Theatre stage

“ 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. ”

“ Towards two o'clock the great theatre was crowded,—pit, gallery, boxes, stage, all were thronged; thousands of faces,—boys, gentlemen, teachers, working-men, women of the people, babies. There was a moving of heads and hands, a flutter of feathers, ribbons, and curls, and a loud and merry murmur which inspired cheerfulness. The theatre was decorated with festoons of white, red, and green cloth. In the pit two little stairways had been erected: one on the right, which the winners of prizes were to ascend in order to reach the stage ”

“ Sometimes folks wait at the corner of the street to see the stage people come out. If the piece is a burlesque or a comic opera, much life moves in the darkness back here. Light comes from the up-stairs windows of the theatre, the dressing rooms of the subordinate players being up there. Snatches of song from feminine throats, mere trills sometimes, isolated fragments of melody, break into the silence. These are always numerous during the half-hour after the performance and before the actors have left the theatre. ”

“ Shakespeare said, "All the world's a stage." If this is true, do we not owe the stage the same courtesy, respect and honor that we owe the world of fellow-men? Be as well-mannered and courteous at the theater and opera as you would in the most fastidious drawing-room. ”

“ The theatre, having ceased to form an integral part of our social life, has come to be the pastime of people with nothing better to do,—the floating population of our hotels, the shop-girl and her young man enjoying an evening out. The plays produced by the gentlemen who, I am told, control the stage in this country for the moment, are adapted to the requirements of an audience that, having no particular standard from which to judge the literary merits of a play, the training, accent, or talent of the actors, are perfectly contented so long as they are amused. ”

“ The makeshifts and artifices of the theatre have to be met half-way, and indulgently accepted.
The stage could not live without its whispers, which, after all, are only whispers in a non-natural sense. For that can hardly be in truth a whisper, which is designed to reach the ears of some hundreds of persons. But the "asides" of the theatre are a convenient and indispensable method of revealing to the audience the state of mind of the speaker, and of admitting them to his confidence. ”

“ In quite a friendly way—
I like your theatre, though but a minnikin;
For though small stages Kean dislikes to spout on,
Renounce me if I don’t agree with Dowton,
The Minors are the Passions’ proper schools
For me, I never can
Find wisdom in the plan
That keeps large reservoirs for little Pooles.
I like your boxes where the audience sit
A family circle; and your little pit;
I like your little stage, where you discuss
Your pleasant bill of fare,
And show us passengers so rich and rare,
Your little stage seems quite an omnibus. ”

“ A person reads a book to himself or to a small group. In most cases, he may choose the conditions under which he will read it, indoors or out, alone or with people about him, etc. In the theatre, according to the size of the auditorium, from one hundred to two thousand people watch the play, and under given conditions of light, heat, and ventilation. They are at a distance, in most cases, 8 from the stage. It is shut off from them more than once in the performance by the fall of the curtain. The novel appeals to the mind and the emotions through the eye. The stage appeals to both eye and ear. ”

“ 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. ”

“ At the back of the theatre is the stage door. Generally up an alley, it is mean in appearance, more like an entrance to some cheap lodging-house than to fairyland. Rough men lounge about outside, those scene-shifters, carpenters, and that odd list of humanity who jostle each other “behind the scenes,” work among “flies,” and adjust “wings” in no ornithological sense, but merely as the side-pieces of the stage-setting. ”

“ I picked up a programme the other day, belonging to what was once a first-class house, and is so still in all except the standard of the performance, and found such old and worn-out features as a lightning crayon artist and a lightning change artist, both of which are so threadbare that even a ten-cent theatre wouldn't care to give them stage room. ”

“ Experienced professional stage-managers, with all the tricks and methods of the theatre at their fingers’ ends, find it impossible, out of a body of men and women born and bred in the atmosphere of the playhouse, to construct a crowd that looks like anything else except a nervous group of broken-down paupers waiting for soup. ”

“ All the world's a stage where are performed the worst of badly constructed plays--plays with neither unity nor sequence nor climax, but performed with absolute perfection. Why waste your time cursing the Adelphi, when, like the Duke, you can see the perfect art of the street? The railway porter's dialect is still convincing. The fat woman with her screaming children may enter at any minute, with her touches of wonderful realism. If you go to the theatre for acting you go to the wrong place! ”

“ 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. ”

“ And that light grew brighter and more steady until as I stood in the middle of the stage mechanically giving forth the majestic lines I had never understood, I found myself trying to observe individuals in the dimly seen audience. ”

“ The theatre was about one hundred feet long, and thirty feet wide, hung all round with green baize, and crimson festoons. “Ginger beer, apples, nuts, and a bill of the play,” were cried; the charge for a bill to a person not provided with one was “a penny.” The seats were rows of planks, rising gradually from the ground at the end, and facing the stage, without any distinction of “boxes, pit, or gallery.” ”

“ The stage has a curious effect on people. Many a person has gone to see a play, and some line has altered the whole course of his life. Some idea has been put forth, some tender note played upon which has opened his eyes to his own selfishness, his own greed of wealth, his harshness to a child, or indifference to a wife. There is no doubt about it, the stage is a great power, and that is why it is so important the influence should be used for good, and that illicit love and demoralising thoughts should be kept out [Pg 20] of the theatre with its mixed audiences and susceptible youth. ”

“ The theatre is the coolest place I have yet been in, I mean at rehearsal; when the front is empty, and the doors open, and the stage is so dark that we are obliged to rehearse by candlelight. That washed-out man, who failed in London when he acted Romeo with me, is to be my Fazio ”

“ The play in a modern theatre is not on the stage but in the stalls. Maeterlinck, Ibsen, Shaw, merely use the stage as a kind of magic-lantern or suggestion-centre for the real things that, out behind us in the dark, are happening in the audience. ”

“ The early years of the twentieth century have been a period of rapid development in the theatre, a development marked by at least two broad phenomena: first, the growing public349 sense of the drama as an art, of which acting is a component part, not the chief end; and, secondly, the revolution in the technique of stagecraft. To sum up the matter in a word, the stage is struggling, rather blindly, to liberate itself from the conventions that intervene between audience and play. ”

“ Now that I have taken you back of the curtain line and out into the front office and shown you just how the wheels go 'round that make the show go, you have become aware that there is something more in the theatre business than a mere group of good actors and singers and dancers doing their best to please you up on the stage. The more the machinery of the stage is kept out of sight, the better the management and the greater the satisfaction, both to the folks behind the curtain and the audience out front. ”

“ 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 is the best mirror of human life; let me therefore recommend the oft use of a theatre as the most agreeable and easy method of making a polite and moral gentry, which would end in rendering the rest of the people regular in their behaviour and ambitious of laudable undertakings. ”

“ The stage during rehearsals is like a workshop—a certain amount of noise and confusion is necessitated by the labour going on in it, but no one has time to spare from his share of the job in hand, and the discipline in a good theatre is remarkable. ”

“ The players either acted at a regular theatre or in an inn-yard, and at both places acting took place in the open air. The only solution possible is that the actors rented a large room of one of the inns or taverns and there acted by candlelight, otherwise beginning at such a late hour cannot be accounted for.
[Pg 237]
AS YOU LIKE IT STAGE, PLAYERS, EXITS, ENTRANCES, PLAYS, PARTS, ACTS, SCENE.
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And here it will be necessary to say a few words on the stage and on stage-illusion.
A theatre, in the widest sense of the word, is the general term for all places of amusement through the ear or eye, in which men assemble in order to be amused by some entertainment presented to all at the same time and in common. Thus an old Puritan divine says:—“Those who attend public worship and sermons only to amuse themselves, make a theatre of the church, and turn God's house into the devil's. ”

“ The theatre usually begins late in the afternoon or early in the evening, and lasts till past midnight. In front of the stage are two large basins of vegetable oil with huge bunches of rush-wicks. They are the main sources of light; the foot-lights are a row of innumerable wax-candles; and when an actor is on the stage, men in black veils attend him with lighted candles stuck on a contrivance like a long-handled contribution box. ”

“ GOOD AND BAD BUSINESS AT THE THEATRE.
When a play is a success the theatre-goer is treated with less consideration than when it is a failure. In the latter case he is overwhelmed with attention and kind words.
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Stage “waves” have often afforded no little amusement to the audience. The troubled ocean is simulated on the stage by a number of men lying on their backs under a painted canvas, kicking their legs and throwing their arms about with a certain amount of regularity, the men being blindfolded to prevent the dust getting into their eyes. ”

“ And the more extensive, democratic Community Drama movement is making play-actors and theatre-workers of thousands who have heretofore been auditors. There will always be a professional group of artists of the theatre, but in their theatres there will be a close understanding and perhaps a physical connection between the audience and the stage; in the great, popular theatre it is conceivable that there will be very little distinction between the auditorium and the stage. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The world’s a theatre, the earth a stage, ”

“ Maurice Browne, The Temple of a Living Art. The Drama, Chicago, 1913, No. 12, p. 168: "Nor is this just a question of stage jargon; that man or woman who would establish an Art Theatre that is an Art Theatre and not a pet rabbit fed by hand, must be able to design it, to ventilate it, to decorate it, to equip its stage, to light it (and to handle its lighting himself, or his electricians will not listen to him) , to plan his costumes and scenery, aye, and at a shift, to make them with his own hand." ”