Set (theatre)

“ In exterior scenes where, for example, trees or clumps of shrubbery answer in a measure to the old "wings," the old terminology may not be quite meaningless; but it is far better eschewed. It is a good general rule to avoid, so far as possible, expressions which show that the author has a stage scene, and not an episode of real life, before his eyes. Men of the theatre are the last to be impressed by theatrical jargon; and when the play comes to be printed, the general reader is merely bewildered and annoyed by technicalities, which tend, moreover, to disturb his illusion. ”

“ On the whole, it would probably be wisest to produce Shakespeare with very simple scenery, in order, on the one hand, not to dim the imagination of the spectators by elaborate magnificence of setting, and, on the other, not to distract their minds by the unaccustomed conventions of a sceneless stage.
What has been said of scenery may be applied also to the use of incidental music. So soon as such music becomes obtrusive, it distracts the attention from the business of the play: and it cannot be insisted on too often that in the theatre the play's the thing. ”

“ A few pieces of coloured cloth, a bangle, some rouge, a military coat, a shawl, a sash, a bit of lace, a strain of music, and these people were transformed, one and all, out of their accustomed workaday mood, gone happily into an atmosphere of fantasy such as with infinite labour was created in the theatre. They were acting, all of them—not paying any attention to what part any one else was acting, but content to be in an environment in which their own play-impulses were released. ”

“ Where the overladen stereotyped first production paradoxically fades out of the picture for the spectator and leaves the path of illusion clear for him, the superlatively simple second production, almost wholly bereft of familiar externals, arrests and fixes his attention and makes illusion impossible. It is true, of course, that all this may be changed in time, when the deletion of externals by the new stagecraft shall have become a convention of the theatre as the heavy laying-on of externals is a convention at present. ”

“ The phenomenal unnaturalness of acting is a thing discounted in the minds of most people by early visits to the theatre. They get used to the fantastic gestures, the flamboyant emotions, the weird mouthings, melodious snortings, agonising yelps, lip-gnawings, glaring horrors, and other emotional symbolism of the stage. ”

“ The dull dead eyes of the puppets are all turned to the proper part of the stage; their stiff arms are raised in horror, or extended in surprise, at the fitting moment; and, with the exception of four, or perhaps five, of the principal actors in the real stage, we consider that there is less appearance of sawdust and wool in the dramatis personæ at this theatre than at —— or ——. ”

“ each had depended after all on the set stage and the convention of the theatre, which is that man in his hunger for faith will feed his mind with the nearest and most convenient food. ”

“ Get us properties, and tricking for our fairies. IV, 4, 78.
“Properties” for stage purposes was in use much earlier than Shakespeare’s time, and has remained in the vocabulary of the theatre until the present day. In its technical theatrical signification, such as the above quotation, it refers to any portable article whether costume, furniture, or weapons required during the acting of the play. In Elizabethan times the properties used were few and simple; they consisted of things that were absolutely necessary, thus giving a realistic appearance to the performance. ”

“ The art of the theatre is the art of illusion and also of compromise, and no rule connected with the stage can be pushed quite home to its apparent logical conclusions: therefore one must have some amount of appropriate scenery, and costumes may not be flagrantly incongruous; but when once these modest demands have been satisfied the audience will be well content with mounting in which nothing more is involved if the play be well written and acted, and agreeable in style to its taste; and we know very well that some of the longest runs have been enjoyed by works produced at little cost. ”

“ In these essays the author is largely concerned with the problem of representational versus presentational stage performances. Should illusion be carried to its furthest limits? Should the play be represented, as at the Moscow art theatre, as ‘an independent entity existing side by side with’ the observing audience? Or should it be presented through the medium of the stage? Other matters dealt with are the advantages and disadvantages of ensemble-acting, and long-run plays. ”

“ The trouble with most of the dreamers who league themselves for the uplifting of the stage is that they consider the theatre with an illogical solemnity. They base their efforts on the proposition that a theatre audience ought to want to be edified. ”

“ A board is placed in a prominent position of the stage in full view of the audience with the name of the character assumed by the performer, the board being changed on each separate occasion when a different character is assumed. Apply this method in the changing of the scene in [Pg 49] an Elizabethan theatre and then you can better understand Shakespeare’s exhortation in his prologues of “Henry V” when he urges the audience that their imagination must fill up the void caused by want of necessary scenery. To our modern notions the number of scenes in a Shakespearean play is quite bewildering ”

“ With properties, as with stage carpentry, everything depends upon invention, and for every new opera the property master is obliged to devise new properties and new effects for which he has often no precedent.
When the curtain falls for good after the encores, the stage machinist blows a sharp blast on his whistle, and as if by magic all the singers and the chorus who have not gone already, leave the stage, and their places are taken by a swarm of stage hands. The fly men raise the drops and the borders out of the way, while the men on the stage take away the movables and the set scenes. ”

“ When all is said and done, this time difficulty caused by the greater vividness of stage presentation remains the chief obstacle in the way of the dramatist who would write of 11 a sequence of historical events or of evolution or devolution in character. Again we foresee probable differences in technique, this time caused by the theatre, the stage, and the intense vividness of the latter.
The novel is, so to speak, the work of an individual; a play is a cooperative effort—of author, actor, producer, and even audience. ”

“ If the spectator looks at scenery when he should be listening to lines, if his attention is startled by some unexpected device of stage-management at a time when he ought to be looking at an actor's face, or if his mind is kept for a moment uncertain of the most emphatic feature of a scene, the main effect is lost and that part of the performance is a failure. ”

“ For in their eyes there shone only that place of adventure which delights the feet of the faithful, whether they tread the sands, or the stage, or the rough cobbles of Drury Lane. To the truly imaginative a theatre is a place of uncommon possibilities; our actors and actresses, and even our limelight-men, are not imaginative, and so, I suppose, they find it ugly. ”

“ I have preserved the common distribution of the plays into acts, though I believe it to be in almost all the plays void of authority. Some of those which are divided in the later editions have no division in the first folio, and some that are divided in the folio have no division in the preceding copies. The settled mode of the theatre requires four intervals in the play, but few, if any, of our author’s compositions can be properly distributed in that manner. An act is so much of the drama as passes without intervention of time, or change of place. A pause makes a new act. ”

“ It is not with the stage performance that we are most concerned, but with that other play, quite out of sight of the audience in the little theatre that night, which is to us more interesting than the scenes they acted behind the footlights. ”

“ The novelist's expedient of delineating character through mental analysis is of course denied the dramatist, especially in this modern age when the soliloquy (for reasons which will be noted in a subsequent chapter) is usually frowned upon. Sometimes, in the theatre, a character may be exhibited chiefly through his personal effect upon the other people on the stage, and thereby indirectly on the people in the audience. ”

“ Moreover, in a theatre we must consider, not the marble of its pavements, not the boards of the stage, nor the columns of the back-scene, nay, nor yet the height of its gables, the splendour of its fretted roofs, the expanse of its tiers of seats; we need not call to mind that this place is sometimes the scene for the foolery of the mime, the dialogue of comedy, the sonorous rant of tragedy, the perilous antics of the rope-walker, the juggler's sleight of hand, the gesticulation of the dancer, with all the tricks of their respective arts that are displayed before the people by other artists. ”

“ The licentiousness of our comedies had too often indeed presented a fair occasion for their attacks; and they at length succeeded in purifying the stage: we owe them this good, but we owe little gratitude to that blind zeal which was desirous of extinguishing the theatre, which wanted the taste also to feel that the theatre was a popular school of morality; that the stage is a supplement to the pulpit; where virtue, according to Plato's sublime idea, moves our love and affections when made visible to the eye. ”

“ The theatre was fitted up with the taste of a people more essentially theatrical than any other in the world. For not merely the eye, but the tongue, is theatrical; and not merely the stage, but every portion of private life. ”

“ They had the true theatric instinct—the right theatre spirit. They were in their seats as soon as the opened doors would let them enter. The tuning of the fiddles was exquisite music to their ears—an essential part of the drama. Every moment was precious to them. They would as lief have missed the rising of the great curtain, sweeping upwards with ecstatic jerk into the flies, as have gone out before the last act, or worn their hats to spoil the delight of others. For them the Theatre held something of a sacred pleasure—the dear pleasaunce of populous cities. ”

“ But because of the development in modern times of the physical conditions of the theatre, we have grown to exclude from the drama all non-dramatic elements. Narrative and lyric, for their own sakes, have no place upon the modern stage; they may be introduced only for a definite dramatic purpose. Only one of the three kinds of blank verse that the Elizabethan playwrights used is, therefore, serviceable on the modern stage. But our poets, because of inexperience in the theatre, insist on writing the other two. For this reason, and for this reason only, do modern actors like Mme. ”

“ It may be profitable to notice some of the technical devices by which attention is economised in the theatre and the interest of the audience is thereby centred upon the main business of the moment. In particular it is important to observe how a scattering of attention is avoided; how, when many things are shown at once upon the stage, it is possible to make an audience look at one and not observe the others. We shall consider the subject from the point of view of the dramatist, from that of the actor, and from that of the stage-manager. ”

“ Leaving aside the argument that with a sceneless stage it is possible to perform all the incidents of the play in their original order, and thus give the story a greater narrative continuity, it may also be maintained that with a bare stage there are far fewer chances of dispersing the attention of the audience by attracting it to insignificant details of setting. ”

“ Many spectators come in late and hide the stage from those behind them while they are taking off their wraps. Consequently, most dramatists, in the preliminary exposition that must always start a play, contrive to state every important fact at least three times: first, for the attentive ”

“ Having emptied the trunks with lightning swiftness, he claps down their covers for the rest of the week. Whenever he wants anything for the theatre, he straddles the pile on the quilt, and paws it wildly, but rapidly over, pulling out a shoulder-cape here, a doublet yonder, one boot from the top and its mate from the bottom—all these he pitches into the theatre-basket, and is happy for that day. ”

“ But those who work day by day in the theatre sometimes find, as the rehearsals advance, that this ill-lit, unfurnished void can on a sudden be transformed into a world of enchantment. The actor and the author together are as yet undisturbed in their task, and what is still to come in the way of added illusion their imagination can readily supply. ”

“ It was so large that the dramatists were obliged to deal only with subjects that were traditional,—stories which had long been familiar to the entire theatre-going public, including the poorer and less educated spectators who sat farthest from the actors. Since most of the audience was grouped above the stage and at a considerable distance, the actors, in order not to appear dwarfed, were obliged to walk on stilted boots. A performer so accoutred could not move impetuously or enact a scene of violence ”