in conjunction with local governments, this type of theatre deployed actors as agents provocateurs to identify issues of concern in communities. Performances expressed local communities’ views on the genesis, manifestations, and solutions applicable to that locality. This approach was subsequently adopted in developed countries through programs that partnered theatre artists with underprivileged communities (the homeless, urban youth, the rural poor, the incarcerated, immigrants and refugees, etc.) in an attempt to build solidarity within each community and bring the attention of a broader public to the community’s circumstances.
A performance of William Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, Kabul, 2005.© Tomas Munita—REX/Shutterstock.com
Throughout the 20th century, live theatre demonstrated an unexpected tenacity in the face of competition from film, television, video, the Internet, and other media. At one time, theatre lovers feared that a new generation of actors, directors, and technicians without professional experience of the theatre would precipitate a decline in theatrical art; on the contrary, many actors most identified with movies took large risks to perform on the stage. These actors, including Dustin Hoffman, Martin Sheen, and Lauren Bacall, brought to the theatre precisely those qualities of risk and commitment that make live performance so challenging.
Other factors that contribute to the ongoing survival of theatre include the revival of dramatic classics, which are given new expression to show perennial relevance across time and culture. Revivals of dramas of different epochs and different cultures—including Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (411 bce), Molière’s Tartuffe (1664), Racine’s Phèdre (1677), Ibsen’s Peer Gynt (published 1867), Shaw’s Saint Joan (1923), and Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children (1939), although the instances could be multiplied countless times without exhausting the list of the classics regularly performed—often reinvigorate these works by reimagining their settings or their characters. The success of these revivals is a reminder that such works were written for the stage and, it is often argued, can be given full expression only by stage representation.
Adaptations for the screen or television of material that was conceived in terms of the stage remain merely adaptations, in the same sense that a reproduction of Georges Seurat’s painting Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte on a coffee mug remains merely an adaptation. Although Laurence Olivier’s film adaptations of Shakespeare’s Henry V, Hamlet, Richard III, and Othello were justified—in that thousands of people who would not otherwise have had the opportunity to see the original plays were enabled to see adaptations magnificently performed—those who saw both stage and film versions usually testified to the superiority of the theatrical experience. The texts used in the films were necessarily incomplete, and the acting and direction were adapted to suit a medium for which the originals were not conceived. Some part of the public will always believe that it is as important to see fine performances of theatrical masterworks as it is to see the originals of great achievements in painting, sculpture, and architecture rather than photographic reproductions of such works. As long as this is the case, there is a good reason for the continued existence of a live theatre.
Olivier, Laurence; Herlie, Eileen; Sydney, Basil: HamletLaurence Olivier (seated), Eileen Herlie, and Basil Sydney in Hamlet (1948).Copyright © 1953 Universal Pictures Company, Inc.
Another reason for believing in the survival of theatre is that the live theatre can achieve a sense of occasion. This sense of occasion is a heightening of everyday people and occurrences into a new vividness and significance—not just the heightening of characters and events of the drama but also a heightening of the people who take part, spectators as much as performers. This can occur more effectively if the occasion is a great one, if the house is large and full, if the audience appears to be distinguished, and if celebrated performers are taking part. But the sense of occasion can be achieved more simply, more subtly, and less expensively. What matters is that, when the performance begins, the audience should be excited, receptive, and ready. Yet the heart of the occasion lies not in the auditorium, however bedizened with celebrity, but on the stage. There a troupe is about to create either a new work or a new interpretation of a classic. The sense of occasion is at its strongest when the cast is distinguished, but even unknown players in obscure performances can create it.
Activity is required of the theatre audience if the performance is to succeed; the audience is required to share with the performer and to assist in the act of creation. In films and in television, mistakes can be eliminated; unsuccessful scenes can be reshot and rewritten; and the whole work can be manipulated, edited, and set before the public with every detail in place. The product has been prefabricated without the cooperation of its audience, which is therefore reduced to the status of a consumer. In the theatre, on the other hand, every audience helps to create or to destroy the performance. To some extent, audiences get the performance they deserve.
Moreover, in every live performance is the imminence of disaster. An actor must be skillful and an audience must be imaginative if Macbeth, seeing a phantom dagger in the air, or Othello, falling down in an epileptic seizure, is to be moving and impressive instead of merely ludicrous. Yet it is precisely this hairbreadth division between the sublime and the ridiculous that creates the sense of occasion.
Some dozens of immortally great expressions of the human spirit have been written for performance by live actors for live audiences and cannot be adequately experienced in any other medium. This is why, despite economic challenges, limited technical resources and funding, and the logistical problems of touring, the live theatre must survive. Tyrone Guthrie Ned Chaillet The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Citation Information
Article Title: Theatre
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 05 December 2018
URL: https://www.britannica.com/art/theatre-art
Access Date: August 16, 2019
Additional Reading
Few works deal as comprehensively with shifting aspirations for the theatre as Marvin A. Carlson, Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey from the Greeks to the Present, expanded ed. (1993). Collections of supporting material that serve as good companion texts are Bernard F. Dukore (compiler), Dramatic Theory and Criticism: Greeks to Grotowski (1974); and Richard Drain (ed.), Twentieth-Century Theatre: A Sourcebook (1995). These are complemented by three surveys of theatre history: Glynne Wickham, A History of the Theatre, 2nd ed. (1992); Margot Berthold, The History of World Theater: From the Beginnings to the Baroque, trans. from German (1991); and Felicia Hardison Londré, The History of World Theatre: From the English Restoration to the Present, trans. from German (1999).
The social function of theatre is addressed by Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception, 2nd ed. (1997); an apt companion to Bennett is Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, 2nd ed. (2008). Marvin A. Carlson, Performance: A Critical Introduction, 2nd ed. (2004), surveys a range of late-20th- and 21st-century perspectives on theatre studies. Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (1982), became a point of reference in the 1980s and ’90s for intercultural studies; one such is Richard Schechner, Between Theater & Anthropology (1985).
Relationships of cultural policy to subsidy may be traced in Loren Kruger, The National Stage: Theatre and Cultural Legitimation in England, France, and America (1992); Justin Lewis, Art, Culture, and Enterprise: The Politics of Art and the Cultural Industries (1990); and David L. Looseley, The Politics of Fun: Cultural Policy and Debate in Contemporary France (1995). The historical background to these debates can be traced in William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen, Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma (1966, reissued 1993); and Tracy C. Davis, The Economics of the British Stage, 1800–1914 (2000). Tracy C. Davis
Theatre
building
Alternative Title: theatron
Table of Contents
Introduction
Origins of theatre space
Developments in ancient Greece
Developments in ancient Rome
Developments in Asia
The Middle Ages in Europe
Developments of the Renaissance
Baroque theatres and staging
Developments in the 19th century
The evolution of modern theatrical production
Theatre, also spelled theater, in architecture, a building or space in which a performance may be given before an audience. The word is from the Greek theatron, “a place of seeing.” A theatre usually has a stage area where the performance itself takes place. Since ancient times the evolving design of theatres has been determined largely by the spectators’ physical requirements for seeing and hearing the performers and by the changing nature of the activity presented.
Farnese, TeatroTeatro Farnese, Parma, Italy.karaian Origins of theatre space
The civilizations of the Mediterranean basin in general, the Far East, northern Europe, and the Western Hemisphere before the voyages of Christopher Columbus in the second half of the 15th century have all left evidence of constructions whose association with religious ritual activity relates them to the theatre. Studies in anthropology suggest that their forerunners were the campfire circles around which members of a primitive community would gather to participate in tribal rites. Karnak in ancient Egypt, Persepolis in Persia, and Knossos in Crete all offer examples of architectural structures, purposely ceremonial in design, of a size and configuration suitable for large audiences. They were used as places of assembly at which a priestly caste would attempt to communicate with supernatural forces.
Taormina, Sicily: theatreAncient Greek theatre, rebuilt in Roman times, in Taormina, Sicily, Italy.Dennis Jarvis (CC-BY-2.0) (A Britannica Publishing Partner)
The transition from ritual involving mass participation to something approaching drama, in which a clear distinction is made between active participants and passive onlookers, is incompletely understood. Eventually, however, the priestly caste and the performer became physically set apart from the spectators. Thus, theatre as place emerged. Developments in ancient Greece Visual and spatial aspects
During the earliest period of theatre in ancient Greece, when the poet Thespis—who is credited both with inventing tragedy and with being the first actor—came to Athens in 534 bc with his troupe on wagons, the performances were given in the agora (i.e., the marketplace), with wooden stands for audience seating; in 498, the stands collapsed and killed several spectators. Detailed literary accounts of theatre and scenery in ancient Greece can be found in De architectura libri decem, by the 1st-century-bc Roman writer Vitruvius, and in the Onomasticon, of the 2nd century ad, by the Greek scholar Julius Pollux. As these treatises appeared several hundred years after classical theatre, however, the accuracy of their descriptions is questionable.
Little survives of the theatres in which the earliest plays were performed, but essential details have been reconstructed from the architectural evidence of the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens, which has been remodeled several times since its construction in stone by the politician Lycurgus on the south slope of the Acropolis in about 330 bc. The centre of the theatre was the original dancing place, a flat, circular space containing the altar of Dionysus, called the orchestra. In the centre stood a platform with steps (bemata) leading to the altar (thymele). Nearby was the temple out of which the holy image would be carried on festival days so that the god could be present at the plays.
Theatrical representations, not yet wholly free of a religious element, directed their appeal toward the whole community, and attendance was virtually compulsory. Thus the first concern of theatre builders of the day was to provide sufficient space for large audiences. In the beginning, admission was free; later, when a charge was levied, poor citizens were given entrance money. It seems reasonable to assume, from the size of the theatres, that the actors performed on a raised platform (probably called the logeion, or “speaking place”) in order to be more visible and audible, while the chorus remained in the orchestra. In later times there was a high stage, with a marble frieze below and a short flight of steps up from the orchestra. The great Hellenistic theatre at Epidaurus had what is believed to have been a high, two-level stagehouse.
The earliest productions did not have a background building. The actors dressed in the skēnē (from which the word “scene” is derived), which was then a small tent, and the chorus and actors entered together from the main approach, the parodos. The earliest properties, such as altars and rocks, could be set up at the edge of the terrace. The first extant drama for which a large building was necessary was Aeschylus’ trilogy the Oresteia, first produced in 458 bc. There has been controversy among historians as to whether the skēnē was set up inside a segment of the orchestra or outside the edge of the orchestra. The skēnē in its later development was probably a long, simple building at the left of the orchestra terrace.
In the first period of Greek drama, the principal element of the production was the chorus, the size of which appears to have varied considerably. In Aeschylus’ Suppliants, there were 50 members of the chorus, but in his other plays there were only 12, and Sophocles called for 15. The size of the chorus became smaller in the 5th century, as the ritual element of drama diminished. Since the number of actors increased as the chorus shrank, and the plots of the dramas became more complex, doubling of roles became necessary. On a completely open stage such substitutions were delayed, and the suspense of the drama was dissipated. Dramatic plausibility was also vitiated by the fact that gods and mortals, enemies and friends, always entered from the same direction. The addition of a scenic facade, with three doors, more than doubled the number of entrances and gave the playwright more freedom to develop dramatic tension. About 425 bc a firm stone basis was laid for an elaborate building, called a stoa, consisting of a long front wall interrupted at the sides by projecting wings, or paraskēnia. The spectators sat on wooden benches arranged in a fan shape divided by radiating aisles. The upper rows were benches of movable planks supported by separate stones planted in the ground. The seats of honour were stone slabs with inscriptions assigning them to the priests.
The background decoration consisted originally of a temporary wooden framework leaning against the front wall of the stoa and covered with movable screens. These screens were made of dried animal skins tinted red; it was not until Aeschylus that canvases in wooden frames were decorated according to the needs of a particular play. Aristotle credits Sophocles with the invention of scene painting, an innovation ascribed by others to Aeschylus. It is notable that Aeschylus took an interest in staging and is credited with the classic costume design. Simple Greek scenery was comparable with that of the 20th century; the impulse to visualize and particularize the background of the action became strong. Painted scenery was probably first used in production of the Oresteia; some 50 years afterward a second story was added to the wooden scene structure. A wooden colonnade, or portico, the proskēnion, was placed in front of the lower story of the building. This colonnade, which was long and low, suggested the exterior of either a house, a palace, or a temple. Painted screens set between the columns of the proskēnion suggested the locale.
In the beginning, scenery was probably altered slightly during the intermissions that separated the plays of a trilogy or a tetralogy or during the night between two festival days. By the latter part of the 5th century, scene changes were accomplished by means of movable painted screens. Several of these screens could be put up behind one another so that, when the first one was removed, the one immediately behind appeared.
Soon after the introduction of the facade, plays were uniformly set before a temple or a palace. To indicate a change of scene, the periaktoi were introduced. These were upright three-sided prisms—each side painted to represent a different locality—set flush with the palace or temple wall on either side of the stage. Several conventions were observed with regard to scenery; one was that if only the right periaktos was turned, it indicated a different locality in the same town. According to another convention, actors entering from the right were understood to be coming from the city or harbour and those from the left to be coming from the country.
The permanent facade was also used to hide the stage properties and the machinery. Evidence for the use of the so-called flying machine, the mēchanē (Latin machina), in the 5th century is given in the comedies of Aristophanes; a character in his play Peace ascends to heaven on a dung beetle and appeals to the scene shifter not to let him fall. The mēchanē consisted of a derrick and a crane. In the time of Euripides it was used conventionally for the epilogue, at which point a god descended from heaven to sort out the complications in the plot, a convention that became known as deus ex machina (“god from a machine”). The lavish use of flying machines is attested by the poet Antiphanes, who wrote that tragic playwrights lifted up a machine as readily as they lifted a finger when they had nothing else to say.
A wheeled platform or wagon, called ekkyklēma, was used to display the results of offstage actions, such as the bodies of murder victims. The ekkyklēma, like the periaktoi, was an expedient for open-air theatre, in which the possibilities for creating realistic illusions were severely limited. A realistic picture of an interior scene under a roof could not be shown, because the roof would block the view of those in the higher tiered seats of the auditorium. So the Greeks, to represent the interior of a palace, for example, wheeled out a throne on a round or square podium. New machines were added in the Hellenistic period, by which time the theatre had almost completely lost its religious basis. Among these new machines was the hemikyklion, a semicircle of canvas depicting a distant city, and a stropheion, a revolving machine, used to show heroes in heaven or battles at sea. Howard Bay Clive Barker George C. Izenour Acoustics
Much recent study has centred on the problem of acoustics in the ancient theatre. The difficulty in achieving audibility to an audience of thousands, disposed around three-fifths to two-thirds of a full circular orchestra in the open air, seems to have been insoluble so long as the performer remained in the orchestra. A more direct path between speaker and audience was therefore essential if the unaided voice was to reach a majority of spectators in the auditorium. Some contend that the acoustical problems were to a degree alleviated when the actor was moved behind and above the orchestra onto the raised platform, with more of the audience thus being placed in direct line of sight and sound with him. By this time, the actors’ masks had reached considerable dimensions, and there are grounds for believing that their mouth orifices were of help in concentrating vocal power—much as cupped hands or a rudimentary megaphone would be.
Increased architectural and engineering sophistication in the Hellenistic Age encouraged further innovations. The theatres of mainland Greece, the Aegean islands, and southern Italy had been constructed in hillsides whenever possible, so that excavation and filling were kept to a minimum; or, lacking a suitable slope, earth was dug out and piled up to form an embankment upon which stone seats were placed. By contrast, the cities of Asia Minor, which flourished during the Hellenistic Age, did not rely on a convenient slope on which to locate their theatres. The principles of arch construction were understood by this time, and theatres were built using vaulting as the structural support for banked seating. Archaeological remains and restoration of theatres at Perga, Side, Miletus, and other sites in what is now Turkey exhibit this type of construction. By a third method, auditoriums were hewed out of rock. Of some six such Greek theatres extant, two excellent examples (both extensively remodeled in Roman times) are the great theatre at Syracuse in Sicily and that at Argos in the Peloponnese. The best preserved of all Greek theatres, also in the Peloponnese and now partially restored, is the magnificent theatre at Epidaurus. This theatre provided seats for some 12,000 people, and its circular orchestra is backed by a stagehouse and surrounded on three sides by a stone, hillside-supported bank of seats. Both chorus and actors performed in the orchestra, but only the actors used the two levels of the stagehouse as well. Theatre construction flourished during the Hellenistic Age as never before in classical times, and no city of any size or reputation was without its theatre. George C. Izenour Developments in ancient Rome
The development of the theatre, following that of dramatic literature, was slower in Rome than in Athens. The essential distinction between Roman and Greek stage performances was that the Roman theatre expressed no deep religious convictions. Despite the fact that the spectacles were technically connected with the festivals in honour of the gods, the Roman audience went to the theatre for entertainment. The circus was the first permanent public building for spectacles, which included chariot races and gladiatorial fights. When Etruscan dancers and musicians were introduced in 364 bc, they performed in either the circus, the forum, or the sanctuaries in front of the temples. The players brought temporary wooden stands for the spectators. These stands developed into the Roman auditorium, built up entirely from the level ground. Stage design
The most important feature of the Roman theatre as distinct from the Greek theatre was the raised stage. As every seat had to have a view of the stage, the area occupied by the seating (cavea) was limited to a semicircle. As in Greek theatre, the scene building behind the stage, the scaenae frons, was used both as the back scene and as the actors’ dressing room. It was no longer painted in the Greek manner but tended to have architectural decorations combined with luxurious ornamentation. The audience sat on tiers of wooden benches, spectacula, supported by scaffolding. There was no curtain; the back scene, with its three doors, faced the audience.
When the popular comedies or farces of southern Italy were introduced to Rome, they came with their own distinctive type of stage—the phlyakes stage. Comedies in Italy were mimes, usually parodies of well-known tragedies, and the actors were called phlyakes, or jesters. They used temporary stage buildings of three main forms. One was the primitive low stage, a rough platform with a wooden floor on three or four rectangular posts. The second was a stage supported by low posts, covered with drapery or tablets; sometimes steps led up to a platform and a door was indicated. The third type was a higher stage supported by columns, without steps but usually with a back wall. The stages often had a short flight of five to seven steps in the centre, leading to the podium. The forewall, covered with drapery, was often decorated, and the background wall usually had objects hanging from it. The rear wall sometimes had other columns, besides the ones set at the corners, as well as doors and, in several cases, windows to indicate an upper floor. The door was usually behind a heavily decorated porch, with a sloping or gabled roof supported by beams and cross struts. Among the furnishings there were usually trees, altars, chairs, thrones, a dining table, a money chest, and a tripod of Apollo (i.e., an oracular seat). The stage was set up in the marketplace in the smaller towns and in the orchestras of Greek theatres in the larger cities.
Coincident with the development of the phlyakes stages, and under the inspiration of Hellenistic colonists, the Romans began to build stone theatre buildings. Beginning by remodeling Greek and Hellenistic theatres, they eventually succeeded in uniting architecturally their own concept of the auditorium with a single-level, raised stage. This they did by limiting the orchestra to a half circle and joining it to the auditorium, thereby improving on the acoustics of Greek and Hellenistic theatres. They also brought to perfection the principles of barrel and cross vaulting, penetrating the seat bank at regular intervals with vomitoria (exit corridors). The raised stage was at a single, much lower level than in the Hellenistic theatre. It was roofed, and the number of entrances to it was increased to five: three, as before, in the wall at the rear of the stage and one at each side. The Romans’ love of ostentatious architecture led them to adorn the permanent background with profuse sculptures. In some theatres, a drop curtain was used to signal the beginning and end of performance. In some cases, a canvas roof was hoisted onto rope rigging in order to shade the audience from the sunlight. Howard Bay Clive Barker
In Roman theatres the stage alone was used by the actors, who entered the playing space from one of the house doors or the side entrances in the wings. The side entrance on the audience’s right signified the near distance and the one on the audience’s left the farther distance. If a scene took place in a town, for instance, an actor exiting audience right was understood to be going to the forum; if he exited audience left, he might be going to the country or the harbour. Periaktoi at the side entrances indicated the scenery in the immediate neighbourhood. If the play required a character to move from one house to another without bringing him on the stage, which represented the street, the actor was supposed to use the back door and the angiportum (i.e., an imaginary street running behind the houses). Since interior scenes could not be represented easily, all action took place in front of the houses shown in the background. If a banquet was to be depicted, the table and chairs would be brought on stage and removed at the end of the scene. Costumes were formalized, but real spears, torches, chariots, and horses were used.
The orchestra became part of the auditorium in Rome, reserved by law for those of privileged rank, who seated themselves there on a variety of portable chairs and litters. The orchestra was no longer needed as part of the performance area because the chorus had long since ceased to be an integral part of drama. The tragedies of Seneca, in the 1st century ad, included a chorus because they were patterned after Greek models. But they never achieved the popularity of earlier comedies, especially those of Plautus and Terence. These works had at first been performed on temporary wooden stages that had been erected on a convenient hillside and sometimes surrounded by temporary wooden seating.
Until the late republic, a puritanical Senate had banned all permanent theatre building within the city of Rome itself as decadent. Thus, theatres there were temporary structures, set up in the Campus Martius for the duration of public games. In 55 bc, however, the triumvir Pompey the Great built Rome’s first permanent stone theatre. Another public stone theatre was built in Rome in 13 bc and was named after Marcellus, son-in-law of the emperor Augustus. Both were used for the scaenae ludi (“scenic games”), which were part of religious festivities or celebrations of victory in war and which were paid for by triumphant generals and emperors. During the period of the Roman Empire, civic pride demanded that all important cities have theatres, amphitheatres, and, in many instances, a small, permanently roofed theatre (theatrum tectum, an odeum, or music hall) as well. In fact, it is from outlying cities of the empire such as Arausio (Orange), Thamagadi (Timgad), Leptis Magna, Sabratha, and Aspendus that archaeological evidence provides most of the firsthand knowledge of Roman theatre building. The best preserved Roman theatre, dating from about ad 170, is at Aspendus in modern Turkey. Vitruvius’ treatise on architecture
Literature is another source for knowledge of Roman theatre. De architectura libri decem (“Ten Books on Architecture”), by the Roman architect Vitruvius (1st century bc), devotes three books to Greek and Roman theatre design and construction. The author gives general rules for siting an open-air theatre and for designing the stage, orchestra, and auditorium. These rules are based on principles of Euclidian geometry in matters of layout and proportion. His dicta on the provision of good sight lines from auditorium to stage are generally sound. Apart from that, however, his treatise is not very helpful. He mentions changeable scenery but is vague about what was involved. Vitruvius’ notion of acoustics, which he claims is based on theory as well as practice, appears to be vaguely associated with Greek ideas of musical theory but has since been proved to have no scientific or mathematical basis. Indeed, his views on this important matter were to cause problems for almost 2,000 years. The odeum
Vitruvius has nothing to say about the roofed odeum (or odeon, “singing place”), which, according to some authorities, represents the high point of theatre building in the ancient world. Theatre history has, unfortunately, largely overlooked these buildings. Excavation work has revealed more than 30 of them, in a wide range of building materials. Odea were apparently first built in Athens under Pericles (5th century bc). They continued to be built throughout the Hellenistic Age and also in the Roman Empire up to the time of Emperor Severus Alexander (3rd century ad). They range in size from one with a seating capacity of 300–400 to one of 1,200–1,400. Experts disagree as to their specific purpose and use but claim they exhibited a refinement of detail and architectural sophistication found in no other Greco-Roman buildings devoted to the performing arts. They are most often found in Greek cities dating from Hellenistic times, on the grounds of private villas built by Roman emperors from Augustus to Hadrian, and in major cities of the empire, usually dedicated to the emperors. One of the most imposing, which also boasts the greatest span for a wooden trussed roof in the ancient world, was the Odeon of Agrippa, named after the emperor Augustus’ civil administrator. This Roman building in the Athenian agora, dating from about 15 bc, is beautifully detailed, with an open southern exposure and a truncated curvilinear bank of seating. It achieves an atmosphere of great dignity and repose, despite the vast size of the room. In the last years of the Roman Empire the odeum was, it is claimed, the only remaining home of the performing arts, because by this time open-air theatres had long been given over to sensational and crude popular entertainments.
Greek and Roman theatre building influenced virtually all later theatre design in the Western world, the theatres of the Spanish Golden Age, the English Elizabethan period, and the 20th-century avant-garde, with its experiments in primitive theatre-in-the-round techniques, being exceptions to this pattern. The architectural writings of Vitruvius became the model for the theatre building of the later Renaissance and early Baroque periods. George C. Izenour Clive Barker Developments in Asia
Although the emergence of Asian theatre was not simultaneous with that of ancient Greece and Rome, it merits discussion here rather than as an appendage to the history of Western drama. India
Indian theatre is often considered the oldest in Asia, having developed its dance and drama by the 8th century bc. According to Hindu holy books, the gods fought the demons before the world was created, and the god Brahmā asked the gods to reenact the battle among themselves for their own entertainment. Once again the demons were defeated, this time by being beaten with a flagstaff by one of the gods. To protect theatre from demons in the future, a pavilion was built, and in many places in India today a flagstaff next to the stage marks the location of performances.
According to myth, Brahmā ordered that dance and drama be combined; certainly the words for “dance” and “drama” are the same in all Indian dialects. Early in Indian drama, however, dance began to dominate the theatre. By the beginning of the 20th century there were few performances of plays, though there were myriad dance recitals. It was not until political independence in 1947 that India started to redevelop the dramatic theatre.
In the 4th century a codification was written of the śāstra, or the staging conventions of the dance. It lists not only the costumes, makeup, gestures, and body positions but also any plots considered unsuitable, and it is the most complete document of stagecraft ever compiled. There is no scenery in Indian dance, although there are usually a few properties, such as a three-foot-high brass lamp. A curtain is used, however, by troupes that dance kathākali, an ancient danced drama of southwestern India. The curtain itself is a cloth rectangle that is held between the stage and a large lamp by two stagehands.
The dancers perform a group of preliminary dances behind the curtain until they make an important entrance called “peering over the curtain.” In this, a character fans the lamp by pulling the curtain in and out until the flames are spectacularly high. The dancer, still hiding his face, displays his hands and legs at the borders of the curtain. At the climactic moment the dancer pulls the curtain aside, displaying his awesome makeup, and stagehands remove the curtain until the next dramatic entrance.
Classical Indian drama had as its elements poetry, music, and dance, with the sound of the words assuming more importance than the action or the narrative; therefore, staging was basically the enactment of poetry. The reason that the productions, in which scenes apparently follow an arbitrary order, seem formless to Westerners is that playwrights use much simile and metaphor. Because of the importance of the poetic line, a significant character is the storyteller or narrator, who is still found in most Asian drama. In Sanskrit drama the narrator was the sūtra-dhāra, “the string holder,” who set the scene and interpreted the actors’ moods. Another function was performed by the narrator in regions in which the aristocratic vocabulary and syntax used by the main characters, the gods and the nobles, was not understood by the majority of the audience. The narrator operated first through the use of pantomime and later through comedy.
A new Indian theatre that began about 1800 was a direct result of British colonization. With the addition of dance interludes and other Indian aesthetic features, modern India has developed a national drama. Two examples of “new” theatre staging are the Prithvi Theatre and the Indian National Theatre. The Prithvi Theatre, a Hindi touring company founded in 1943, utilizes dance sequences, incidental music, frequent set changes, and extravagant movement and colour. The Indian National Theatre, founded in Bombay in the 1950s, performs for audiences throughout India, in factories and on farms. Its themes usually involve a national problem, such as the lack of food, and the troupe’s style is a mixture of pantomime and simple dialogue. It uses a truck to haul properties, costumes, and actors; there is no scenery. China
The most noticeable contrast between China and other Asian countries is that traditionally China has produced virtually no dance. The classic theatre of the Chinese is called “opera” because the dialogue is punctuated with arias and recitatives. Of the amazingly detailed written record of Chinese theatre, the first reference to opera was during the T’ang dynasty (618–907). The development of the opera style popular today took place during the Manchu rule of the 19th century. The Empress Dowager, the last hereditary ruler of China, was so enamoured of opera that she had a triple-deck stage (representing heaven, hell, and earth) constructed in the summer palace at Peking. The most important individual in Chinese theatre of the 20th century, Mei Lan-fang, an actor and producer, was the first to apply scholarship in reviving ancient masterpieces and opera forms.
In general, Chinese theatrical performances start in the early evening and conclude after midnight. The performance itself consists of several plays and scenes from the best known dramas. The audience drinks tea, eats, and talks, and there are no intermissions. The stage itself has a curved apron, covered only by a square rug. On one side is a box for the orchestra, which plays throughout the evening. There is neither a curtain nor any setting to speak of other than a simple, painted backdrop. The virtual absence of scenery accentuates the elaborate and colourful costumes and makeup of the actors.
During a typical performance, the members of a Chinese theatre audience stop talking to each other only at climactic moments. The actors are concerned with their movements only when they are at the centre of the stage; when they stand at the sides they drink tea and adjust their costumes in full view of the audience. An interpretation of this behaviour was the view of the 20th-century German dramatist Bertolt Brecht that a Chinese actor, in contrast to a Western actor, constantly keeps a distance between himself, his character, and the spectator; his performance is mechanistic rather than empathic.
Property men walk around on stage setting up properties for the next play before the preceding one is finished. There are usually very few properties, only a table and a few chairs. A chair may act as a throne, a bench, a tower if an actor stands on it, a barrier if he stands behind it, and so on. A curtain suspended in front of two chairs represents a bed. Doors and stairs are always suggested: an actor mimes opening a door and taking a high step when he “enters” a room.
There are a number of stage conventions; all entrances, for instance, are from a door stage left, and all exits through a door stage right. After a fight scene, the man who is defeated exits first. Wind is symbolized by a man rushing across the stage carrying a small black flag. Clouds painted on boards are shown to the audience to represent either the outdoors or summer. Fire, however, is always represented realistically, either by the use of gunpowder or by pyres of incense. The Chinese feel that Western dramatic realism atrophies the imagination. Japan
Japan is unique in Asia in having a living theatre that retains traditional forms. When an attempt is made in the West to recreate the original production of a Greek tragedy or even a play by Shakespeare, its historical accuracy can only be approximated. In Japan the traditions of stagecraft and costumes for both drama and dance have remained unaltered. Japanese staging developed far earlier than did that of the West; by the time of Shakespeare, for instance, the Japanese had already invented a revolving stage, trapdoors, and complex lighting effects.
Although there are many kinds of theatre in Japan, the best known are the Nō and the Kabuki. Nō was developed by the late 14th century and was first seen by Westerners in the 1850s. It developed from the dengaku, a rice planting and harvesting ritual that was transformed into a courtly dance by the 14th century, and from the sarugaku, a popular entertainment involving acrobatics, mime, juggling, and music, which was later performed at religious festivals.
Two performers and adherents of Zen Buddhism in the late 14th century, Kan’ami and his son Zeami Motokiyo, combined the sarugaku elements with kuse-mai, a story dance that uses both movements and words. Soon dengaku elements were added, and the distinctive Nō style slowly emerged. Like the Zen ways of tea ceremony, ink drawing, and other arts, Nō suggests the essence of an event or an experience within a carefully structured set of rules. There are scores of Nō theatres in Japan today, even though the design of a Nō theatre is so stylized that it is not usable for other types of performances. The Nō stage is a platform completely covered by a curving temple roof. The audience sits on three sides of the stage and is separated from it by a garden of gravel, plants, and pine trees.
Masks are used, though they are restricted to the principal dancer and his companions. The male characters are costumed in brilliant stiff brocades and damasks well suited to the grandiose posturing of the actors. The female roles are played in bright flowered brocades. The outer robes of both sexes are of a fine-woven gauze, light and suitable for the gliding dances when sleeves and fans float in the air. Mask carving is an important art in Japan, and Nō masks add considerable beauty to the traditional robes. Most costumes are based on the classic court hunting dress of the Heian (794–857) and Kamakura (1192–1333) periods.
Kabuki troupes, originally composed only of women, developed in the early 17th century. By the 1680s Kabuki had become an established art form, and curtains and scenery were introduced. Kabuki was first seen in western Europe during the latter part of the 19th century, but it was not until the 1920s that it was accepted there as something more than quaint. The work of the Russian film director Sergey Eisenstein was influenced by the Kabuki troupe that toured the Soviet Union in 1928, and Kabuki staging devices were tried out in theatres in the Soviet Union, France, and Germany; one Kabuki actor, in turn, brought back Russian techniques that influenced the Japanese theatre.
A Kabuki theatre in Tokyo is one of the largest legitimate theatres in the world, with a 91-foot- (28-metre-) wide stage and seating for 2,599 people. Running through the audience and connecting the stage with the rear of the auditorium is the platform runway, called the hanamichi. It is utilized for significant entrances and exits, processions, and dance sequences. Its purpose is to unite the actor and audience by moving the actor out of the decorative background. Originally there were two runways, with a connecting bridge at the rear of the auditorium. Because of economic pressure to seat more people and the influence of Western architecture, the second hanamichi was removed in the early 20th century.
The scenery for Kabuki may be as elaborate and complex as that found anywhere; the stage, for instance, may be a house, a forest, and a river simultaneously. Some settings are triple-level palaces, with the actors using all levels at once; others have only a simple backdrop.
Kabuki costumes are of the Edo period (1603–1868), when Kabuki is considered to have been at its height. Wigs and makeup carefully conform to classical tradition, enabling habitual playgoers to recognize the type of play and characters at a glance. Many of the costumes are much exaggerated; all are designed to accentuate dramatic movement. Courtesans and heroes, for instance, wear stilts that raise them several inches off the ground. Bali
Balinese theatre is included here as representative of theatre in the smaller nations of Asia, such as Thailand, Kampuchea (Cambodia), Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam, in all of which drama consists almost exclusively of dance. Balinese dancing may take place anywhere; usually it is executed in front of a temple or a pavilion used for community meetings. The audience sits on three sides of the performers or, occasionally, in the round. The musicians, called the gamelan, sit on one side of the stage area.
There are neither settings nor visible indications of scene changes; location is suggested by the dialogue or the facial expressions and gestures of the actors. A scenic “device” is employed at the beginning of each section of the dance; for instance, the dancer makes a gesture called “opening the curtain.” The hands, palms out, are in front of the face; they separate on a diagonal line to reveal the figure, stopping only when the full, formal posture of Balinese dance is reached. Howard Bay Clive Barker The Middle Ages in Europe
In terms of performances and theatres, Roman drama reached its height in the 4th century ad, but it had already encountered opposition that was to lead to its demise. From about ad 300 on, the church tried to dissuade Christians from going to the theatre, and in 401 the fifth Council of Carthage decreed excommunication for anyone who attended performances on holy days. Actors were forbidden the sacraments unless they gave up their profession, a decree not rescinded in many places until the 18th century. An edict of Charlemagne (c. 814) stated that no actor could put on a priest’s robe; the penalty could be banishment. This suggests that drama, most probably mime, had ridiculed the church or that it had tried to accommodate religious sensibilities by performance of “godly” plays.
The invasions of the barbarians from the north and east accelerated the decline of Roman theatre. Although by 476 Rome had been sacked twice, some of the theatres were rebuilt. The last definite record of a performance in Rome was in 533. Archaeological evidence suggests that the theatre did not survive the Lombard invasion of 568, after which state recognition and support of the theatre was abandoned. Theatre did continue for a while in the Eastern Roman Empire, the capital of which was Constantinople, but by 692 the Quinisext Council of the church passed a resolution forbidding all mimes, theatres, and other spectacles. Although the effectiveness of the decree has been questioned, historians until recently used it to signify the end of the ancient theatre.
The assumption now is that although official recognition and support of performances were withdrawn and theatres were not used, some remnants of at least the mime tradition were carried on throughout the Middle Ages. Christian writings suggest that performers were familiar figures. For instance, two popular sayings were “It is better to please God than the actors” and “It is better to feed paupers at your table than actors.” Apart from the mime tradition, one Roman playwright, Terence, retained his reputation through the early Middle Ages, probably because of his literary style. Howard Bay
Women performers were widespread during the period as jugglers, acrobats, dancers, singers, and musicians. There were women troubadours and jongleurs, and many of the French chansons are written from the point of view of female narrators, notably the chansons de mal mariée, or complaints by unhappily married women. Generations of ecclesiastical authorities protested against the great choruses of women who poured into churches and monasteries on feast days, singing obscene songs and ballads. Complaints are recorded from the 6th century ad to the 14th about women taking part in licentious public performances on festive occasions. Women were also active participants in the later mumming plays; the London Mumming of c. 1427 was presented by an all-female cast, while in the Christmas Mumming at Hertford, the young king Henry VI saw a performance consisting of “a disguysing of the rude upplandisshe people compleynynge on hir wyves, with the boystous aunswere of hir wyves.” Church theatre
Medieval religious drama arose from the church’s desire to educate its largely illiterate flock, using dramatizations of the New Testament as a dynamic teaching method. It is doubtful whether there is any connection between the drama of classical times and the new rudimentary dramatizations that slowly grew into the miracle and mystery cycles of plays in the Middle Ages. As early as the 10th century in Switzerland, France, England, and Germany, short and simple dramatic renderings of parts of the Easter and Christmas liturgy of the mass were being performed. As these short scenes grew in number, small scenic structures, called mansions, sedum, loci, or domi (the Latin words for seats, places, and homes, respectively), were placed at the sides of the church nave. At these were acted stories of the Nativity, Passion, or Resurrection, depending upon the particular season of the Christian calendar. At the conclusion of each scene the congregation turned its attention to the next mansion, so following a succession of scenes set out at intervals around the nave. Gradually, the performance of liturgical drama passed out of the hands of the clergy and into those of the laity, probably via the trade guilds of craftsmen, which were also religious fraternities. More and more secular interludes crept into the dramas—to such an extent that the dramas moved out of the church building into the public square. The individual plays became linked in cycles, often beginning with the story of the creation and ending with that of the Last Judgment. Each play within the cycle was performed by a different trade guild. Many of the plays from different cycles have survived and can still be seen in parts of England. George C. Izenour Clive Barker Staging conventions
A number of staging conventions that evolved in the church were to continue throughout the Middle Ages. Apart from the mansions there was a general acting area, called a platea, playne, or place. The methods of staging from these first liturgical dramas to the 16th-century interludes can be divided into six main types. The first involved the use of the church building as a theatre. In the beginning, for Easter tropes (embellishments of the liturgy), a tomb was set up in the north aisle. As dialogue was added, the entire nave was used, and within this space different localities were indicated by mansions. A few mansions housed numerous elaborate properties, particularly those for the Last Supper. Some mansions had curtains so that characters or objects might be revealed at a particular moment or concealed at the end of an episode. Sometimes the choir loft was used to represent heaven and the crypt to represent hell.
The second type of staging evolved by the 12th century, as drama began to outgrow the capacity of the church to contain it. As long as the action was confined to the central theme, it could be played in an arrangement of mansions down the length of the nave. But as the subject matter extended to include both Old and New Testament history, the action was transferred to a stage outside the west door of the church. In 1227 Pope Gregory IX decreed the removal of what had become a show from holy ground to the marketplace or an open field. During the same period the language of the plays began to change from Latin to the vernacular. When drama was first taken outdoors, the crucifix was placed at one end, no doubt where it would have appeared above the altar in the church. Mansions were placed alongside each other, usually in sequences reflecting earlier church performances.
A third type of staging was the so-called stationary setting, found outside of England, which involved placing the mansions in a wider range of locales. Here the audience accepted three conventions. One was the symbolic representation of localities by the mansions; the second was the placing of the mansions near each other; and the third was the use for acting purposes of such actual ground as was enclosed by or in front of each mansion. The mansions were placed in either a straight or a slightly curved line, and all of the scenery was visible simultaneously. Because of their scope, many of the plays were divided into parts separated by intermissions ranging from one to 24 hours. During the intermissions, mansions were changed. Also, some mansions might represent more than one location; the identity of the mansions was announced before each segment of a play. It is difficult to know exactly how many mansions were used; in a play at Lucerne, Switz., in 1583, for instance, 70 different locations were indicated, though only about 32 mansions were actually used.
The two mansions almost always present were those representing heaven and hell, set at opposite ends of the playing area. The earthly scenes were set in the middle, and the two opposing mansions were supposed to represent man’s dual nature and the choices that faced him. In the 15th and 16th centuries, heaven was usually raised above the level of the other mansions. Sometimes heaven had a series of intricate turning spheres, from which emanated the golden light of concealed torches. The hell mansion was designed to be the complete opposite of that of heaven; some portions of it, for instance, were below stage level. Sometimes hell was made to look like a fortified town, an especially effective image when Jesus Christ forced open the gates to free the captive souls. The entrance to hell was usually shaped like a monster’s head and was called Hell’s Mouth, emitting fire, smoke, and the cries of the damned.
The fourth type of staging was in the round. In France and England particularly, surviving Roman playhouses were used for drama, and the mansions were probably placed in a circle. The play Castle of Perseverance from this period was intended to be performed within a moated round. Within the moat was an earthen bank on which the mansions were placed. Within the bank was a circle of flat earth with a tower structure in the centre. Members of the audience perambulated in the centre from mansion to mansion. The actors dressed in a small tent outside the round. Entry to the circle was over one bridge. The remains of several of these rounds still exist, the principle one being Piram Round in Cornwall.
The fifth type of staging employed movable settings. Processional staging was particularly popular in Spain. The wagons, called carros, on which the scenery was mounted were positioned next to platforms that had been erected in every town. Developments were somewhat different in England and the Netherlands. There, the mansions themselves became portable, being called pageant wagons in England and wagonseel in the Netherlands. Beneath the raised platform was a curtained space with room for the actors. Although the number of settings available was the same as for the mansion presentation, only one wagon was visible at a time; the audience remained stationary, and the successive pageants were wheeled into place before it. Sometimes the pageant wagons were quite elaborate structures: a realistic ark, stocked with animals and possibly floated on water, might be constructed for the story of Noah and the Flood; or an ingenious model of a whale, able to contain an actor within its belly, might be used for the story of Jonah.
Special effects, which were very popular, became so complex and numerous by the 15th century that many scenes were added to show them off. For flying, a fixed setting was often placed against a building equipped with pulleys and windlasses on its roof. Additional flying machinery was also hidden inside the heaven mansion. Angels, souls released from limbo, devils, and fire-spitting monsters could be shown flying. The machinery became so complex that 17 people were needed simply to operate the hell scenes at a theatre at Mons, in what is now Belgium. Trapdoors were used for sudden appearances, disappearances, and substitutions of dummies for actors in scenes of violence. In a production involving Barnabas’ burning at the stake, bones and entrails stuffed in the dummy gave off a realistic smell.
The morality plays, which first appeared in the 14th century, made use of no scenery or complex properties. Although some were performed indoors, most were offered outside on a stage that anticipated the English Elizabethan public theatre. A fixed facade was built at the rear of a large platform, and there were three openings at stage level that could be used to show interior scenes. A second level included similar openings, and a third level had a throne for the figure being honoured by the morality.
The last type of staging, and the one about which least is known, was the curtained platform. Toward the end of the Middle Ages itinerant professional actors who performed interludes required only a curtain behind them for staging. Howard Bay Clive Barker Courtly diversions
Another kind of theatre flourished in the courts—more or less impromptu entertainments, deriving from the medieval love of tournament. Essentially secular diversions, they were most sumptuously costumed and caparisoned, with the emphasis on spectacle. This type of theatrical entertainment grew in popularity throughout Europe, culminating during the 16th century.
Another manifestation of courtly theatrical display took place on the triumphant entry into a city of a prince and his entourage after victory in war or on the occasion of a neighbouring ruler’s visit. Public participation was usually invited, and sometimes mandated, to help augment the sense of occasion. Such entertainment was followed by private festivities held at court. On occasion, a group of strolling players would also be invited to perform in the great hall or courtyard of the palace.
The theatre of the Middle Ages was essentially one of participation, and throughout its development it never lost an intimacy between actors and audience. It was a theatre that combined realism with considerable symbolism. George C. Izenour Clive Barker Developments of the Renaissance
Just before 1500, Italian amateur actors were performing classical comedies on stages with no decoration except for a row of curtained booths. By 1589, complex painted scenery and scene changes were being featured in production in Florence. And by 1650, Italy had developed staging practices that would dominate European theatre for the next 150 years.
In the beginning of the Renaissance, there were two distinct kinds of theatrical productions. The first was of the type presented by the humanist Julius Laetus at the Accademia Romana, a semisecret society he founded in the mid-15th century for the purpose of reviving classical ideals. In terms of staging, several medieval-type mansions were clustered to form a single large unit. There were, however, two elements not found previously. One was that the mansions were probably framed by decorative columns. This was the first movement toward the framework that would develop into the proscenium arch—the arch that encloses the curtain and frames the stage from the viewpoint of the audience. (The first permanent proscenium was built in the Teatro Farnese at Parma, Italy, in 1618–19, a temporary one having been constructed by Francesco Salviati 50 years earlier.) The second innovation was that the mansions, by being linked, were treated as components of a general city street. In 1508 at Ferrara a background painted according to the rules of perspective was substituted for the mansions; the scene included houses, churches, towers, and gardens. The revival of theatre building in Italy
The revival of theatre building, first sponsored by 16th-century ducal courts and academies in northern Italy, was part of the general renewal of interest in the classical heritage of Greece and Rome. The ruins of classical theatres were studied as models, along with Vitruvius’ treatise on classical architecture. There were, however, new conditions that fundamentally affected design. First of all, the theatre’s move indoors gave rise to problems of lighting and acoustics. Second, the newly formulated laws of perspective in painting, when applied to stage and scenic design, brought about a profound change in the effect of a stage on an audience. The first Renaissance theatres, like those of early antiquity, were temporary wooden constructions in gardens, ballrooms, and assembly halls. Sometimes they were hastily erected affairs, put up to celebrate the births and weddings of ducal offspring or to commemorate victories in war. The theatrical performances given were mostly of allegorical pageantry, but the scenic spectacle was calculated to dazzle the eye and often succeeded. One court vied with another for the services of painters, sculptors, architects, and innovators in stagecraft. Such artists as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Vasari, Bramante, Raphael, and a host of other Italian painters, sculptors, and architects, as well as poets, such as Tasso, and musicians, such as Monteverdi, strove to please and exalt the reputations, real or imaginary, of their princely patrons.
A more sober attempt to revive the classical theatre was made by the academies, organized by upper-class gentlemen who assembled to read and, on occasion, to participate in and to support financially productions of classical drama. The plays were generally of three kinds: contemporary poetic dramas based on ancient texts; Latinized versions of Greek dramas; and the works of Seneca, Terence, and Plautus in the original. Toward the middle of the 15th century, scholars discovered the manuscripts of the Roman writer Vitruvius; one of these scholars, the architect and humanist Leon Battista Alberti, wrote De re aedificatoria (1452; first printed in 1485), which stimulated the desire to build in the style of the classical stage. In 1545, Sebastiano Serlio published his Trattato de architettura, a work that concentrated entirely on the practical stage of the early 16th century.
Serlio’s treatise on the theatre had three especially significant items. The first was a plan for an auditorium and stage that assumed a rectangular hall, with spectators arranged in the same pattern as in the Roman cavea (i.e., the tiered semicircular seating area of a Roman theatre), the difference being that the semicircle of the audience was cut short by the sidewalls. Second, his three types of stage designs—tragic, comic, and satiric—were the same as Vitruvius’ classifications. Third, for the stage, he started with a Roman acting platform, but instead of the scaenae frons, he introduced a raked platform, slanted upward toward the rear, on which the perspective setting of a street was made up of painted canvases and three-dimensional houses. Since the perspective required that the houses rapidly diminish in size with distance, the actors were able to use only the front houses. Serlio used three types of scenes, all with the same basic floor plan. Each required four sets of wings (i.e., the pieces of scenery at the side of the stage), the first three angled and the fourth flat, and a perspective backdrop.
The Accademia Olimpica in the little town of Vicenza, near Venice, commissioned a famous late Renaissance architect, Andrea Palladio, to design a theatre. This, the Teatro Olimpico, was the first permanent modern indoor theatre, and it has survived intact. Palladio thoroughly researched his subject (the outdoor classical theatre of Rome) and without knowing it designed something now considered very close to a Roman odeum. It is a scaled-down version of an outdoor Roman theatre, with shallow open stage and a heavily sculptured, pedimented, permanent background. A colonnade of heroic proportions, surmounted by sculptured figures, surrounds a steeply stepped bank of seating. Overhead is a painted sky. To promote an intimate stage–auditorium relationship, he used a flattened ellipse in planning the seating, rather than the classic half circle. The interior was to be lit by tallow candles mounted in wall sconces. Palladio died before the building was finished, and his follower Vincenzo Scamozzi completed the work in 1585. Behind the five stage entrances (attributed to Scamozzi) are static, three-dimensional vistas of streets receding to their separate vanishing points; it is not certain whether this was the intent of the original design. In performance, the theatre is efficient if the auditorium is full, and speech carries quite well because of the small volume, flat ceiling, modulated sidewalls, excellent vertical sight lines, and direct hearing lines from all seats to the stage. The exterior is an ungainly, masonry-walled structure with a wood-trussed, tiled roof.
Teatro Olimpico, Vicenza, Italy; designed by Andrea Palladio and completed by Vincenzo Scamozzi, 1585.© travelview/Fotolia
In 1588–89 Scamozzi designed the Teatro all’Antica, a small court theatre for the Gonzaga family at Sabbioneta. Unlike the Teatro Olimpico the stage here is a single architectural vista behind a shallow-raked open platform, after the manner of the stage illustrated by Sebastiano Serlio. At Sabbioneta a divided horsehoe-shaped bank of seating leaves an empty arena, at floor level, in front of the stage. This space, backed by the permanent bank of seating, can be used for additional seating, but it also accommodates other uses and paves the way for the most famous and influential of all Renaissance theatre buildings, the Teatro Farnese.
The Teatro Farnese lies about 12 miles west of Sabbioneta at Parma, in a palace of the Farnese family. The theatre, designed by Giovanni Battista Aleotti and built in 1618 (but not used until 1628, to celebrate the marriage of a Medici daughter to a Farnese son), was the first proscenium theatre to be designed for movable scenery and is the earliest large-scale indoor theatrical facility to have survived. It was severely damaged by fire bombing in World War II but has since been restored to its former glory. There has also survived an extensive catalog giving details of events held there, including some contemporary comment on performances. The catalog describes the variety of uses to which the theatre was put: drama, opera, and ballet were performed on stage; equestrian acts and sumptuous balls were held in the spacious arena between stage and seating, which could also be flooded to a depth of two feet and used for mock naval battles; and, in addition, the theatre accommodated such court ceremonies as ambassadorial receptions, proclamations of state, and princely extravaganzas. The Teatro Farnese has windows (as did the Teatro Olimpico and the Teatro all’Antica at Sabbioneta before it) behind and above the banked seating, which helped to illuminate the space during daytime use; tallow candles or animal-fat lamps, in wall and overhead fixtures, were the only source of nighttime illumination for this and all interior theatres until the introduction of gas lighting in the 19th century. The Teatro Farnese set the style for stage and auditorium design over the next 250 years, with the exception of the courtyard-patio (corrales) theatre in Spain and the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre of England. George C. Izenour Howard Bay Clive Barker Developments in staging
In the latter half of the 16th century, intermezzi became a popular element of theatrical production. These entertainments, inserted between the acts of a play and totally unrelated to it, were generally on classical themes and were originally mounted during masked balls and banquets. The need to change settings rapidly for the alternating segments of plays and intermezzi encouraged the development of new devices for shifting scenery. The first solution to scene shifting adopted for intermezzi was derived from discussions of periaktoi found in Vitruvius. Nicola Sabbatini’s “Manual for Constructing Theatrical Scenes and Machines,” published in 1638, listed three main methods of changing scenery: one used periaktoi; the second maneuvered new wings around those already there; and the third pulled painted canvas around the wings to conceal the previously visible surfaces. In addition, the author explains how to change the flat wings near the back of the stage by sliding them in grooves or turning them like pages in a book. All of Sabbatini’s devices indicate a considerable simplification of Serlio’s wings (e.g., the substitution of painted details for three-dimensional ones).
The demands of scene changing required that flat wings replace the angled ones. The problem of transferring a perspective picture successfully to a series of flat wings was not solved until 1600. By 1650 angled wings were completely outmoded; at each wing position as many flats were set up, one behind the other, as there were settings. Scenery was changed by removing the visible wings to reveal the set behind. Grooves were made in the stage floor to support the flats and facilitate their movement. The background was painted on two flats, called shutters, which met at the centre of the stage; and cloths that could be rolled up were occasionally used.
The final step in scene-shifting was introduced by Giacomo Torelli in 1641, when he perfected the chariot-and-pole system. According to this system, slots were cut in the stage floor to support uprights, on which flats were mounted. These poles were attached below the stage to chariots mounted on casters that ran in tracks parallel to the front of the stage. As the chariots rolled to the centre of the stage, they carried the flats into view. An elaborate system of winches, ropes, and pulleys made it possible to change every part of a setting by turning a single winch. This invention, adopted by every European country except England and Holland, was the standard method of shifting scenery until the end of the 19th century.
The Italians were particularly taken with special effects and delighted in elaborating on medieval practices. Most of the special effects were associated with the intermezzi and involved the replacement of biblical characters of the Middle Ages by pagan deities. Machines capable of flying up to 50 characters might be used. According to Serlio, moving mechanical figures representing men, animals, and objects were cut out of pasteboard and drawn across a scene by invisible wires. In many productions clouds that engulfed the stage would hide the activity of lowering painted cloths and flats. The front curtain was used to conceal the scenery and increase amazement at the beginning of a performance. At first the curtain was dropped, but, as this was hazardous, the roll curtain was soon adopted.
Alongside the theatre of the aristocracy existed the enormously popular commedia dell’arte. The term commedia dell’arte only began to be used in the mid-18th century, though it has since come to denote the traveling companies of actors whose masked, improvised farces enjoyed a period of great popularity in Italy and throughout Europe in the 16th and early 17th centuries. The origins of the commedia are questionable, though it seems most likely that it derived from an ancient tradition of popular dancing and buffoonery, combined with stock characters from Roman comedy. Popular legend associates commedia performances with improvised acting in the open air, but evidence suggests that the commedia was not infrequently performed in enclosed spaces, since its emergence in the early 16th century proves it to be quite clearly a commercial theatre. The development of the commercial theatre, perceived by Vasari in the 16th century as an extraordinary innovation, parallels the emergence of the commedia companies, known for at least a century and a half as performers of commedia mercenaria (mercenary commedia), commedia all’improvviso (improvised commedia), commedia delle maschere (mask commedia), and, in France, as the comédie italienne. The basis of the commedia companies was continuity; roles and plots were transmitted orally, often from generation to generation. The companies traveled constantly and performed in hired indoor spaces, only occasionally on outdoor stages, making use of perspective scenery when they could but relying primarily on the skills of individual actors. Particularly famous were Francesco Andreini and his wife, Isabella, who was a playwright and poet in her own right, besides being a successful actress, Tiberio Fiorillo, and Vicenza Armani, whose arrival in many cities was accompanied by ceremonial cannon fire.
The commedia dell’arte is best remembered as a theatre of stock types that later degenerated into pantomime clowns but that caught and held the imagination of audiences across the centuries. In fact, the greatest significance of the commedia has often remained hidden; its emergence as a specific form of theatre in the 16th century marks a fundamental change in the history of Western theatre as a whole. In the precommercial theatre, performance was characterized by the mutual participation of actors and audience. In the commercial theatre, where actors have to sell themselves to the audience, the emphasis shifts away from the role of the audience onto the skills of the actors. So the commedia dell’arte began as a festive people’s theatre of the medieval world and became an actors’ theatre. Its rise to fame and popularity marks the precise moment of the start of the theatre industry. The 16th and 17th centuries in France
In 16th-century France most theatrical activity was associated with the Confrérie de la Passion, a Parisian organization set up for the performance of mystery cycles. In 1402 the company was granted permission to stage any mystery play, but by 1548 it had been forbidden to produce sacred mysteries, this satirical forum for the lower clergy having proved to be too much for the ecclesiastical authorities. The company was granted, instead, complete control over secular drama, and they converted the Hôtel de Bourgogne into a theatre. The sets consisted of paintings of houses, unusual for the variety of localities represented within the same stage area.
Despite the number of critics seeking to hold to the classical “unities”—i.e., the notion that a play should concern a single course of action set in one day, in one place—popular sentiment inspired plays with numerous settings. Such a play could be presented by the use of curtains, by changing scenery, or by a third method, the décor simultané, which was utilized by Laurent and Mahelot, the designers for the Confrérie. In this scheme, several localities were represented on the stage at the same time—each on a different portion of the stage—using angled mansions of wooden frames covered with canvas. When a play needed more mansions than could be fitted onstage at once, units were converted by removing the canvas coverings or by opening curtains to show an interior scene. Molière inherited a permanent town square set when he moved into the Petit-Bourbon in 1658. The Elizabethan stage
During the early part of the 16th century, there were two distinct types of theatre in England. One was represented by small groups of professional actors who performed in halls, inns, or marketplaces. The location of a play was established by the words and gestures of the actors. As in the commedia dell’arte, these localities had little significance. The second type of theatre, found in the London area, was made up of amateurs, usually university students, performing for the royal court and assorted gentry. The audience and the actors were educated, acquainted with the classics, and knowledgeable about theatre in other countries, particularly France. The stage was probably set with buildings made of laths, covered with painted canvas, with cloud borders masking the upper part of the acting area.
The significant achievement of the Elizabethan stage was connected with the theatres of professional acting groups, not the court theatre. During the second half of the 16th century, as they became successful, the troupes no longer needed to remain itinerant. In 1576 the first permanent public theatre, called simply the Theatre, was erected by the actor James Burbage. The building boom continued until the end of the century; the Globe, where Shakespeare’s plays were first performed, was built in 1599 with lumber from the demolished Theatre.
The typical Elizabethan stage was a platform, as large as 40 feet square (more than 12 metres on each side), sticking out into the middle of the yard so that the spectators nearly surrounded it. It was raised four to six feet and was sheltered by a roof, called “the shadow” or “the heavens.” In most theatres the stage roof, supported by two pillars set midway at the sides of the stage, concealed an upper area from which objects could be raised or lowered. At the rear of the stage was a multileveled facade with two large doors at stage level. There was also a space for “discoveries” of hidden characters, in order to advance the plot; this was probably located between the doors. Some scenes took place in a playing area on the second level of the facade, but, again, historians disagree as to which scenes they were.
Properties were occasionally carried onto the platform stage, but from extant lists it is obvious that they were few in number. Some properties were so cumbersome that they remained onstage throughout a performance. Smaller properties were probably revealed in the discovery space, and servants carried some properties on and off. It appears that the audience was not concerned by the scenic inconsistencies.
All of the theatre buildings were round, square, or octagonal, with thatched roofs covering the structure surrounding an open courtyard. Spectators, depending on how much money they had, could either stand in the yard, which may have sloped toward the stage, sit on benches in the galleries that went around the greater part of the walls, sit in one of the private boxes, or sit on a stool on the stage proper.
Copy of Johannes de Witt's sketch of the interior of the Swan Theatre, by Aernoudt (Arendt) van Buchell, c. 1596.Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands
The importance of this type of theatre was its flexibility. In some ways it was similar to earlier attempts to reconstruct the scaenae frons of the Romans; it had the facade and the entrance doors. The Elizabethan theatre differed in that it had a main platform, an inner stage, and an upper stage level that made movement possible in all directions instead of simply along the length of a narrow stage. Spain’s Golden Age
Religious drama developed in Spain during the Middle Ages only in the northeast because the Moors occupied the remainder of the peninsula. During the 16th century, as Spain became the most powerful country in Europe, it started to develop a sophisticated theatre. Following a period of interest in classical drama and the introduction of printing, in the late 15th century there appeared Juan del Encina, the founder of modern Spanish drama. Although the origin of professional status among players is obscure, it is known that actors in Spain were being paid as early as 1454. The popularity of the theatre mushroomed in the 1570s, and among the playwrights of this era were such masters as Lope de Vega, Cervantes, and Calderón de la Barca.
During this Golden Age in Spain, the theatre assumed a form more flexible than that of the Italian or French stages. The model was that of the corrales—courtyards enclosed by the backs of several houses—in which the earliest troupes had performed. The staging arrangements were almost identical to those in contemporary London. The stage itself was a raised platform, without a front curtain or a proscenium arch but with a permanent facade at the back. Stages were about 28 feet long and 23 to 30 feet deep. The open platform was usually backed by a facade of two levels, with pillars dividing the lower level into three openings. The second level, basically a gallery, usually represented towers, city walls, or hills.
Spanish staging conventions, like those of the Elizabethan theatre, tended to be simple. To denote a change of location, an actor merely exited and reentered. Occasionally, a curtain might have been used to augment the scenic effect, being drawn aside to permit upstage action. As with Shakespeare, however, locale was suggested by poetic discourse rather than by visual symbolism. The stage probably derived directly from the medieval wagon platform that had been used in the public square. Backstage were the actors’ dressing rooms and stage property rooms. A shallow roof, supported by the primary backstage structure, extended partway over the platform, though probably not far enough to require any additional support. Three kinds of scenic background were utilized: the facade; the curtains concealing the facade, which were used when the location was not particularly important; and medieval-type mansions, which were sometimes erected on the main stage. As spectacle increased after 1650, painted flats with doors and windows were set into the facade in place of curtains. After a period of time, awnings were rigged over the seating, and, eventually, the addition of a permanent roof made it an indoor theatre. Sevilla (Seville) at one time boasted seven permanent theatres; the most important in Madrid was the Corral de la Cruz, opened in 1579. The corrales themselves, enclosing a square or rectangular courtyard, were unroofed until the 18th century; when roofs were added, a row of windows was added under the eaves. Seating consisted of benches on the ground level and balconies set in the containing walls for wealthier patrons. A special boxlike gallery, called the cazuela, the “stewpot,” was assigned to women spectators. Above the cazuela were galleries for members of the city government, the clergy, and the aristocracy. Baroque theatres and staging
The combination of two artistic innovations—the formulation of the laws of perspective in the 15th century and the production of the first opera in 1597—provided the foundation for the Baroque theatre, which was to last until the 19th century. During this era all countries were brought into the same orbit, although Italy remained the primary inspiration. The classically inspired drama of the 16th century gave way to a variety of entertainments—intermezzi, ballet, masques, and opera. The invention of new means of presenting spectacular visual effects encouraged the installation of more and more elaborate machinery in theatre buildings. The result was that spectacle dominated all other aspects of production. Howard Bay Clive Barker Court theatres
The Baroque architectural style, beginning in Italy and spreading across Europe, dominated theatre building between about 1650 and 1790. Its chief characteristics are refinement in detail of the proscenium stage and of the Renaissance horseshoe-shaped auditorium and seating plan. The innovations of the period were introduced in the private court theatres. As many as five shallow balconies were stacked vertically in the auditorium. For the first time there appeared an orchestra pit in front of the stage, sunk below ground level. The stage floor, which previously had extended only a few yards back from the proscenium arch, was now deepened to accommodate scenery, equipment, and dancing.
With the rise of grand opera and ballet, inventors and designers were called upon to provide increasingly elaborate, portable, perspective scenery and complicated stage machinery, both above and below stage, to effect scene changes (nearly always carried out in full sight of the audience). Famous names of this period include the Italians Giacomo Torelli and the Bibiena family, whose ingenious settings were unrivaled for originality. A rigid court etiquette dictated that the lines of perspective should provide a perfect stage picture from the point of view of the royal box, which directly faced the stage. Since, moreover, the building of theatres was controlled by the ducal or imperial purse, a rigid architectural formalism, varying only in detail, became the fashion, not to be broken until late in the 19th century. The auditorium was planned in tiers, a vertical stratification that reflected the ordering of society by class. A good example is the French court theatre at Versailles (1769), designed by King Louis XV’s architect, Jacques-Ange Gabriel. For a court theatre, its stage is exceptionally well equipped, mechanized in the manner of the Bibiena family, with an overhead pulley system for flying drops and borders, while the flat wings and shutters making up the elaborate scene were mounted on frames attached to carriages that ran on rails beneath the stage and so could easily be changed. Engravings of the time indicate that the court theatres were used for balls, concerts, and the like, as well as for stage performance. Though small, these costly court theatres witnessed the first productions of many operas by composers such as Haydn and Mozart, and they also played an important part in fostering the development of classical ballet. Public theatres The opera house
There were two kinds of public theatre in the 18th century. One was a logical development of the earlier private court theatres, reflecting a sophisticated, urban, aristocratic demand for theatre as entertainment. The Teatro alla Scala (1776–78) in Milan is a good example of the numerous theatres erected by 18th-century nobility in the capitals of Europe. Public theatres such as La Scala differ from private court theatres only in the size of the auditorium and stage. Whereas Versailles had seated fewer than 700 in the auditorium, La Scala could accommodate more than 2,000. Opera, generally including a ballet, was by this time the most popular form of entertainment, especially in Italy.
Teatro alla Scala (La Scala).© walencienne/iStock.com The Restoration playhouse
The other kind of public theatre, peculiar to England, was the Restoration playhouse. The Baroque horseshoe-shaped auditorium, with its deep stage and orchestra pit, was generally in favour all over western Europe, fixing the design and style of opera houses in particular. In it the actor played in front of elaborately painted scenery and behind the proscenium arch. The Restoration playhouse, however, while borrowing the fully rigged stage of the Baroque theatre, provided, in addition, a deep apron stage thrusting out from the proscenium, upon which most of the action took place. Thus, the actor played, as it were, in the auditorium and away from the scenic backing; the English, with their Shakespearean tradition, were loath to abandon the intimate contact between actor and audience that the Elizabethan theatre had allowed. At either side of the forestage were doors by which actors entered; above these doors were additional boxes, for spectators, stacked one above the other in the Baroque manner. Influence of technical achievements
Theatre lighting in this period was provided by wick-fed illuminants concealed behind the wings and proscenium arch and at the edge of the stage apron. In the auditorium either a large, single, central fixture, as at La Scala, or a number of smaller ceiling fixtures, as at Versailles, was the custom. All were kept burning during performance, and the habit of lighting the auditorium persisted until late in the 19th century. George C. Izenour
The court masques served to introduce Italian staging to England. The masques were allegories designed to honour a particular person or occasion by comparing them favourably with mythological characters or situations. Inigo Jones, the foremost English architect of his time, produced masques and other entertainments at the English court from 1605 to 1640. He had visited Italy between 1596 and 1604 and was the individual most responsible for acceptance of Italian stage design in England. From his sketches it is known that Jones went through several phases in his designs, starting in 1604 with the décor simultané, mentioned above, in which different localities were represented on different portions of the stage. In 1605 he introduced simple perspective settings—two painted representations of houses with a painted back shutter. The same year he experimented with periaktoi, creating a globe, with no visible axle, that revolved to reveal eight dancers sitting inside.
His masques all had painted proscenium arches, into which he set a falling curtain. By 1635 Jones designed a setting that utilized four angled wings, like Serlio’s, and four shutters at the rear, three of which could be drawn to the sides in two parts. Jones’ design for a masque in 1640 is considered the first design of the Baroque theatre in England. Four sets of side wings were placed on each side of the stage, each wing consisting of two flats. There were four shutters at the rear, with each dividing into two parts for easy removal. Each wing had either a header (i.e., a horizontal unit that joins two upright wings, to form a flat arch) or a sky border (a horizontal piece of scenery, designed to look like the sky, which masks the space above the set). To give the illusion of distance, the side wings were made in exaggerated perspective, with each succeeding wing in significantly smaller scale than the one preceding. The disadvantage of using smaller sized flats toward the back of the stage was that if the actors stood too close to them the illusion would be destroyed. The actors were therefore restricted to the front of the stage. In successive decades, attempts were made to give the stage area greater depth by multiplying the number of flats on each side. In sum, with the exception of the chariot-and-pole system of scene changing, Jones introduced all of the major Italian developments into England.
Stage designed by Inigo Jones in the Italian manner for a production of Florimène, 1635; in the Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth, Eng.Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth. Reproduced by permission of the trustees of the Chatsworth Settlement
After Inigo Jones, English scenery practices and stage conventions were similar to those of Italy. Sets were changed by sliding them in grooves in the stage floor and overhead. Since the curtain was raised after the prologue and remained up throughout the performance, all scene shifting was in view of the audience. It was not until 1750 that an “act drop” was used; previously, even intermezzi were performed in front of a full stage setting.
As interest in spectacle increased, the scene painter became more important, and by the late 18th century each theatre had two or more permanent scene painters. The best known designer around the end of the 18th century was Philip James de Loutherbourg, a painter; from 1771 he worked for the actor-manager David Garrick as scenic designer at the Drury Lane Theatre in London, and he is credited with changing the orientation of design from the architectural to the landscape era, thus marking the end of the Baroque in England. He was one of the pioneers of the cut cloth, a double back cloth in which there was an opening in the one nearer the audience that revealed a vista painted on the back one. He also utilized transparent scenery; in one production he cut the moon out of the canvas back cloth, replaced it with gauze, and lit it from behind. The importance that Loutherbourg’s landscape painting of the back cloth assumed is shown by the fact that the Drury Lane pantomime of 1779 was specially written for the scenery he had designed while on a trip to Derbyshire. His depiction of actual places in England started a vogue for “local colour.” Loutherbourg’s single most important contribution, however, was that he achieved a unity of design because he directed both the scenery and the lighting and effects of a single production. Scenic design
Significant changes in scenic design were made by Italy’s Bibiena family, of whom the best known members were Ferdinando, Francesco, Giuseppe, Antonio, and Carlo. Around 1703, at Bologna, Ferdinando introduced angled perspective. Previously, stage design was based on one-point perspective using a single vanishing point, in which all lines appear to recede with distance toward one point at the centre of the background. Bibiena, however, used perspective with two vanishing points; if this technique were used to render a large, flat building as seen from one corner of it, for example, the base and roof lines of one side extended into the distance would appear to meet at some point off to the right and those of the other side at another point off to the left. Furthermore, by locating these points quite low, Bibiena gave the structures the effect of immense size. Buildings, walls, or courtyards were placed in the centre of the set and vistas at the sides, and the scale of settings, which had previously been designed to make the scenery an extension of the auditorium, was altered. The front wings were painted as though they were only the lower part of a building. The result of these innovations was that Bibiena’s sets seemed so large that they created a feeling of fantasy. Despite its apparent size, though, an angled-perspective setting required less stage space than one with a central alley. Many of the settings divided the stage into a foreground, for the actors, and a background, for distant objects. A drop, designed to resemble a series of arches or columns, often marked the rear of the acting area.
Another designer who developed the angled scene independently of Bibiena was Filippo Juvarra, a major Italian architect of the early 18th century, who began his work, as did many artists of the period, with the decoration of court entertainments. Some of his most intriguing scenic designs, in terms of architectural fantasy, were executed for a marionette theatre owned by his patron. These designs are of particular interest to theatre historians because Juvarra usually included plans of the stage settings showing exactly how the wings were placed. Juvarra’s sets were basically curvilinear, leading the audience’s eye to the foreground instead of the sides. In several sketches he designed a permanent set with a large archway opening up to a series of vistas, which varied from a landscape to a perspective corridor. His designs foreshadowed the interest in landscape that was not to find its complete development until almost a century later.
In the second half of the 18th century, several new directions in thinking led to stylistic changes in scenery. One was the increased interest in history, spurred by the rediscovery of Pompeii in 1748. Scenery of classical ruins overgrown with vines became popular. Plays based on folk literature were produced with Gothic architectural settings. The most important new direction was that scenic designers introduced “mood”; they started to emphasize light and shadow to create an atmosphere. The best known artist of this period was the Italian engraver Giambattista Piranesi, who executed more than 1,000 engravings of Roman ruins and prisons. He did not particularly apply himself to the theatre, yet his designs were inspired by contemporary stage settings and were in turn themselves an inspiration for other designers. Developments in France and Spain
Although Italian-style scenery was introduced to the French court before, it was not popular until after 1640. The first theatre in France with a permanent proscenium arch and a stage designed for flat wings was constructed in 1641 for Cardinal de Richelieu. In 1645 an Italian designer, Giacomo Torelli, popularly called “the great sorcerer,” was imported by Richelieu’s successor, Jules Cardinal Mazarin, to design for the new theatre, the Palais-Royal. In 1646–47 Torelli remodeled the Palais-Royal to accommodate his invention of the chariot-and-pole system of scene shifting. Pierre Corneille, the founder of French classical tragedy, was commissioned to write Andromède for the remodeled theatre. Although the play progressed through spoken episodes, each act provided an excuse for Torelli to introduce elaborate machinery, including the revolving stage. Until Torelli, the changing of scenery had marked a structural break in the dramatic presentation. Torelli put aside all previous methods, which were so distracting to the audience, and introduced set changes within, rather than at the ends of, the scenes. The audience was mesmerized by the scenery mysteriously changing while the action of an opera or ballet proceeded without interruption.
For the wedding of Louis XIV, in 1660, Gaspare Vigarani went to France from Italy to build the Salle des Machines, the largest theatre in Europe. It was 226 feet long, only 94 feet of which was occupied by the auditorium. Its stage, 132 feet deep, had a proscenium arch only 32 feet wide. One of Vigarani’s machines, 60 feet deep itself, was used to fly the entire royal family and their attendants on stage for the finale. Vigarani was succeeded by his son, who was in turn followed by the Jean Berains, father and son. The Berains established a distinctly French style of design, emphasizing heavy lines, curves, and encrusted ornamentation. They usually designed only one set for each act but used many machines and special effects. This combination of static scenery and dynamic machinery was to remain in vogue in French opera through the 18th century. After 1682 the influence of the court on public theatre declined. After 1690 the King became so puritanical that plays were no longer encouraged.
In contrast to court opulence was the Comédie-Française, for which a theatre was built in 1689 from a converted tennis court. The stage was equipped for flat wings and shutters, but since scene changes were few, the machinery was minimal. The typical background for tragedies was the palais à volonté (literally “palace to order”), a neutral setting without particularized details. For comedy the typical scene was chambre à quatre portes (“room with four doors”), an informal interior. By 1700 Paris had two types of theatres, epitomized by the Opéra, with its Baroque scenery and machines, and the Comédie-Française, which did not rely on spectacle.
The first true spectacle in a public theatre was the 1755 production of Voltaire’s Orphelin de la Chine (Orphan of China), with its supposedly accurate Chinese scenery and costumes. Subsequently the Comédie-Italienne, permanently performing in Paris, introduced local colour and increased the use of spectacle. Giovanni Nicolò Servandoni, originally a Florentine who lived in Paris from 1724 to 1746, translated Italian styles to French taste. His use of perspective gave the illusion of space without falling back on the obvious geometry that characterized the High Baroque. He took over as director of the Salle de Machines, where his work in its turn influenced the designers of Italy and Germany. At the Opéra, as opposed to public theatres, spectacle was used throughout the 18th century. Its best known designers included the painter François Boucher. And although many famous painters designed settings, there is still no comparison with the works of the Italians of this period. The financial problems of the theatres did much to prevent a forward thrust in French design. Ironically, the most sumptuous spectacle of the latter part of the 18th century occurred in France in 1794, after the Revolution: the National Convention decreed “The Festival of the Supreme Being,” designed by the painter Jacques-Louis David and conducted by the revolutionary government leader Robespierre—Neoclassicism in the service of the Republic.
After the 1760s, theatres were built in the Italian style, with ovoid auditoriums and enlarged stages. By the 1780s, when the standing pit fell into disuse, all of the spectators were finally seated, off the stage. The seated pit was not to become accepted in France until the 19th century.
In Spain during this period, theatre began to decline. Although Italian-style scenery was used occasionally, it was not common until brought from Florence in 1626 by Cosimo Lotti, who staged many outdoor productions on the grounds of the Buen Retiro palace in Madrid. For one, he built a floating stage on a lake, and the special effects included a shipwreck, a water chariot drawn by dolphins, and the destruction of Circé’s palace. This production was lit by 3,000 lanterns, and the spectators watched from gondolas. In 1640 Lotti built a permanent theatre in Madrid, the Coliseo, which probably had the first proscenium arch in Spain. The next decade saw a decline in both court and public theatres. By 1650 the Coliseo was reopened, but its popularity had diminished by 1700. By the late 1600s Spain had lost most of its economic and political power, and its theatre through most of the Baroque was a watered-down version of Italian concepts. Developments in northern Europe
One country outside the Italian influence during this period exhibited an interesting theatre plan. In 1638 Jacob van Campen, an architect, designed a theatre in Amsterdam that had no counterpart elsewhere in Europe. The auditorium was elliptical, with two tiers of boxes on one side opposite a stage facade with open balconies over the sides. The facade itself consisted primarily of pillars with cornices above them, and painted panels, representing different localities rather than a unified setting, were set between the pillars. The whole concept of the panels was probably directly derived from the simultaneous stage of the Middle Ages.
The constantly shifting politics of northern Europe, and particularly of Germany, in the 16th and 17th centuries was the primary cause for the late development of professional theatre in this region. Theatre in Germany owes its impetus to the English troupes that started touring the country in the early 17th century. At first, the English performed in courts, and by 1650 they were traveling across the country regularly. To attract the non-English-speaking audience, the troupes gradually inserted German phrases, speeches, and then whole scenes. As early as 1626, German actors were joining the troupes, and by 1680 English actors had been completely displaced. Because Germany was politically divided and there were no large cities, the troupes had to travel constantly to find new audiences. To attract the disparate spectators, a company might have as many as 100 plays in its repertoire. These conditions combined to make it impossible to rehearse and mount plays with any great professionalism.
Between the mid-17th and the late 18th century the aristocracy ignored public theatre in favour of opera. The first Viennese opera house was built in 1652 by Giovanni Burnacini and is similar to the courtyards of Italian Renaissance palaces in the two levels of its auditorium, framed by a double arcade of rounded arches. Italians played an important part in every aspect of theatre at the imperial court until the late 18th century. The first performance at the Viennese opera house was of an Italian opera.
In the public theatre, the work of the manager Johann Friedrich Schönemann led to the establishment in 1767 of the Hamburg National Theatre, the first noncommercial public theatre, subsidized by a group of rich citizens. This marked the beginning of a movement that gained force during the next decade and can be found even today in East German theatre. The prevailing attitude was that theatre is a cultural institution that, like museums, should be available to all citizens.
This movement toward permanence greatly influenced the evolution of staging in the 18th century. As audiences grew larger, and as cities developed, a troupe was able to reduce the number of plays in a repertoire, and this in turn led to better productions. And as the theatre building grew in size and substance, the chariot-and-pole system of scene shifting was introduced. Interest in historical accuracy of sets and costumes was stimulated by the chivalric plays popular in the 1770s. During the next two decades dramatists were writing plays that relied on complex set pieces, including bridges and walls. Doors and windows were set up between the wings, marking the first development toward the box set—a set representing three walls of a room, the fourth being the plane of the proscenium. Early Russian staging
Russian theatre can be traced back to the pagan rituals of the ancient Slavs, the later Christian festivals, and, in the Middle Ages, the mixed rituals of these two influences. As early as the 10th century there were mummers, called skomorokhi, probably itinerant comedians who performed in small towns and villages. Suffering the same fate as the actors of western Europe during the early Middle Ages, the mummers were the victims of measures taken by the princes as well as the church. Their specialties were trained-animal acts, usually with bears, and puppet shows. The Greek Orthodox Church introduced some morality plays in Russia, but they were limited in scope and number. Since the mass was celebrated in the vernacular, the church did not need the aid of morality plays for the dissemination of its message. At the beginning of the 17th century, the only theatre using a literary text and a trained company was the drama brought from Poland to the Ukraine.
In 1672 the first public performance of a play was offered in Moscow. A special theatre was built in the Tsar’s residence; there seems to have been no scenery outside a fir tree on either side of the stage, although there was a sliding curtain. The Tsar (Alexis), who was so excited that he sat in the theatre for 10 hours on the day of the first performance, paid for the founding of a theatrical school. The problem with the theatre during the next 80 years was precisely that it had been founded on the Tsar’s order: it was attached to the court and subsidized by the aristocracy (who chose German directors); it assumed political overtones and aimed at pleasing only the monarchy.
The beginning of change came in 1730, when an Italian group brought the commedia dell’arte, elaborate sets, and machinery to Moscow. During the next 10 years, Italian opera and ballet were also introduced to Russia. Despite the success of foreign companies, the significant event was the birth of the national theatre in 1749. This enterprise was open to the public, and, although it was popular, lack of funds made it a weak rival to court theatre. Its impact lay in the fact that it introduced the concept of theatre to a large audience.
By the end of the 18th century, companies were touring the major cities, and privately owned theatres were being opened. In general, only the aristocracy patronized the theatre, and nobles established their own serf troupes. One prince, who owned 21,000 serfs, established his own ballet, opera, and dramatic companies. Owners occasionally rented their troupes for public performances, until the abolition of serfdom in 1861. Little is known of the staging of their productions beyond the fact that it was imitative of French and Italian theatre. Developments in the 19th century Theatre in France after the Revolution
Under Napoleon, French theatre was little different from that of the 1780s, specializing in Neoclassical drama. Popular drama, as performed by what were known as “boulevard theatres,” introduced melodrama, a form that was to dominate theatre in the 19th century. Melodrama, in turn, by popularizing departures from Neoclassicism and capturing the interest of large audiences, paved the way for Romantic drama.
The dramatic debut of Romanticism is dated at 1830, when public pressure forced the Comédie-Française to produce Victor Hugo’s Hernani. After a spirited opening at which Hugo’s Bohemian claque overwhelmed the staid regular theatregoers, Romanticism was victorious and ruled the Parisian stage for 50 years. The grandiose bombast of Romanticism did not overturn the Baroque, it merely diluted it; the formal artificial structure was broken into sentimental, melodramatic episodes depicting the distraught hero buffeted by an unfeeling world and the awesome elements. The melodramas introduced natural disasters that were significant to the plot, so that emphasis could be placed on special effects and spectacle. Dramatists also deliberately included exotic locales or examples of local colour, so that a variety of historical periods and fantastic sets would hold the attention of the audience. Throughout the 19th century, architectural perspective was replaced by neo-Gothic sentimentalization of nature. Painted Romantic scenery, in the style of Loutherbourg, was the rage in France.
The two important designers of this period were Jacques Daguerre, who was also the inventor of the daguerreotype, an early photographic technique, and Pierre-Luc-Charles Ciceri, the most important designer of this period. The panorama, a major scenic innovation, was invented in 1787 and first used on the London stage in 1792. The panorama was set up in a circular building in which the audience, sitting on a central platform, was totally surrounded by a continuous painting. Daguerre started his career as one of the first panorama painters. He went on to invent the diorama, in which the audience sat on a platform that revolved to show paintings on proscenium-like stages. Although the scenery remained stationary, Daguerre created the illusion of constant change by controlling the light on the semitransparent sets. The panorama was more popular than the diorama because it did not depend on the ability to alter stage lighting. Its shape, though, was altered to resemble the diorama. The next development in spectacle was the moving panorama, in which a continuous scene was painted on a long cloth, hung from an overhead track, and attached at both ends to spools. When the spools were turned, the cloth moved across the stage so that the actors with their carriages and other props could move from one location to another without changing wings and drops. The sky borders were dispensed with, and flats of architectural units or natural objects forming an arch were placed at the front of the stage, through which was seen a distant view painted on a curved panorama stretching across the back and sides of the stage.
Ciceri’s importance arose from his abilities to depict local colour, ruins, and historical backgrounds. He founded the first scenic studio in Paris independent of a theatre, with specialists in various types of design. After the opening of the new Opéra in 1822, interest in spectacle was so great that promptbooks were published, describing scenery and special effects and how they could be adapted for theatres with less equipment.
By the end of the 19th century, the process of scenic design and construction had become standardized. The director gave the requirements to the scenic designer, who made cardboard models. The scenery was constructed by the theatre’s carpenters and then sent to a scenic studio for painting. Howard Bay German Romanticism and Naturalism
The 19th century in Germany was a study in contrasts. The beginning decades saw the rise of Romanticism, which, 50 years later, was still strong, primarily in the figure of the composer Richard Wagner. The century’s middle decades of political and economic disillusionment before the unification of Germany were conducive to the emerging Naturalist school, the philosophy of which was first embodied in the Meiningen Players, organized in 1866 by George II, duke of Saxe-Meiningen.
By the middle 1820s, after the defeat of Napoleon, the political turbulence in Germany led to municipal control over the theatre and strict censorship. Repertoires consisted of “safe” classics and insipid new plays, resulting in competent but uninspired theatre. This competence was reflected in the staging. One of the few important designers of this period was Karl Friedrich Schinkel, who had been trained in both Italy and Germany. He introduced the diorama in Berlin in 1827.
One true innovator during the first half of the 19th century was Ludwig Tieck, who advocated realistic acting on a platform stage. With the help of an architect, he tried to reconstruct an Elizabethan public stage. He also championed the open stage in the belief that pictorial realism destroys the true illusion of the theatre. Invited by William IV of Prussia to stage Antigone at the court theatre in Potsdam in 1841, Tieck extended the apron in a semicircle over the orchestra pit and built a skēnē as the only background for the drama. In 1843 he adopted Elizabethan conventions to the proscenium theatre for a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Using the front part of the stage as a large open space, he built a unit in the rear consisting of two stairs leading to an acting area eight feet above stage level. The stairs framed an inner stage below the platform. He then hung tapestries at right angles to the proscenium, thus masking the sides of the stage. Although Tieck was universally respected, it was not until the 1870s that his innovations received widespread support. The works of Wagner and Saxe-Meiningen were responsible for this change in the public’s attitude.
Wagner’s works were the dramatic culmination of Romanticism and the contribution it was destined to make to modern theatre practices. German Romanticism was in great part a protest movement against the dominance of French Neoclassicism. Instead of structuring dramatic action according to fixed patterns of logical progression, the Romantics wanted dramatic structures born of human experience. This stress on what was to be called “organic form” was a protest against the received tradition of dramatic theory and staging practices. German Romanticism, also known as Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”), a movement generally attributed to the influence of the young Goethe at the end of the 18th century, turned to a revival of the Gothic style of the Middle Ages to escape Neoclassicism. The new middle-class audiences identified with the lonely soul against the world—a sentimental world of windswept mountain crags and gloomy, mouldering castles.
Romanticism later broke into two camps. The first of these, called historical Romanticism, held that history is continuous, and that once its import has been grasped, the present can be recognized to be as “historical” as anything that occurred in the past. The second Romantic group, with which Wagner was associated, was concerned only with the use of history to reach absolute truths. Wagner believed that the study of history leads ultimately to prehistory and thus to transhistorical mythology, the realm of absolute truths. What is particularly interesting is that the first type, historical Romanticism, eventually found its home in the theatre in the realist school. Wagner’s myth-Romanticism faded by the late 1800s, although Romantic contributions to staging exerted their influence well into the 20th century.
Wagner wanted to use myth to reunite modern man with the passion from which rationalism, the industrial process, and capitalism had separated him. For him, the theatrical manifestation of the myth was the music drama, and he hoped to combine music, acting, stage space, design, and lighting to establish the primeval mood of myth. To house his music drama, Wagner designed the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, which opened in 1876, marking a rejection of the Baroque stratified auditorium and a return to classical, democratic principles of theatre design. The seating is fan-shaped, a belated acknowledgment of the fact that good lateral sight lines are essential for the enjoyment of performances on a proscenium stage. Wagner did away with the box seats, from which the wealthier theatregoers had watched each other instead of the stage for hundreds of years. Another striking feature is the absence of any radial or parallel aisles. Side aisles and two vomitory exits provide the only access to seating, thus further concentrating and compressing the main body of seats in front of the proscenium. Wagner had the orchestra lowered into a pit (the “mystic gulf”), so that it became the hidden source of an enveloping sound.
The stage itself was raked upward toward the rear, and the scenery was shifted by using the chariot-and-pole system. Wagner introduced a system of steam vents to make a steam curtain to hide scene changes. For him the theatre could no longer be the aggregate of the parts contributed by various hands. The ideal was the Gesamtkunstwerk (“total work of art”), in which all the elements of performance would be integrated. Nothing could be left to chance; all must be directed toward the same end.
At the time Wagner was introducing his music drama, George II, duke of Saxe-Meiningen, began to take an interest in the theatre of his court. The theatre itself, built by his father in classical-revival style in 1831, had a facade decorated with pillars crowned by a Greek pediment. The building contained not only the auditorium and stage house but also an assembly hall for balls, banquets, and other nontheatrical festivities. Saxe-Meiningen tried to create the illusion of reality with accurate spectacle and lifelike acting. He studied the distinctions between nations within the same historical period; the result was unprecedented historical accuracy. Saxe-Meiningen also insisted on using authentic period furniture, and the success of his troupe led to the opening of theatrical supply houses. The Duke designed all scenery, properties, and costumes for his troupe. Costumes were made of authentic materials. Characters appearing in chain mail wore chain mail and not some lighter substitute. Swords were of authentic weight. In this way, it was reasoned, the actor’s physical sensation of wearing the costumes induced empathetic feelings for the character, and these feelings formed the basis of “lifelike” acting. Saxe-Meiningen viewed scene design as similar to architectural design in that it shapes whatever activity it shelters. He insisted on the continuous and direct relation between the design of a set and the actors’ movements within it. Among his innovations is the abandonment of the practice of using only pastel colours for scenery; instead of sky borders as overhead masking, he used richly coloured banners, foliage, and other devices. Saxe-Meiningen was one of the first designers to break the surface of the stage floor into different levels.
From 1866 to 1874 the troupe performed only in Meiningen; for the following 16 years it toured 38 cities in nine countries. It had enormous impact on the history of the theatre, as it achieved complete illusion in every facet of its productions. Saxe-Meiningen is considered the single most important influence on the directors who inaugurated 20th-century stagecraft; he introduced the pictorial massing of crowds. He coordinated and controlled the work of his actors and established the ensemble as the basis for creative work in the theatre. There were no stars in the Meiningen Players. Casting policy required that actors play leading roles in some productions, subordinate roles in others. The supernumeraries were subjected to the same discipline, and the crowd was sectionalized under the leadership of actors. Actors were required to learn practical skills appropriate to their roles. The Saxe-Meiningen movement toward unified productions influenced other major figures such as André Antoinein France and Konstantin Stanislavsky in Russia, great apostles of realism and the founders of modern theatre.
However disparate the aims of Saxe-Meiningen and Wagner were, they had a great deal in common. Between them they established the principle that a production should be subordinated to the will of one individual who directs and integrates all aspects of the preparation. The profession of theatre director came into being with their vision of theatre. Russian imperial theatre
Russian drama in the 19th century also got off to a slow start because of strict government censorship, particularly after 1825. This atmosphere was conducive, as in Germany, to the flowering of Romanticism, especially as manifest in patriotic spectacles. Melodrama, Shakespeare, and musical plays were the backbone of Russian repertory until the 1830s. The best known plays of the new realistic school were those of Aleksandr Ostrovsky, Nikolay Gogol, and Ivan Turgenev.
Until 1883 the imperial theatres, under strict government controls, had a monopoly on productions in Russia’s two major cities, Moscow and St. Petersburg. It was not until the monopolies were rescinded that public theatre was able to expand, although the state troupes, such as the Bolshoi in Moscow, continued to offer the most professional productions.
Through the 1850s each theatre had its own few stock settings. The box set had been introduced in the 1830s, but it was to take several decades to become popular. Realism began to dominate scenic design by the 1850s, particularly at the Maly Theatre in Moscow. Historically accurate settings began to appear in the 1860s, when one theatre hired a historian to help the designer of Aleksey Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan the Terrible. Previously, settings had followed the neutral style of the German designer Alfred Roller, whose pupils were the major designers for the state theatres. The unified production techniques of Meiningen were not seen in Russia until the Moscow Art Theatre flourished at the beginning of the 20th century. British theatre and stage design
In 19th-century Britain the audiences shaped both the theatres and the dramas played within them. The upper class favoured opera, while the working class, whose population in London alone tripled between 1810 and 1850, wanted broadly acted theatre with scenic wonders and machinery. And as the audience grew in number, the Georgian theatre building, which was small and intimate, began to disappear.
In the early 19th century an important designer was William Capon, who utilized pieces set at various raked angles and elaborate back cloths as an alternative to flats and wings. His sets were also large enough not to be overpowered by the larger theatres. One of Capon’s sets, depicting a 14th-century cathedral, was 56 feet wide and 52 feet deep. His sets were historically accurate even though the practice of having several designers work independently on the same production was still in effect.
The productions of John Philip Kemble, the manager of first the Drury Lane and then the Covent Garden, marked the shift from Neoclassicism to Romanticism in English stage design. He valued theatricality over historical accuracy, as the audience demanded an increased use of spectacle with each passing year. As melodrama became more popular, the effects multiplied until, in an 1820 production of King Lear, the storm noises were so realistic that Lear could not be heard. In 1823 Kemble began to reverse this trend and started to use accurate sets and costumes for Shakespeare, and within 15 years historical accuracy was dominant.
Another important contributor to the history of staging was Lucia Vestris, an actress and manager at the Olympic Theatre. She controlled all the elements of a production and combined them into a single, integrated unit. She also was enamoured of spectacle and is credited with introducing the box set on the London stage in 1832, although there is some evidence pointing to its use as early as 1794. In this new set, the sidewalls of rooms were built solidly from front to back so that the actors, instead of entering as usual between side wings set parallel to the footlights, came in through doors set on hinges. She treated the box set realistically, attaching knobs to doors, for example.
By the 1840s, because of political conditions, many theatres were bankrupt. The next 20 years saw a gradual recovery, with few dramatic innovations in design. One important manager of this era was Charles Kean, a pictorial realist, whose first major attempt to ensure accuracy in every production detail was made in 1852 with King John. In the following year, Kean gave the audience a printed list of authorities consulted with regard to the authenticity of each production. In mounting Shakespeare as lavishly as possible while at the same time emphasizing historical accuracy, Kean practically buried his actors in historical costume, settings, and pageantry.
Charles Kean as Lear in King Lear© Archive Photos
In the second half of the 19th century, burlesque, extravaganza, and musical drama held the largest audience appeal. The music hall also came into prominence, as incidental entertainment was separated from drama. In the period from 1860 to 1880, the theatre continued to expand, and the number of buildings alone increased 50 percent in the first 10 years. The first manager of significance was Charles Fechter, who revived interest in the box set. He also discontinued entrances from the wings, heretofore a standard practice of actors even when the wings represented solid walls. Fechter also used a stage that sank by hydraulic mechanism, later perfected by the Germans, which allowed scenery to be shifted in the basement (see below Development of stage equipment).
The most important management team was that of Sir Squire Bancroft and his wife, Marie Wilton, at the Prince of Wales Theatre. Producing plays by Thomas W. Robertson, they succeeded in melding character and stage business. Spectacle was no longer embellishment but an emphasizing of realistic visual details. The Bancrofts’ productions also finally won general acceptance for the box set; they were as accurate in modern plays as in Shakespeare; and they firmly anchored the acting behind the proscenium arch. Theatre boxes had been replaced by open balconies, which no longer extended to the proscenium wall. This made it possible for the Bancrofts and others to lower the proscenium arch. In 1880 they even extended the arch downward on either side and across the floor of the stage to emphasize the analogy of the picture frame. Modern, realistic interior settings were constantly used, and the acting was keyed to the settings. Although Fechter had employed realistic stage business as early as 1860, the Bancrofts were the first to standardize it and make it a tradition.
Box set for a scene from Ours by Thomas William Robertson, performed at the Prince of Wales Theatre, 1866Courtesy of the Illustrated London News; photograph, John Freeman & Co.
The greatest of the actor-managers was Sir Henry Irving, the manager of the Lyceum Theatre from 1878 to 1901. The best known designers of the period, Hawes Craven and Joseph Harker, worked for Irving. He hired historians to advise on the accuracy of productions and enlisted easel painters such as Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema to design scenery for Cymbeline and Coriolanus and Sir Edward Burne-Jones for King Arthur. After Irving saw the Meiningen performances in London in 1881, he modeled his Shakespearean productions on what he had seen. Irving was also the first manager to use the front curtain to hide major scene changes, and he completely darkened the auditorium during performance, as Wagner had done.
The widespread changes in staging methods during the 19th century were possible because of changes in architecture and the development of machinery. The complex scenery of the Victorian theatre required increased flying around the stage, with a complicated counterweight system, and this in turn fostered one of the most popular features of the staging of this period—the flying of actors as well as scenery.
During this period the arrangement of the stage floor also changed to fit the requirements of spectacle. After 1850 the stage floor was usually constructed so that floorboards could be removed for raising and lowering machinery between the joists. Sometimes a vertical panorama would run from overhead through a groove in the floor. The changes in stage floors made possible new scenic effects to meet the audience demand. The traps of the Elizabethan and Georgian eras, for instance, were greatly elaborated. The most famous trap was a “ghost glide,” a sort of dumbwaiter that made actors appear to rise from the earth and glide through space.
As stage lighting improved with the introduction of gaslight, the deficiencies of two-dimensional scenery in terms of realism became increasingly apparent. The taste for verisimilitude led Edward Godwin, the father of Edward Gordon Craig, frequently to commission three-dimensional scenic elements for his productions. Since the groove system of scene-changing was unsuitable for such pieces, he dispensed with it and hired a crew of 135 stage hands. The new trend also rendered the naked stage obsolete, for reasons of gravity. Irving, who was instrumental in accepting new developments in lighting, also introduced black masking pieces at the front of the stage to prevent light spill. Irving’s importance to theatre is comparable to that of Saxe-Meiningen. His emphasis on pictorial realism marks the high point of British theatre before World War I. Theatre and stage design in America
The first recorded performance of a play written by an American was in 1690 at Harvard College. The first permanent American theatre was built in Philadelphia in 1766; it was made of brick and imitated English buildings in arrangement and general architecture. In 1752 Lewis Hallam, a member of a distinguished theatrical family, arrived with a troupe from England, thus marking the beginning of professional theatre in America. The theatre in America for the next 40 years was similar to British provincial theatre, with simple sets for easy traveling; few cities could yet afford theatre buildings. By the 1790s, however, troupes were based in Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, and Charleston, S.C., and many permanent theatres were being erected.
The first decades of the 19th century brought not only multiplication of playhouses in the larger Eastern cities but also the extension of theatre to interior regions. The frontier spirit was embodied by Samuel Drake, who took the first company west (to Kentucky) in 1815. Drake designed an adjustable proscenium that could be set up in any large room. The front curtain was a roll drop (lowered from behind the proscenium arch), and three sets of wings (one each for exteriors, ornate interiors, and simple interiors) and six roll drops (including a garden, a street, and a wood) completed his scenic repertoire.
After 1825, New York City had higher standards of theatrical production and more theatre buildings than any other city in America. Although decoration and furnishings created an impression of luxury, the early urban theatres were in fact filthy and rat-infested. They had little or no fire protection, and between 1820 and 1845, no fewer than 25 theatre buildings burned down. Although most productions used stock sets and props, occasionally an elaborate or specific set was added. Interest in historical accuracy was not a major production concern until 1830, when Charles Kean visited with his Shakespeare troupe from England.
During the latter third of the 19th century, the general scenic trend was toward greater naturalism, with particular emphasis on local colour. The major design innovations came from the managers of troupes permanently based at a theatre. One such manager was Edwin Booth, whose new theatre, opened in 1869, introduced several new concepts in the United States. The most important innovation was that the stage floor was flat and had no grooves; elevators raised set pieces from the 50 feet of working space below the stage, and flying machines moved other pieces into the 76 feet of overhead space. In Booth’s new theatre he abandoned the apron and used box sets almost exclusively.
Another important manager was Augustin Daly, who furthered the trend of realism. While the members of his troupe changed considerably during its three-decade history, it was the best example of the permanent stock company in the history of the American theatre. Daly stressed the unity of every production and controlled each element himself. His first success, Saratoga, by Bronson Howard, in 1870, was the first play to give a realistic picture of American life of the day.
Steele MacKaye, also active during this period, holds a unique place in theatre as an actor, manager, playwright, inventor, and designer. In an age of mechanical inventions, producers were seeking a means of effecting scene changes that would not require an intermission. In 1879, MacKaye filed a patent for a “double stage,” a feature he subsequently introduced in the Madison Square Theatre in New York City. He built an elevator platform on which one scene might be set while an earlier scene was being played below. The new scene was then merely lowered, with its own stage floor, to the appropriate level, while the previous scene rolled back behind it.
Among MacKaye’s other mechanical innovations were a folding theatre chair with coatrack attached, a sliding stage, a theatre ventilation system, the first installation of an electric lighting system in a theatre (1885), devices to produce cloud, ocean wave, and rainbow effects, the substitution of overhead lighting for footlights (which had been in use since the early Baroque period), and a process for fireproofing scenery. For financial reasons, some of his more grandiose schemes were never executed. For the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, for example, he designed a “Spectatorium” for musico-spectacle-dramas; it called for a sky dome that encircled the stage, a curtain made of light, a sliding stage for scene changes, and an auditorium seating 10,000 people.
In 1896 six men formed the Theatrical Syndicate, which acquired almost complete control over American theatre. They were interested only in commercially profitable works, such as productions featuring performers with large followings. The major opposition to the syndicate came from David Belasco, a producer and playwright. Belasco’s aim as a producer was to bring complete realism to the stage, and it is difficult today to appreciate how spectacularly far he carried this pursuit. In 1879, in his production of The Passion Play, the story of Jesus Christ from birth to Resurrection, he arranged for a live flock of sheep to be herded onstage. When the actor James O’Neill (father of playwright Eugene O’Neill), who played Christ, was dragged before Pontius Pilate and crowned with thorns, members of the audience fainted. And after the performance, when O’Neill walked around the city, people sank to their knees and prayed to him. The play aroused such religious frenzy that Jews were assaulted on the street outside the theatre, and a court injunction forbade further performances.
David Belasco's realistic setting for the New York production of Tiger Rose, 1917.Courtesy of the Theatre Collection, New York Public Library at Lincoln Center, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
The power of the Theatrical Syndicate was so great that in 1904 Belasco was forced to rent Convention Hall, a leaky building in New York City, for his productions. During the first performance there was a violent rainstorm, and the audience had to sit through the last act holding umbrellas. Belasco’s productions became so popular that the syndicate was finally forced to compromise with him, thus breaking their stranglehold on the American theatre. Howard Bay George C. Izenour Clive Barker The evolution of modern theatrical production
Underlying the theatrical developments of the 19th century, and in many cases inspiring them, were the social upheavals that followed the French Revolution. Throughout Europe the middle class took over the theatres and effected changes in repertoire, style, and decorum. In those countries that experienced revolutionary change or failure, national theatres were founded to give expression to the views and values of the middle class, whose aspirations in these cases coincided with a more general movement of national liberation. In western Europe a different pattern of development emerged, varying considerably in each country but having the unified features of a demand for “realism” on the stage, which meant a faithful reflection of the life-style and domestic surroundings of the rising class in both its tragic and its comic aspects; an adjunct to this development was the demand for increased decorum and cleanliness in the auditorium.
In England, where the Industrial Revolution was more advanced than in the other European countries, the middle class had to struggle for its own theatres against the entrenched power of the two patent houses (licensed by the Crown), Drury Lane and Covent Garden, which had enjoyed an almost total monopoly of dramatic theatre since 1660. As early as 1789, attempts were made to evade the legal restrictions on building new theatres. The Reform Bill of 1832, which enfranchised the propertied middle class and established its political power, led to the Theatres Act of 1843, which gave London a “free theatre.” The expected flood of new theatre buildings did not occur, and no major building took place for 16 years. This is probably because there were already sufficient illegal theatres in operation when the act was passed. The boulevard theatres of Paris experienced less trouble in establishing themselves. The rise of the middle-class theatres caused the decline of both the patent houses in London and the Comédie-Française—the national theatre of France. After much political struggle, centring particularly around censorship, the Comédie-Française, unable to compete with the boulevard theatres, capitulated and presented the plays of the new school for the new audiences.
As the new class came into the theatres, the theatres were cleaned up. Samuel Phelps at The Sadler’s Wells Theatre instituted audience controls that drove out the old audience and paved the way for respectability. The Bancrofts, as representative as any of the new movement, took over the run-down Prince of Wales’ Theatre, cleaned up the auditorium, and placed antimacassars on the seats. They also dropped the melodrama and attracted a wide audience with the social comedies of Tom Robertson, making a considerable fortune in the process.
Throughout the 19th century, cities throughout Europe and North America exploded in size, and industrial centres attracted labour to their factories and mills. The working-class suburbs of cities and the industrial towns created their own demand for entertainment, which led to the construction of large theatres.
Accelerating this change was the growth of the railways. The pattern of theatre was disrupted in England as productions were mounted in London and sent on tour. The old provincial stock companies folded and theatres became touring venues rather than producing houses. A breed of managers arose who made money from the possession of the bricks and mortar property rather than by presenting their own productions. In the United States the Theatrical Syndicate established great fortunes from the New York theatres and the almost unlimited touring circuit that the railways opened up. The change in status from enterprise to industry gave rise to the commercial theatre systems of the West End in London and Broadway in New York City. Improvement in travel in general made it possible to increase the links between the two systems early in the 20th century, and the exchange of productions further extended the possibilities of profitable exploitation.
Modern theatre began around 1885 with the revolt of the younger generation against the material injustices of society. Those in revolt founded so-called independent theatres to present a more critical or scientific view of the workings of society or so-called art theatres to rise above vulgar materialism with the establishment of aesthetic standards. The independent theatres took the Meiningen Players as their starting point. The art theatres looked to Wagner for inspiration. The new Naturalism
The first of the independent theatres was the Théâtre-Libre (“Free Theatre”) founded in 1887 by André Antoine, who made his living as a clerk for the Paris Gas Company. The Théâtre-Libre was an amateur theatre with no home of its own. It hired rooms or theatres where they were available and sold tickets for its performances to a closed membership. In this way it avoided censorship. Antoine’s original intention was to present plays that had been rejected by the Comédie-Française, and thus the repertoire was eclectic. The major impact the group made was with a number of naturalistic plays. The theatre was at this time lagging behind literature, and, although Émile Zola had written an essay entitled “Naturalism in the Theatre” in 1881 and had produced what is seen as the first Naturalist play, Thérèse Raquin, in 1873, no theatre devoted itself to a Naturalist policy until Antoine founded the Théâtre-Libre.
Following on the scientific developments and the philosophical skepticism of the 19th century, the social reformers of the last two decades of the century probed into the causes of human behaviour and postulated that the meaning of human character was to be found in its interaction with the physical, social, and economic environment. The new theatre demanded “truthfulness” not only in the writing but also in the acting and stage setting. The actors were expected to ignore the audience and to behave and speak as though they were at home. Antoine is normally credited with being the first to require an actor to turn his back on the audience; from this style of acting arose the concept of the “fourth wall” separating the stage from the audience. Behind this “wall”—invisible to the audience, opaque to the actors—the environment portrayed was to be as authentic as possible. Antoine himself designed rooms and then decided which wall would be “removed.” In The Butchers, he hung animal carcasses on the stage.
It is possible, however, to overestimate Antoine’s commitment to Naturalism, since a great deal of his repertoire was not naturalistic and the descriptions of several of the Théâtre-Libre presentations show an imaginative experimentation with lighting effects that goes well beyond creating realistic temporal and atmospheric conditions. The first production of the Théâtre-Libre had no scenery at all but only a few pieces of furniture borrowed from Antoine’s mother, yet it was this production that set the Naturalist style. Zola, the philosopher of the movement, had deplored the fact that the Naturalist theatre began by creating an external representation of the world instead of concentrating on the inner state of the characters. Strindberg showed that a few carefully selected properties could suggest an entire room. With the ideas of Antoine and Strindberg, the days of flapping canvas doors and kitchen shelves painted on the walls of the set came to be numbered. The more natural and detailed the acting became, the more it clashed with a painted background.
Antoine’s innovations did much to establish the principle that each play requires its own distinct setting. In 1906, as director of the state-subsidized Théâtre de l’Odéon, he produced classical plays in which he strove for realism not by means of period decor and costume but by re-creating theatrical conventions of the 1600s.
The new pattern of theatre set in France was imitated in Germany during the same period. Otto Brahm modeled his theatrical society, the Freie Bühne, founded in Berlin in 1889, after Antoine’s Théâtre-Libre. Its first production was Ibsen’s Ghosts. On the basis of this and other examples, it could be said that Ibsen pioneered the repertoire, Saxe-Meiningen the staging methods, and Antoine the organizational form for a range of small, independent theatres springing up throughout Europe.
With both ideological aims and theatrical tastes in mind, members of the German middle-class theatre audience formed an organization called the Freie Volksbühne in 1890 for the purpose of buying blocks of tickets and commissioning performances and even productions for its membership, which included a large working-class element. Early in its history the organization split between the Freie Volksbühne, who were attempting to make theatre available to a wider audience, and the Neue Freie Volksbühne, who had specific Socialist attachments and policies. Eventually the two arms recombined and were able not only to subsidize performances but also to build their own theatre and mount their own productions.
During the 1890s in France, a similar program of democratization was attempted. One of the prime movers in this was Romain Rolland, whose book The People’s Theatre (Le Théâtre du peuple, 1903), inspired similar movements in other countries.
In England the works of Ibsen aroused great interest and attracted the attention of the censors. The first English independent theatre was organized by Jack Thomas Grein, and its first production in 1891 was Ibsen’s Ghosts. Grein’s intention of finding British writers of the new drama was frustrated until the arrival of George Bernard Shaw, the most famous Ibsenite of them all, in 1892, with his first play, Widowers’ Houses. Shaw remained the mainstay of the independent theatre movement in Britain. His preeminence in the independent theatre in England coupled with the success of Arthur Wing Pinero in the commercial realist theatre led to a major innovation in staging in England. Both playwrights participated in the casting of their plays, which in Pinero’s case led to a break away from the old stock company casting and the institution of casting to type. Shaw was able to impose his own interpretation and stage direction on the production of his plays.
Russia also followed the pattern of the independent theatre movement that developed in France, Germany, and England (see below Developments in Russia and the Soviet Union). Reactions to Naturalism
The Théâtre-Libre had scarcely been established when the reaction against Naturalism got under way. Symbolism developed out of a total opposition to the philosophy that lay behind Naturalism. It sought an intuitive and spiritual form of knowledge, regarded by its proponents as higher than that which science could provide. If Naturalism attacked the materialist values of society from a critical and reformist standpoint, Symbolism rejected them altogether. In their manifesto of 1886 the Symbolists suggested that subjectivity, spirituality, and mysterious internal forces represented a higher form of truth than the objective observation of appearances. The Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck, the most successful Symbolist playwright, gave as his opinion that an old man sitting at his table, surrounded by silence, was more dramatic and true-to-life than the lover who strangles his mistress in a tirade of jealousy. The Symbolists drew for example and inspiration on Wagner and on the later plays of Ibsen. They were influenced by the poets Mallarmé and Baudelaire, and the latter’s poem Correspondences, which finds comparative values in colours and musical notes, is often seen as the first manifesto of the movement. The expressive paintings of Gauguin were also influential.
The first of the Symbolist theatres was the Théâtre d’Art started by the French poet Paul Fort in 1890. Fort was principally concerned with the power of the poetic text but nevertheless made some ingenious contributions to staging. In his production of the Frenchman Pierre Quillard’s play The Girl with the Cut-off Hands (1891), the actors intoned their lines behind a gauze curtain, backed by a gold cloth framed with red hangings. In front of the gauze, a girl in a long blue tunic repeated the actors’ lines and commented on their feelings. This is the first instance in which the setting of a play derives entirely from the ideas of the director and the designer rather than from tradition or from direct evidence in the text of the play itself. The setting for The Girl with the Cut-off Hands is a visual image, suggested by the play but not dictated by it. It is a poetic vision and does not place the play in a specific context.
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