Staging

“ The handling of entrance and exit and the representation of the conventional devices and scenes provide the framework of the staging. Interwoven and interpolated are those scenes which rely not on formal presentation but on spontaneous action. These are the scenes which, through the intensity of their poetic conception, the penetration of their observation, or the keenness of their wit, illuminate the stage. But no sharp distinction exists between the conventional device and the spontaneous action. They both spring from the need to sustain and perfect an extended narrative. ”

“ A sketch of the desired arrangement of the stage should be prefixed to the description of the setting. This may be as simple as comports with clear picturing of the exact conditions required. Such drawings not only help to clearness, they sometimes bring out difficulties in a proposed setting not at once evident in a description. Perhaps the staging called for in what immediately follows may not seem over-elaborate in the reading. A diagram at once shows its awkwardness, expensiveness, and undesirability. ”

“ It must be recognized, however, that the paucity of actors in the early days resulted, as we have just seen, in conventions of staging which perhaps were afterward accepted as part of the tradition, however unnecessary they may in the meanwhile have become. ”

“ In fine, the whole problem of staging resolves itself into this: achieve your effects in as simple a way as possible; suggest, do not try to represent; scenery, which ought indeed to be a delight to the eye, is after all only background. Experiment, but never hesitate to ask the advice of those who know the basic principles of color, line, and form, as well as those who have technical knowledge of every branch of the art and craft of the theater.
[pg 108] Costumes. ”

“ The following suggestions for a simplified staging of "Why The Chimes Rang" are offered, not to college dramatic societies or other expert amateurs but to the many young people in the secondary schools, Sunday schools and country districts, who would enjoy staging short plays if it could be done without elaborate scenery or lighting equipment and without previous experience in stage management. ”

“ A window in a still higher story could, if necessary, be brought into play. So, with all due respect to the obscurities of the evidence, I reconstruct the facts. It will, I hope, be apparent without any elaborate demonstration that this system of public staging, as practised by Burbadge at the Theatre, by Lanman at the Curtain, by Henslowe at the Rose, and perhaps with some modifications by Langley at the Swan, is very fairly in line with the earlier sixteenth-century tradition, as we have studied it in texts in which the Court methods are paramount. ”

“ Before any attempt is made to sum up the result of this long chapter, one other feature of sixteenth-century staging, which is often overlooked, requires discussion. In the majority of cases the background of an out-of-door scene need contain at most a single domus; and this, it is now clear, can be represented either by a light structure, such as a tent or arbour, placed temporarily upon the floor of the stage, or more usually by the scena or back wall, with its doors, its central aperture, and its upper gallery. ”

“ One or two are almost purely miracle-play or farce; and towards the end one or two show some traces of classical influence. [72] Subject, then, to the exceptions, the interludes—and this, as already indicated, is a fundamental point for staging—call for no changes of locality, with which, indeed, the purely abstract themes of moralities could easily dispense. The action proceeds continuously in a locality, which is either wholly undefined, or at the most vaguely defined as in London (Hickscorner) , or in England (King Johan) . ”

“ Road picquets can either be sent out each day from staging posts, can be permanently located in a succession of blockhouses, or can be semi-permanent, that is to say can be supplied from a series of minor posts connecting staging centres. In each of the above cases the same number of men will be required. ”

“ Pure Naples silk, not worsted. I defer a full consideration of stage hangings to the chapters on staging; cf. vol. iii, p. 78.
[1704] For the classical sense of Scaena, cf. the passage from Vitruvius quoted in vol. iii, p. 3. Florio, Dictionary (1598) , s.v. Scena, ‘a skaffold, a pavillion, or forepart of a theatre where players make them readie, being trimmed with hangings, out of which they enter upon the stage’, points to the identity of scene and tire-house front. This structure has therefore precisely the double function of the ‘domus’ of the court plays; cf. ch. xix. ”

“ Notes of locality are very rare. Occasionally a definite shift from one country or town to another is recorded; [647] and a few edited plays, such as Ben Jonson’s, prefix, with a ‘dramatis personae’, a general indication of ‘The scene’. [648] For the rest, the reader is left to his own inferences, with such help as the dialogue and the presenters give him; and the modern editors, with a post-Restoration tradition of staging in their minds, have often inferred wrongly. ”

“ But my parting with the theatre and stage life was not destined to be an agreeable one by any means. I made a shake-down bed on the stage, and “lay down my weary head.” It would be about midnight when I heard a rustling at the drop scene. In a few moments the scene commenced to rise, being rolled up by an unseen hand, and when it had been raised a few inches I was not a little “struck” to see a man’s head appearing underneath the curtain. Now this was a bit of real, earnest acting—none of your unnatural, unfinished style. ”

“ With the sliding and sinking stage a little further advanced, you can imagine the scenery taking a really furious interest in the actor, pursuing him from floor to basement and back again. You can imagine some new director working out a drama in which a cathedral chases an apostate priest about the stage, or a phallic column pursues the heroine into the darkness of the cellar only to lose her as she rises triumphantly on the last of the seven mystic stages guided and blessed by that unique functionary of the German theater, the Obermaschineninspektor. ”

“ Variety of cadence is the best rule, the greatest help to the actor and refreshment of the audience.
If, then, verse may be made natural in itself, how becomes it unnatural in a play? The stage, you say, is the representation of nature, and no man in ordinary conversation speaks in rhyme. ”

“ The Stage, of course, has its Slang—“both before and behind the curtain,” as a journalist remarks. The stage manager is familiarly termed DADDY; and an actor by profession, or a “professional,” is called a PRO. A man who is occasionally hired at a trifling remuneration to come upon the stage as one of a crowd, or when a number of actors are wanted to give effect, is named a SUP,—an abbreviation of “supernumerary.” ”

“ If we are to make a drama of energy, of extravagance, of phantasy, of musical and noble speech, we shall need an appropriate stage management. Up to a generation or two ago, and to our own generation, here and there, lingered a method of acting and of stage-management, which had come down, losing much of its beauty and meaning on the way, from the days of Shakespeare. ”

“ Nor would anything an Elizabethan stage-manager could do help us to realise either the locality or the high hills. We may presume an inner stage (though Richard II. can be played without one) , and that, for this scene, its curtains would be better closed than open. Let so much be conceded. An inner stage did by use and wont suggest an interior of some sort, for it was the convenient place to set furniture in, or from which to bring it forth; and why distract the audience’s attention to the empty place uselessly? ”

“ A wise stage-manager, when he uses a set as magnificent, for example, as the memorable garden scene in Miss Viola Allen's production of Twelfth Night, will raise his curtain on an empty stage, to let the audience enjoy and even applaud the scenery before the actors enter. ”

“ The stage director orders you at a certain time to take the centre of the stage, the leading man is indignant at your being pushed forward; he revenges himself at night by moving his face in such away, "mugging" is the stage slang, that the audience is attracted to him, and from you. ”

“ Stage drama takes even a step in advance of fiction literature in its approximation of realistic illusion. The characters of the play become the breathing, living, walking and talking persons conceived by the playwright and anticipated by the audience. Audiences laugh and weep, rejoice and sigh, despite themselves, wherever good stage drama is offered. ”

“ A stage manager who will see to all these details and provide himself with intelligent assistants who will quietly “set” the stage for one picture and clear it for the next, behind the curtain, in such a manner as not to interrupt the reader in front of it, nor take the attention of the audience, is equally necessary. ”

“ You may not be an actor; but really when you add to that twelve or fourteen-inch space the steep incline of the stage—why, you can readily understand how advisable it was for the dead Desdemona that day to stay dead until the play was over. ”

“ This one exclamatory sentence had in it enough of affectionate regard to enable the minister to contain himself a little longer, under the impassioned tide which now flowed again.
"The stage? The stage as an institution?" John appeared to pause and wind himself up. "Why, listen! The stage function is a godlike function. When God created man out of the dust of the ground and breathed into him the breath of life he planted in man's breast also the instinct to create. That instinct is the foundation of all art. Man has always exhibited this passion to create something in his own image. ”

“ The stage is not an Institution with us, I should say; yet it affords recreation to a very large and increasing number of persons, and while it would be easy to over-estimate its influence for good or evil even with these, there is no doubt that the stage, if not the drama, is popular. ”

“ There are no rails round the stage, such as we may infer the existence of at the Globe. [1670] The only scenic apparatus visible is a large bench, on which a lady sits, while another stands behind her in an attitude of surprise, at the rapid approach from an outer corner of the stage of a man in an affected attitude, with a hat on his head and a long staff in his hand. You might take him for Malvolio cross-gartered, were there any chance that Twelfth Night could have been written when the drawing was made, or produced at the Swan. ”

“ The stage is not a mistress that we are sworn to undress. Why should we look behind the glass of fashion? Why should we prick the bubble that reflects the world, and turn it to a little soap and water? Trust a little to first appearances—leave something to fancy. I observe that the great puppets of the real stage, who themselves play a grand part, like to get into the boxes over the stage ”

“ But from two plays, The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune and The Woman in the Moon, both of which probably represent a late development of the Court drama, we may gather at least one other definite function of the platform, as a point of vantage from which presenters, in both cases of a divine type, may sit ‘sunning like a crow in a gutter’, and watch the evolution of their puppets on the stage below. ”

“ The stage is generally a temporary erection improvised in a market-place, and the stage arrangements are of the most primitive character; no scenery is employed, and the actors introduce themselves in a sort of prologue, in which they state the name and character they represent in the drama. ”

“ Indeed, the actual expression of the No stage is ever so slight and ephemeral, like many other artistic expressions, the sighs of crickets or shivers of flowers; we have gained, as we behold it, great brevity at an almost astonishing cost of human energy. ”

“ One night, in the last of January,—the coldest of that savage winter,—I happened again to be in the corridor leading to the stage door, having come from within the theatre in advance of my friend the comedian, with whom I was to have supper at the Actors' Athletic Club. The actress's cab was waiting. The dark little portion of the world back there was deserted. ”

“ If the Act begins in a garden, a street, or [a] chamber; 'tis ended in the same place. And that you may know it to be the same, the Stage is so supplied with persons, that it is never empty all the time. He that enters the second has business with him, who was on before; and before the second quits the stage, a third appears, who has business with him. This CORNEILLE calls La Liaison des Scenes,'the Continuity or Joining of the Scenes': and it is a good mark of a well contrived Play, when all the persons are known to each other, and every one of them has some affairs with all the rest. ”

“ In all the welter of the dramatic conditions of the moment there emerges one fact, that of the growing importance of the stage as a vehicle for what one may term general culture. The stage, with its half-sister, the cinema, is strangely, by how long and circuitous a route, returning of course, with an immeasurably developed equipment, to its starting-point, ending curiously where it began as the handmaid of the church. ”