TO BEHOLD THE SWELLING SCENE

The Emergence of ‘Scenography’ in Twentieth Century Theatre

Robert Cheesmond

”The Spectacle has, indeed an emotional attraction of its own, but, of all the parts [of
drama] it is the least artistic, and connected least with the art of poetry"

In 350 BC Aristotle expresses what has been a recurrent source of tension in the field
of dramatic presentation, both among practitioners of the drama, and members of its
audiences.Although from the very beginning – and certainly in the Greek theatre - the
elements of costuming, furnishing, and stage setting – the spectacle – have featured
prominently in theatrical presentation, and have constituted at times the very basis of
its popularity, these aspects of production have generally been adjudged by the
critically aware, or, at least, the critically self-aware, as to a greater or lesser extent
peripheral. Until quite recently, even in terms of a simple word-count, Stage Design
received scant attention from the scholars who have analysed and theorised the
languages of the stage. As both Christine White and Ellie Parker argue in their
respective contributions to the present volume, there is a serious doubt – at least
among designers and design theorists - whether currently available analytic tools,
including Semiotics, are even adequate to the task
One reason for this -of central importance to the argument of this paper –is that
theatrical performance is at once a real action, and a complex sign for an imaginary
action. Semiotics necessarily concentrates upon the ‘fictional’ nature of the theatrical
event, rather than upon the actual event of performance. In the vast majority of works
addressing theatre semiotics, the direction in which the thinking moves is from
signifier to signified. The dimension given massively less attention is the identity of
the signifier as itself - or rather, not as itself, but in itself, - and the experience in
performance of the essence, as well as the significance of the whole action, and of its
component parts.
Underlying most of the many works dissecting the process of signification in theatre,
there is the assumption that the ‘meaning’ of any element of theatre is something other
than itself; by definition, almost , the ‘act of theatre’ means something other than
itself. So, for example, Eli Rozik takes as fundamental to theatre the “ basic
distinction between description and world”, and applies this to both fictional and real
worlds:
“As we assume the existence of a real world independent of description in any
possible code, we may also conceive the existence of fictional worlds also
independent of the descriptions that evoke them”.1

‘Acting’ , therefore, for Rozik, is

“redefine[d] as an intentional performance of iconic sentences which refer to

fictional entities, ie of iconic he-sentences which reflect the basic duality of
actor-character”. 2.

In speaking of the non-human practical details of theatrical presentation, Rozik places

these within the category ‘Symbol and Metaphor’. The progressive understanding of

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the function of space as metaphor has been throughout this century the spine
(considered as nerve centre as well as backbone) of the development of scenographic
theory, and I have no wish to set my face against the tide upon which I have myself
ridden. Nevertheless, we may derive some insights from the way Rozik discusses, say,
light, to which he gives some attention :

Light is a usual metaphor of human understanding. In Macbeth the lack of light,

which is one of the central motifs of the play, is loaded with additional
lugubrious connotations that revolve around the invocation of night by Lady
Macbeth. Night becomes the cradle of crime, and light an obstacle to the
powers of evil. When the first murderer puts out the light, an act that makes
possible Fleance’s escape, the literal act is loaded with an associative periphery
of foolishness. In the same vein, the taper carried by Lady Macbeth in her last
scene (V i) represents the dwindling light of her soul in its vain attempt to
recover sanity. Lady Macbeth is doomed to the very same darkness she had so
fervently invoked. In other words, the light is a metaphor which is used in this
context symbolically.3

This is incontrovertible, and in non-theatrical dramatic production, eg a radio

production, this ‘conceptual’ scenography does indeed function solely as metaphor .
Furthermore, in the theatre, it is common that further layers of meaning (using
Christopher Baugh’s phrase –see below) may be added by manipulation of light not
specifically arising from textual prescriptions..
What is distinctive about the theatre, however, is that the quality of light is
experienced by the audience, as well as interpreted. The absence of light, darkness, is
a fundamental experience, charged with a multiplicity of ‘meanings’, but also evoking
atavistic emotional as well as physical responses. A spotlight shone directly at the
audience may well ‘represent’ the enlightenment of Paul on the road to Damascus,
say, but it is also actually blinding. The spectator experiences this directly. It is,
therefore, simultaneously , descriptive and actual. In Rozik’s terms, it is both ‘world’
and ‘description’.
Erika Fischer-Lichte writes of stage space and furniture:

“ The signs of decoration thus form a closely knit complex with the proxemic
signs that can potentially materialize. They are what allows the audience to
identify the actor’s walking through the middle of the stage as the way to the
door of a house, walking from backstage to frontstage left as the way to get
from the door of the beloved’s room to the dungeon, and moving in a circle as
walking round an altar.”4

Once again, this is of course all correct, but it is also true that the actor’s walk is
through the middle of the stage, from back to frontstage, or in a circle. Whatever it
may represent, that is what it is. The action itself may have a directly expressive
function, as well as an imitative one, and, as we shall see, this expressive function is
intimately connected with the spatial disposition of actor and audience.

As late as 1928, Sheldon Cheney offers his opinion that:

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 " Stage decoration is, in simplest terms, the craft of creating an adequate and
appropriate background for theatric action" .5

Although Cheney was singled out by Lee Simonson as one of the ‘prophets’ of the
‘New Theatre’ (see below), the terms used here clearly suggest a perception – even by
then old-fashioned - of stage design, the background, as distinct from, rather than part
of, the ‘action’. We may also note the use of the term ‘decoration’, which has the
same connotations, and which , although later in the work he expressed doubts about
it, Cheney used as the title for his book. So also did Fuerst and Hume6, also in 1928.
Erika Fischer-Lichte’s use of the same term in 1992 (supra) is an indication of how
pervasive the habit of speech, and thought, has been.
The essence of the drama, “That within which passeth show” has been taken to reside
in the ‘poetry’ of the dramatic text as written by the author, and, latterly at least, as
delivered on stage by the actor.
In 1932 Simonson, himself a major designer, in one of the seminal works on Stage
Design, The Stage Is Set, declared uncompromisingly:
“Stagecraft at best is nothing more than the tail to the poet’s kite”.7

Simonson’s project in writing this book was largely to counteract what he called the
“apocalyptic fervours” of advocates of a so-called ‘New Theatre’, among whom he
included Craig, the Italian Futurists, and Reinhardt, who had, he felt, ( not without
some justification) carried too far their enthusiasm for a theatre in which both
director and designer would usurp the playwright’s position as primary creator.

There has been a considerable tyranny of snobbery, in that the impact of spectacle is
immediate – ‘accessible’, the word used so often to denigrate works of music, art and
literature, as though inaccessibility were some kind of virtue.
Ironically, among practitioners, even the most serious and least ‘spectacular’ of
productions is commonly referred to as a ‘show’: “I’ve got a show opening tonight”,
or “What show are you working on at the moment?” This is quite irrespective of the
‘seriousness’, or artistic ‘status ‘ ascribed to the piece; whether it be Guys and Dolls,
Endgame, The Romans in Britain, or A Long Day’s Journey Into Night, to theatre
people it is a ‘show’.
In the history of collaborations between the stagers of ‘shows’, (and of course all
theatre is collaborative, which has been a persistent problem for those concerned with
its status as ‘art’) there have been some lively antagonisms; Ben Jonson’s
Expostulation against Inigo Jones, whose magnificent scenic fabrications stole his
textual thunder in the masques of the Tudor and Stuart Courts, is only the most
famous of many prologues from the pens of his contemporaries decrying and denying
the primacy of stage effects. (Christine White’s analysis of the scenographic content
of the masques appears in the following chapter.)
In the nineteenth century, J.R.R Planche, to whom I will have occasion to refer again,
made more or less the same complaint of the gold leaf employed by William Roxby
Beverly in the extravaganzas which the two created with Madame Vestris – ‘shows’ if
ever there were such8.
In the twentieth century, between the wars, interest and experiment in stage design
burgeoned in a flurry of ‘new movements’ and manifestos, with a corresponding
resurgent interest in the politics of theatrical collaboration, but by the mid -20thc the
movement toward ‘poor’ theatre – although I would by no means suggest that
Grotowski, instigator of that movement, was not acutely concerned with the settings

3
of his ‘shows’9- was all too often seized upon gratefully by cash-strapped theatre
producers and penniless practitioners who saw in so-called ‘actors’ theatre an artistic
validation of their economic need to dispense with expensive and elaborate stagings-
still the chief criticism thrown at the major opera companies, in this country (Britain),
at least.
Recently, the indivisibility of the performance text from its physical con-text has
come to be re - acknowledged and dignified by a resurgence of serious critical and
theoretical analysis.
Unlike directors, to whom verbal communication comes – has to come – easily,
designers have not generally hitherto been articulate about their work, at least in print.
More recently, the former trickle of verbal comment by designers (Appia, Craig,
Simonson , for the most part concentrated in the inter-war period,) has accelerated
into a steady stream of works addressing the aesthetic, political and theoretical
significance of their practice. Too much has happened in recent years for any list to be
comprehensive, but a selection is indicative: in 1971 designers in Britain formed The
Society of British Theatre Designers, which has been active in promoting awareness
of the work of designers through publications and exhibitions – the latter aimed
ultimately at the Prague Quadrenniale, the international exhibition which has stood as
a landmark for more than thirty years. In 1989 the Society supported the publication
of John Goodwin’s British Theatre Design: The Modern Age. 1985 saw the
publication of Arnold Aronson’s American Set Design, in which the work of a
selection of designers is discussed, with extensive comment from the designers
themselves. In 1994 Josef Svoboda’s The Secret of Theatrical Space was published in
translation by J.F.Burian. Recent books have appeared devoted to individual designers
– Ralph Koltai (1997), Otakar Schindler (1998), Jaroslav Malina (1999).
More and more frequently, training courses for designers now extend beyond craft-
based teaching – Pamela Howard, for one, frequently uses the term ‘theatremaker’ in
preference to either ‘director’ or ‘designer’.
Stage Design is becoming theorised, the latest of the theatre disciplines to be so, as
‘scenography’, (although, as was pointed out to me recently in an undergraduate
dissertation, the word remains unknown to computer spellcheck programmes.).

This is perhaps the point at which to admit a degree of national – or anglophonic -

bias in this brief survey; the work which has taken place post-war in such centres as
Poland, Germany and (former) Czechoslovakia has of course been of incalculable
importance. Nevertheless, it was not until 1994 that the International Federation for
Theatre Research instituted a Scenography Working Group at its World Congress in
Moscow, with an inuagural membership of 11. This has now risen to over 80. A
conference held by the group in Prague in 1999 attracted 66 delegates from 18
countries, with 45 of them giving papers. There has been considerable recent growth.
In this chapter I aim to chart some of the key stages which have led to the coinage
and establishment of ‘scenography’ , as a term, and as an important theoretical field
within Theatre Studies.

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I had the good fortune on graduating to spend a year as a trainee with the late Michael
Elliott, founder of the Royal Exchange Theatre Company. Acting as my mentor for a
production I was directing, he advised me that the relationship between director and
designer was that the director was the male, and the designer the female, in the
creative partnership.
That was in 1969, and he would now quite rightly be arraigned on more than one
count for that remark, but I think his meaning is clear. However, thirty years later, it
has become equally clear that the substance of his advice is now as untenable as the
terms of his analogy.

The title of this paper, taken from the prologue to Shakespeare’s Henry V, is widely
read as a principal statement of Shakespeare’s theory of stage presentation.
It has been differently interpreted.
On the one hand it is taken to indicate the priority given by Shakespeare to the
exercise of the audience’s collective imagination, over actual, or literal,
representations of locality or context. Simonson 10 suggests that the prologue is
something of an apology for an absence of spectacle such as was currently on offer
elsewhere.
Through the nineteenth century, certainly, these chorus passages were read as a rather
wistful expression of Shakespeare’s longing for a technology sufficiently developed to
give full realisation to his grand imaginings. That, as Michael Booth has pointed out 11
,the nineteenth century (like its natural successor, the modern film industry) was
happy to supply. The programmes, playbills, and newspaper criticism of the later
19thc are suffused with a sense that Shakespeare was at last being done
‘properly’.This emphasis on ‘propriety’ is a key proposition in the development of
Stage presentation, differently interpreted according to national traditions. So, for
instance, the Italian theatre developed fixed architectural scenes ‘appropriate’ to
identified dramatic types – the celebrated ‘comic’, ‘tragic’, and ‘satyric’ scenes.
In England from1660, as the professional theatre returned after the hiatus of the
commonwealth, various old and new practices were incorporated. Women, of course,
appeared as actresses. The old playhouse shape gave way to a continental, indoor
model, derived from dining halls and tennis courts. The lavish entertainments of the
Tudor and Stuart courts – the masques- to which I have referred, although involving a
level of expenditure by and large out of the reach of professional managements, had
at least developed a technology for theatrical spectacle, a sense of what was
technically possible, and a taste for wonderment.
The science of perspective painting was applied to the creation of stage settings, more
and more conceived as representations of the supposed ‘locality’ of the play’s action,
and theatre auditoriums were successively constructed to throw progressive emphasis
on the visual – the ‘show’.
During the eighteenth century there were effectively only two theatres operating in
London, and Covent Garden, under John Rich, the virtual inventor of Pantomime, had
become the house of spectacle – of ‘shows’. However lofty a disdain David Garrick
affected for his rival, he felt the pain where it hurt, in the box-office.
Fortuitously, he was approached by an Alsatian painter, Philippe James de
Loutherbourg, who was interested in taking charge of scenic presentation at Drury
Lane. He became Garrick’s designer, though that term had not yet been coined.

5
(Neither, of course, had ‘director’, and I have deliberately not corrected here the fact
that, in writing of the relationship between the two, I fell into the trap of referring to
de Loutherbourg as ‘Garrick’s designer’. Even for those acutely aware of and
sensitive to the issues here, the terminology is deeply ingrained and, as feminist
critics well know, consolidates and perpetuates the politics.)

De Loutherbourg’s contribution to the development of stage design is given full

attention by Christopher Baugh, both elsewhere12 and in chapter 4 of the present
volume. My purpose is to identify two directions –or, rather, two parallel paths of
development- in which de Loutherbourg propelled Stage Design..
In 1779 for The Wonders of Derbyshire, he went out into the peak district to prepare
sketches of localities in the peak – ‘Dovedale by Moonlight’, for instance - which
were then worked up into scenes for the show. He was, of course, a noted easel
painter, whose work frequently features specific localities, as well as the pyrotechnic
‘effects’ of the Industrial Revolution.
Although it had not been uncommon for a half-century prior to this production for
‘actual’ scenes to be depicted on stage (See Sybil Rosenfeld, 1973, 1981)13,
particularly in Germany, de Loutherbourg’s paintings had a particularly powerful
impact.
This provided, I suggest, two sources of satisfaction for audiences. Firstly, there was
that inexplicable pleasure on seeing in the fictional context of theatre something
familiar from the world outside. “Thus”, as Percy Fitzgerald put it in 1870:
when we take our dramatic pleasure, we have the satisfaction of not being
separated from the objects of our daily life, and within the walls of the theatre
we meet again the engine and train that set us down almost at the door; the
interior of hotels, counting houses, shops, factories, the steam-boats, waterfalls,
bridges, and even fire-engines 14

(Whatever acclaim is due Tom Robertson for his address to contemporary social
issues, he is notorious for his ‘real’ door-knobs and teacups, as is Beerbohm Tree for
the ‘real ‘rabbits introduced onto the set for his staging of A Midsummer Night’s
Dream.)
Secondly, of great importance through the Industrial Revolution and throughout the
nineteenth century, there was the thirst for information, for knowledge, disseminated
by theatre through vicarious experience. De Loutherbourg’s accurate depictions of the
Peak were succeeded by Capon’s reconstructions of medieval London, Stanfield’s
panoramas of the Battle of Trafalgar, and the ‘antiquarian’ depictions of ancient
Athens and Rome in the mid-century productions of Charles Kean.
Any stage production, from the Pantomime to Shakespeare, might be expected to
fulfil a ‘documentary’ function. Accuracy in depictions of the world outside the
theatre became necessary.
Rosenfeld cites one critic from the London Magazine who “ after praising
Loutherbourg’s views of Buxton Wells and Poole’s Cavern as “taken with great
exactness”, expressed reservations about the view of Castleton in which the entrance
was “much too beautiful and illumined”.15
‘Authenticity’ in staging began to matter.

The second major area of de Loutherbourg’s influence was the impetus he gave to
the developing pictorial sense of theatre. One of the rather too few extant examples of
his work shows the conception of a setting as a picture of a location, broken up into

6
receding flat planes. The convention persists of course in English Pantomime scenery,
where it is deliberately archaic and parodic, and, in this century, it was precisely the
approach of David Hockney in designing The Rakes Progress.

Loutherbourg experimented with coloured gauzes placed in front of oil lamps, cut-
out pieces to create lighting effects with only limited technology. He also developed a
show , the Eidophusikon , an early form of son-et lumiere in an eight foot square
booth, in which such scenes as Milton’s Hell could be staged in miniature . (This may
be regarded as a direct precursor of such 20thc developments as Prampolini’s Teatro
Magnetico and Svoboda’s Laterna Magika, to which I shall be returning.).

Well before 1800, the theatre was firmly launched upon the path of development
which would see the nineteenth century for ever designated the era of the ‘picture’
stage. Actors retreated further and further from the audience space, ending up behind
a proscenium arch which more and more resembled a picture frame.
Stefan Brecht has commented on the frame as a protective device, demarcating the
boundary between art work and spectator/ audience: “..not only a gesture of specious
valuing but a way to save the work from the world – a cowardly act.”.16 (Brecht is
here contrasting “the enclosed well-and wall- defined action space of modern
agoraphobic theatre” with the outwardly-radiating spatial dynamics of Peter
Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theatre, emphatically not designed for custom – built
theatre spaces.).
More specifically, Erika Fischer-Lichte analyses the significance of the proscenium in
terms of the politics of the performance:
“The box set of the nineteenth century…finalized the complete separation of the
two spheres. The stage space is on one side, where all of the light is directed,
and the audience space is on the other, which is submerged in profound
darkness. Consequently, the individual viewer in the audience cannot see any of
the other viewers, nor can the actor see the audience. As a logical consequence
the actor performs as if no audience were present and thus degrades the viewer
to an indiscreet observer who invades the actor’s sphere more or less without
having the right to do so. As a result, however, the theatre loses its ability to
function as a form of the self-portrayal and self-reflection of society.”17

Art critic Michael Fried, addressing the question of the painting-beholder

relationship, and considering both nineteenth century French painting and mid 20thc
‘minimal’ art, has repeatedly argued that excellence in painting is achieved in inverse
proportion to what he identifies as its ‘theatricality’ :
“In several essays on recent abstract painting and sculpture…I argued that
much seemingly difficult and advanced but actually ingratiating and mediocre
work of those [late sixties] years sought to establish what I called a theatrical
relation to the beholder, whereas the very best recent work[s]…were in essence
anti – theatrical, which is to say that they treated the beholder as if he were not
there.”18

I will return to Fried in due course. My present point is that, perhaps ironically, not
only did the painting of the nineteenth century treat the beholder ‘as if he were not
there’, but, in the theatre itself, this was precisely the effect of the developing and
enveloping proscenium arch. In Fried’s terms, ridiculous as it seems to say so , the
theatre was itself becoming ‘anti – theatrical’.

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This is of course to use the word in a very particular sense, and, in Allardyce Nicoll’s
terminology, the taste for authenticity, expressed as ‘antiquarianism’, went hand in
hand with a thirst for ever more ‘spectacular’ representations which, in the
commonly accepted usage of the word, were extremely ‘theatrical’.
First John Kemble and then Charles Kean employed the services of JRR Planche, that
same writer of light entertainment who fell out with his collaborator Beverley, and
who happened to be a passionate antiquarian, to ensure that the costuming and setting
of Shakespeare’s plays was achieved with maximum historical accuracy.
A short example, taken from many collected by GCD Odell, illustrates the lengths to
which this passion was taken The production in question is Macbeth, presented by
Kean in 1853. Odell introduces the account:

“Beginning with Macbeth…Kean issued with his bill of the play the material
used as an introduction to the printed text; therein every playgoer was informed
of the scholarly reasons why the spectacle was clothed and built in exactly the
manner visible on the stage…It was as good as going to school…”

A short extract from the programme suffices to make the point:

“Party-coloured woollens and cloths appear to have been commonly worn

among the Cetic tribes from a very early period.
Diodorus Siculus and Pliny allude to this peculiarity in their account of the
dress of the Belgic Gauls; Strabo, Pliny and Xiliphin record the dress of
Boadicea, Queen of the Iceni, as being woven, chequer-wise, of many colours,
comprising purple, light and dark red, violet and blue”

And so on. And on. Pages of it. As Odell remarks, this is “archaeology run
rampant”.19
These monster productions employed a succession of master painters –the Grieve
family, Telbin, Beverley, and Clarkson Stanfield, to name only the most prominent, to
provide breathtaking backdrops, painted under their direction by dozens of assistants.
Their achievements in scene-painting have never been surpassed. The painters , and
the scenes which they painted, received star billing, alongside the play, author and
leading players. The gas lighting which predominated through the nineteenth century
provided the ideal softening effect for the better appreciation of illusionistic painting.
There are notoriously few surviving examples of the scenic art of this period; unlike
easel painting, stage painting is not executed with a view to longevity. The sheer scale
of the work, the need to work with cheap, and therefore fugitive materials, and the
constant need to recycle, all militate against preservation. Some idea of how close was
the relation of the stage to easel painting may be derived from comparison of the
composition of the paintings of Vernet , for instance, The Tempest, with an
engraving of Boucicault’s The Shaughraun and the drawing of the staging of a
tempest scene from an 1888 French book on staging, Moynet’s L’Envers du Theatre:
(illustrations 1,2,3)
Evident in all of these is a keen interest in the creation of an illusion of space, with
great holes punched into the picture plane, and a preoccupation with light and
atmosphere.
The climax of the period of the ‘picture’ stage, before its translation to the cinema,
was the period at the interchange of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the time
of Beerbohm Tree and Henry Irving. Tree achieved fame, if not notoriety, for the

8
lavishness of his spectacles. I have referred to his real rabbits. Both he and Irving
engaged Alma –Tadema as designer in re-creations of ancient Rome. Christened as
‘toga’ plays by David Mayer20 , these productions translated easily into Hollywood
spectacle.
Irving achieved more lasting stature as an actor than did Tree, but was also famous in
London and Paris as a great metteur en scene, whose productions were written about
in fine art journals. His mastery of the pictorial aspects of production is fully
recounted by Michael Booth:
"He knew exactly what he wanted to achieve in every line and with every scene,
and would go to infinite lengths of trouble in order to obtain it....[he] usually
fitted in his own part in the latter stages of rehearsal, and to others never seemed
to spend any time rehearsing himself. Nevertheless, his conception of his own
role was as clear as his conception of everything else, and he always knew in
advance precisely how his figure and costume would become a distinctive and
vital part of stage groupings and gain particular emphasis from lighting"21

Booth quotes Bram Stoker's account of expressing his doubts to Irving about the
Brocken scene in the 1885 production of Goethe’s Faust, which he felt was shaping
up to appear rather drab, with dull grey and green costumes. Irving's reply, as quoted
by Stoker, was as follows:

"I know the play will do... As far as tonight goes you are quite right: but you
have not seen my dress. I do not want to wear it till I get all the rest correct.
Then you will see. I have studiously kept as yet all the colour scheme to that
grey-green. When my dress of flaming scarlet appears among it , it will bring
the whole picture together in a way you cannot dream of. .. You shall see too
how Ellen Terry's white dress, and even that red scar across her throat, will
stand out in the midst of that turmoil of lighting"22

Irving’s pictorialism incorporated, rather than rejected, historical accuracy; he

maintained a firm commitment to archaeological accuracy in staging , and he had his
own comments to make on authenticity:

" With regard to scenery I have endeavoured to adhere to the principle which
has always guided me, namely, that to meet the requirements of the stage,
without sacrificing the purpose or the poetry of the author, should be the aim of
those who produce the plays of Shakespeare; and I trust that any change which I
have ventured to introduce on this occasion in the ordinary scenic arrangements
has been made in the spirit of true reverence for the works of our greatest
dramatist. All such changes have been suggested either by the text of the play
itself or by the descriptions of the chroniclers from whom we know that
Shakespeare derived most of his incidents. As to the period chosen for the
costumes, we read that Macbeth was slain by Macduff on December 5th, 1056;
I have therefore taken the 11th century as the historical period of the play" .23
(my italics)

Authenticity was of course what the entire Naturalistic movement was about, and in
this sense the theatre was simply one strand in the developing European artistic braid.

9
In summarising its intentions Erika Fischer-Lichte once again suggests much by her
choice of terms:
“The theatre of Naturalism… provided a detailed, as it were authentic,
reproduction of actual interiors, which had the function of portraying as
precisely as possible the milieu that determined the actions, attitudes, values
and views of the world of the characters”24 (my italics)

The impatience with ‘convention’, and the quest for ‘truth’ very quickly led to a
preoccupation with illusionistic detail. The “décor exacte” famously demanded by
Zola25 in settings, costumes and properties was universally literally interpreted.
Importantly, unlike all of the other arts, with the possible , though at the time not yet
realised, exception of sculpture, the theatre had the potential to deploy real objects as
simulacra for themselves. Thus, for example, the fictive pistols of General Gabler
may be represented on stage by a pair of real pistols. To this semiotic construct Keir
Elam has given a name: “The theatre is perhaps the only art form able to exploit what
might be termed iconic identity: the sign-vehicle denoting a rich silk costume may
well be a rich silk costume…” 26 (author’s italics)
In the ‘picture stage’, this often led to uncomfortable clashes of convention. The
introduction of real furniture into a scene in which even persons in a crowd might be
illusionistically painted, for instance, gave rise to a deal of criticism.27 Strindberg’s
complaints about painted kitchen implements, first presented in French to audiences at
Miss Julia in 1883, are well enough known, and such demands were not confined to
Europe. Linda Ben Zvi has recently cited the production of Eugene O’Neill’s first-
performed play Bound East For Cardiff , in 1916:
Although the artist William Zorach attempted to interest O’Neill in a stylized,
painted backdrop, the young playwright refused: “Gene insisted everything
had to be factual. If the play called for a stove, it couldn’t be a painted box.”28
–

In this conflict of convention, the ‘real’ triumphed over the ‘false’, as both were then
identified, and on the Naturalistic stage we find, notoriously, real sides of beef
hanging up in an abbatoir scene, real plate glass mirrors behind the bars of French
cafes, and, where the real object simply could not be introduced, highly sophisticated
techniques for simulation.
To the satisfaction of seeing the real object out of context is now added that of
astonishment at how such accurate simulations are achieved. The virtuosity of the
scenic artist becomes, like the coloratura of a star soprano, a delight for audiences
dazzled by cleverness. For the practitioner, too, this is all very beguiling. The lexicon
of techniques for the simulation of anything from stone walls to tree bark allows for
quick returns, in that the success of the artifact is apparent, and measurable, in a way
that abstraction is not.
That this is an ‘as it were’ authenticity (Fischer Lichte, supra) was brought home to
me by audience reaction to a piece of my own work. A production of Osborne’s
Look Back in Anger provided an opportunity to experiment with the reproduction of
damp walls, greasy linoleum, and so on, to reproduce as convincingly as possible
(though within an architecturally improbable arrangement) a dingy mid-fifties attic
flat. Great fun, as most designers would admit, however wistfully.
The results received generally favourable comment. (illustration 4)

10
Nevertheless even some of the more enthusiastic audience responses were indicative .
Many people expressed admiration for the way in which the period and environment
had been represented.
Some half – dozen, however, had noticed a flaw - but not all of them the same one.
On the contrary, each had noticed a different point of – to them – discordant detail:
“Did they have curtains like those in the fifties?” “Had plastic washbaskets come in
by then? “ “ Would they have had a yellow teddy-bear?” And so on.
The last ‘would they?’ is the fundamental question of Naturalism, explicitly
separating, in Rozik’s terms (supra) the ‘world’ - the play - from the ‘description’ –
the performance. ‘Authenticity’, the yardstick to measure quality of achievement or
experience, derives from outside the performance event.
On such evidence it is hard not to agree with Aristotle, that the satisfactions derived
from this kind of spectacle have little to do with the “art of poetry”.

In the early part of the century, that point was not lost upon some practitioners and
scholars to whom it was already clear that a more ‘authentic’ authenticity in the
application of stage design was both possible and necessary.
Agreeing with Matisse that “l’exactitude n’est pas la verite”, they did not start
altogether from scratch. At about the same time as Charles Kean had been staging his
grandly-realised antiquarian productions of Shakespeare at the Princess’s Theatre,
Samuel Phelps managed the much less lavishly- appointed Sadler’s Wells. Lacking
the resources which enabled Kean to employ , according to his own account, as many
as 550 people in the realisation of his spectacles, Phelps displayed resourcefulness
and imagination. Odell 29 recounts his commissioning of 80 wax heads from Madame
Tussauds, costumed , and carried by forty ‘extras’, each holding two of these effigies,
in order to swell a march of soldiers from 40 to 120. His production of Macbeth in
1847 employed gauzes to much-acclaimed effect in the witches’ scenes, as did, six
years later, A Midsummer Night’s Dream :
“And not only…do the scenes melt dream-like one into another, but over all the
fairy portion of the play there is a haze thrown by a curtain of green gauze…
placed between the actors and the audience, and maintained there during the
whole of the second, third and fourth acts. This gauze curtain is so well spread
that there are very few parts of the house from which its presence can be
detected, but its influence is everywhere felt; it subdues the flesh and blood of
the actors into something more nearly resembling dream figures…throwing the
same green fairy tinge, and the same mist, over all”30.

Clearly there is here an address to what Fuerst and Hume later called (infra) the
“inner mood” of the play, rather than to any external reality. The setting functions
directly, and poetically, in the totality of the experience of performance.
It is hardly necessary to point out that the same scenic impulse informed the great
music dramas of Richard Wagner, in which the settings are more even than an
interpretation of the drama: they were conceived alongside the music, and the
dramatic narrative, and are integral to the whole.
As Fuerst and Hume wrote in 1928 :
“the stage settings were not invented (as in the case of Romantic opera before
Wagner), for the mere pleasure which they gave to the eye, for with Wagner the
setting has become for the first time an actor in the drama.

11
 Here the stage decoration acts, it plays a part.; something which it had never
done before. Moreover we can find in it a tendency toward psychological
expression, toward the creation of a mood".31

(We might do well, of course, to keep in mind George Bernard Shaw’s point, that the
aquatics of the Rheinmaidens would have been impossible- in fact, literally,
inconceivable- had not the technology been developed in the extravaganzas and
pantomimes on the popular stage –‘shows’. Augustus Harris himself referred to Das
Rheingold as a “damned pantomime”.)
Nevertheless, as Richard Beacham points out, in spite of the fact that Wagner assumed
total artistic control of the staging of his works, established the revolutionary
Festspielhaus in which to stage them, and concentrated the attention of the spectator
by darkening the auditorium,
by placing his performers within a relentlessly illusionistic scenic environment
where little or nothing was left to the imagination, he ensured that, visually, the
settings could never express the inner spiritual world suggested by the music32

What Wagner imagined yet remained to be realised. In Appia’s words, he “cracked

[the] mould, but by no means destroyed it.”33

12
‘Psychological expression’ and ‘the creation of a mood’ are the most obvious
characteristics of the work of the two titanic figures who might equally lay claim to
the title of demiurge of twentieth century stage design, both in theory and practice.

Much has been written both by and about Edward Gordon Craig, and it is not my
present purpose to evaluate his contribution to the theatre. The spectrum of opinion
ranges from Simonson’s criticism of his arrogance and impracticality34 to the
celebration of his vision by, among others, Christopher Baugh in the present volume.
Craig is notorious for outspoken and deliberately contentious comment, in particular
about the role of the actor in the production enterprise, for which he envisaged a
hierarchical model of organisation. At the head, a master mind whom he called the
Stage Manager, whose role and multiple required capabilities he outlined frequently,
principally throughout the first and second dialogues on The Art of the Theatre.
Although, like Appia, Craig fiercely repudiated the principle of Naturalism, and
eschewed its practice, it is possible to see some aspects of that movement as a real
step in the direction which both were to take.
The drive toward ‘authenticity’, however defined, essentially consisted in progressive
subordination of the several constituent elements of theatrical presentation to the
production envisioned as a whole. In other words, it is a move in the direction of
artistic coherence, and the recognition, in Craig’s most famous phrase, of an ‘art of
the theatre’.
The concomitant notion of an ‘artist’ of the theatre introduces a new question of
authorship. The written dramatic text comes to be regarded as a part of, sometimes
referred to as a blueprint for, the performance text, and the notion of the author,
although it has not ( as happened in 20thc film criticism) entirely given way, has
certainly given ground, to that of the '‘auteur”. Although it was to be some time
before that particular terminology was to be applied to theatre, it is the unmistakeable
foundation of the work of Craig, notwithstanding Bablet’s cautionary reminder that
the ‘stage –director’ was always conceived as an “…interpreter (Craig never for a
moment suggested – as he has so often been accused of doing- that stage production
could be an art in itself)”. 35 (original orthography)
In his visions (notoriously under-realised in his lifetime , for reasons mercilessly
demonstrated by Simonson , who, as aforesaid, fiercely resisted the whole concept of
‘auteur–ship’ in the theatre and held Craig in particular contempt 36) there is no
interest at all in an authenticity based upon the detail of surface reality –‘factuality’ .
Craig’s locations are abstracted, simplified, and grand.
Above all they are designs for performance events and in them we find a
preoccupation with mood, atmosphere – in essence, with the experience of the
spectator.

Craig’s contemporary Adolphe Appia, in his enterprise to stage Wagner’s music

dramas more ‘authentically’ than had Wagner himself, similarly eschewed anything
resembling Naturalism .
In direct contrast to the wealth of detail provided in the antiquarian classic
productions, and while Naturalism demanded, above all, the explicit, Appia embraced
simplicity, ambiguity, mystery, in which the spectator is made aware of elements of
the set selectively.
His own account of the staging of Tristan und Isolde is now among the most
celebrated and influential passages in the history of theatre:

13
 It is essential for the spiritual conflict involved that some form of representation
be found which allows it to be successfully dramatized. Moreover the audience
can be made directly aware of the inner or spiritual action involved only by
some form of scenic investiture which is based upon the dramatic line of the
play37

This seems obvious enough to us now, but it is remarkable how often, even ten years
after the First World War, practitioners and critics feel the point still to be worth
making. For example:
" to express, by visual means, the psychological essence or inner mood of the
play had (post-war) become the principal concern of the stage setting."38

Appia’s own writing has by now been comprehensively translated, analysed and
interrogated; even before this, however, the principles he propounded had become the
foundation upon which the work of the majority of modern scenic artists is built, even
though many may even yet be unaware of their source. In Simonson’s words:
“Practitioners of stage-craft were converted by a set of illustrations to a gospel
which most of them never read”.39

In further quoting from the Tristan passage, I wish to draw attention to Appia’s choice
of language, rather than to the specifics of the staging he describes:

Picture the stage at the rise of the curtain: A great torch at stage centre. The
somewhat narrow stage space is filled with enough light so that the actors can
be distinctly seen, without dimming the brilliance of the torch and above all
without dimming the shadows which this source of light casts. The forms which
demarcate the stage setting are seen only hazily. The quality of the light veils
them in an atmospheric blur. A few barely visible lines in the stage setting
indicate the forms of trees. Gradually the eye becomes accustomed to this;
above, it becomes aware of the mass of a building in front of which one
perceives a terrace.
During the entire first scene Isolde and Brangaene stay on this terrace and
between them and the foreground one senses a declivity, the forms of which one
cannot identify clearly. When Isolde extinguishes the torch the entire setting is
enveloped in a monotonous half-light in which the eye loses itself without being
arrested by a single definite shape. Isolde, as she flies towards Tristan, is
enveloped in a mysterious shadow which intensifies the impression of death that
the right half of the stage has already induced in us. During the first ecstasy of
their encounter both remain on the terrace. At its climax we perceive that they
come toward us imperceptibly from the upper terrace and by means of a barely
noticeable ramp reach a lower platform further in the foreground…..
Then, when their desire is sufficiently appeased, when a single idea possesses
them and when we become increasingly aware of the death of time, only then do
they reach the foreground of the stage where we perceive for the first time a
bench that awaits them………Whether as a result of our visual reactions
induced by the gleam of the torch and the shadows it casts, or whether because
our eye has followed the path that Tristan and Isolde have just traversed,

14
 however that may be, we become aware of how tenderly they are enfolded by
the world about them.40
(all italics are mine)

The phrases I have italicised are all concerned with the experience of the spectator,
and the majority are expressed as active verbs –“we see”, “we become aware” and so
on. The staging here is not authenticated by reference to historical accuracy, or in
terms of an author’s, actor’s or director’s intentions. The contrast with the passages
quoted above from Charles Kean and Henry Irving, which valorise the production
rather than the performance event, is obvious. To take up again the terminology of
Michael Fried, Appia’s approach carries back into theatre the ‘theatrical’ 41, insisting
upon the acknowledged ‘presence’ of the spectator. Moreover, his language echoes
Walter Pater’s in describing the evanescence of the artistic experience:
…Pater defined the art object as something we know only through
“impressions, unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which burn and are
extinguished with our consciousness of them". He was never interested in
anything of "solidity" ”but only in "experience itself...that continual vanishing
away, that strange perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves42

In practical terms, the whole experience depends upon a completely new importance
given to light, and to form as defined by light in terms of atmosphere and shadow,
which is described as a process.
Appia had his first opportunity actually to stage a Wagner opera in 1923, when he
designed the production of Tristan und Isolde at La Scala.
As Richard Beacham has recounted, conservative Italian audiences didn't like it:

.. ,there was little understanding, and less sympathy, for Appia's settings
amongst the opera going public, although they received a more mixed response
from the critics, ranging from one who termed them "ridiculous, shameful,
pretentious and oppressing to the eye" to another who praised them for their "
poetic use of light, psychological intimacy and sense of mystery".
Spectators were perplexed by the relative drabness of colour, the absence of
elaborately painted scenery, and the austere simplicity of the decor43

Of vital importance to Appia was the recognition , not only of the presence of the
spectator, but equally of the plastic reality of the human presence on stage; what he
termed the actuality of the actor. The word is important. Appia’s use of it is echoed by
Richard Schechner ‘s coinage of the term to denote particular kinds of performance
event44 in which the lived experience is foregrounded, rather than a fictional , or
imitated action. Beacham has noted the influence of Appia upon Schechner, Chaikin ,
The Living Theatre, and others concerned with analysis of the performer/spectator
relationship.45
Appia, half a century before Schechner, was concerned with reality itself; the verbs
which I emphasised in the Tristan passage quoted above relate not to an image, or a
fictional reality, but to an actual event, the performance, and treat three dimensional
form, and space, its complementary opposite, defined by light, as more than context
for the event; they are integral to it.
Light, just like the actor, must become active...Light has an almost miraculous
flexibility...it can create shadows, make them living, and spread the harmony of

15
 their vibrations in space just as music does. In light we possess a most powerful
means of expression through space, if this space is placed in the service of the
actor.46

Important also is the fact that the actor is a moving object.

As Appia's starting point had been the music-drama of Wagner, rhythm was obviously
of vital importance. In 1906 he met Emile-Jaques Dalcroze, who had developed a
series of rhythmic exercises into his system of 'eurhythmics'. The two worked together
on a system of space, light and movement which resulted in the establishment of the
institute at Hellerau, for which Appia designed a great Hall for the presentation of
performances, 50m x 16m, 12m high, in which, crucially, there was no proscenium to
divide audience from actors. Sharing the space of performance, the audience to some
extent ceased to be spectators, and assumed, at least to a degree, the role of
participants:
Up until now, all we have asked of the audience has been to sit still
and pay attention. In order to encourage it in this direction, we have
offered it a comfortable seat and have plunged it into a semi-darkness
that favours the state of complete passivity...If the playwright and those
who perform his work are to bring about a change of direction - a
conversion - then the spectator must, in his turn, submit to it ( the
awakening of art in oneself) too. His starting point is himself, his own
body. From that body, living art must radiate and spread out into space,
upon which it will confer life.47

Put simply, Appia’s contribution to the development of twentieth century

scenographic practice may be regarded as threefold:

1)The development of the concept of expressive and flexible lighting

2)The importance of space, and the plastic (sculptural) reality of the stage setting.
3)The emphasis upon the spectator as agent in shaping the experience of performance.

Although known to Craig , Appia’s writings were not widely known until after the
publication in 1932 by Simonson of the translated Tristan passages. Beacham, in the
preface to his Adolphe Appia48, lists subsequent translations, the earliest of which, into
English, appeared as late as 1960. So it is no surprise that, in 1928, five years after the
La Scala production of Tristan, Friedrich Kiesler is still grappling with :
the antinomy "picture stage"….. [which] “has remained generally unnoticed.
For stage is space, picture is surface. The spatial junction of stage and picture
produces a false compromise, the stage picture .
And the general uncritical acceptance of the contradiction "picture-stage" shows
how greatly we need the apparent pleonasm "space-stage" (which arises
naturally in contrast to " picture stage"); for this designation calls attention to
the fact that, despite its thousands of plays, the stage is not yet what it should
be: that is, space by whose relative tensions the action of a work is created and
completed 49

16
Writing in the same issue of the journal in which this article appeared the Italian,
Prampolini, argued for a theatre in which scenic elements were the entire means of
expression, eliminating the human performer altogether:
I consider the actor a useless element in theatrical action and moreover one that
is dangerous to the future of the theatre.
The actor is that element in interpretation which offers the greatest unknown
quantities and the smallest guarantees....THEREFORE I DECLARE THAT THE
INTERVENTION OF THE ACTOR IN THE THEATRE AS AN ELEMENT OF
INTERPRETATION IS ONE OF THE MOST ABSURD COMPROMISES IN
THE ART OF THE THEATRE.
The theatre, in its purest expression, is a centre of revelation of mysteries,-
tragic,-dramatic-comic,-beyond human phenomena.50
(original orthography)

Simonson’s alarm, faced with these italicised capitals, is perhaps understandable.

The Magnetic Theatre enterprise which Prampolini created to carry out his
experiments belonged at least as much to the world of Fine Art as to the theatre, and
together with the 'installations' originating with the artists of the Bauhaus developed
and continued into what we variously call now 'performance art', 'time-based art', and
so on , all based, not on the interpretation of a dramatic text, or on the provision of a
platform for acting, but on a totality of performance experience which may or may not
have a conventional, orthographic text, and may or may not have performers
recognisable as 'actors.' This carries its own body of criticism, and its relation to
theatre is continually shifting, and consistently problematic – for scholars and critics,
if not practitioners. As ‘fine’ artists have, from at least the mid-century, become less
and less concerned with the artifact qua object, and more and more with the
experience of art, the several arts may well be seen as having approached synthesis.
This has concerned critics like Fried, whose 1967 essay Art and Objecthood
concluded with three propositions:
1) The success, even the survival of the arts has come increasingly to depend
on their ability to defeat theatre. This is perhaps nowhere more evident than
within theatre itself, where the need to defeat what I have been calling theatre
has chiefly made itself felt as the need to establish a drastically different relation
to its audience….
2) Art degenerates as it approaches the condition of theatre…
3) The concepts of quality and value – and to the extent that these are central to
art, the concept of art itself – are meaningful, or wholly meaningful, only within
the individual arts. What lies between the arts is theatre.51

17
In Russia, the theatre provided for the artists of the revolutionary Constructivist
movement an opportunity necessarily denied them by the real world:
The one area of creative endeavour in which it was possible to realise
experimental syntheses of ‘new ways of life’ with corresponding total
environments was the theatre(Lodder, 1983)52

In the theatre, the Constructivist model for social and economic organisation could be
realised in miniature, in effigy . As shamans in Malaya conjure evil demons into little
paper boats and send them out to sea, so here the theatre could offer a context for the
creation of simulacra of wished-for social models . It is not a great surprise to find
Simonson expressing a sceptical view:
Outside of Russia, where collectivism is not a dominant creed, constructivism
has been imported and accepted as an art form. Nevertheless…it has failed to
become an appropriate setting for accepted masterpieces. And the playwrights
who hail it as a great liberation and write scenes that can be interpreted only on
trestles, chutes and elevator-shafts, invariably write empty and pretentious
allegories.53

Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes had continued into this century the notion of the stage as
picture, with stage settings and costumes very much related to the easel painting of
the time, and created by some of its foremost practitioners: Braque, Utrillo, Picasso,
Derain, to name only a few.
The denial by the revolution of the validity of beauty detached from functionality saw
the introduction of a new style of setting which was more than background to the
actor, and more even than a platform for acting., closely related as it was to a new
style of acting, the ’biomechanics ‘, of Meyerhold. Beside providing interesting
arrangements of levels and spaces, in turn providing ‘opportunities’ to actors, the
settings made their own statements.
They did things.
The most famous example is of course Liubov Popova’s set for The Magnanimous
Cuckold, produced by Meyerhold in 1922, a wonderful semi-abstract working
construction reminiscent of things children used to make out of Meccano, or various
other model-making systems involving sticks and wheels and rubber bands.
Where have they gone, in our world of virtual reality and Tomb Raiders?
(The question is serious. The entire thrust of this paper depends upon the movement
in art from the virtual to the actual; much available entertainment has moved in
precisely the opposite direction. When the Rolling Stones finally succeed in
reproducing themselves as holograms, will they cease to perform in concert?)

In that working collaboration between Meyerhold and Popova we see an instance of a

working partnership in the theatre in which the physical reality of the setting is
inextricably bound up in the artistic experience, and closely related to the actor and
the manner of performance. Arguably, this had not occurred to anything like this
extent since the seventeenth century achievements of the Italian stage and the English
court.
In some of the other experiments of the constructivist theatre we see another interest,
though again of necessity confined to maquettes and sketches ; experiments in the
reshaping of performance spaces to make possible different relationships between the
audience and the performance.

18
This, like Appia’s later theories, transcends mere aesthetics, in an address,
unsurprising in revolutionary Russia, to the politics of theatrical presentation

At around the same time, in 1920, and also influenced by Appia, Copeau rebuilt the
stage and auditorium of his Vieux Colombier theatre, effectively destroying the
division between the two, and situating spectators and performers very much in the
same space.
Much the same was Terence Gray’s re-shaping of the Cambridge Festival Theatre, in
which performers entered through the seating spaces.
As Sayre points out, in commenting upon Fried’s repudiation of ‘theatre’:
…one of the distinguishing, and to him disturbing, characteristics of
performance art is its ideological thrust. If art gives priority to the audience –
the masses, as it were – then art must also divest itself of its more elitist
assumptions, which tend to be defined in terms of the academy –that is,
traditional literary and art criticism – most especially of the academy’s
privileging of the art object as a formal, autonomous, and authoritative entity.54

The urge to break down the actor/audience demarcation in space was a step in the
direction of a similar ‘de-privileging’ of the theatrical performance, essentially also
ideologically-driven.
So far in the course of this paper I have had cause to refer to four publications from
the year 1928. In Germany in that year Brecht’s Threepenny Opera was first
produced at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm. Of this production, Christopher Baugh
has written:
This was the first production in which the idea of an entire staging achieved the
status of a "model" - not only from a personal sense of pride (and copyright) but
in the important sense that the setting could exist as a layer of meaning within
the text; a layer which is as contributive, and therefore perhaps as inappropriate
to separate from future productions as the dialogue and Kurt Weill's musical
score55

Of the three designers principally associated with Brecht, Caspar Neher was the first
and is generally held to have been the most important.
At the time that they were collaborating it was Neher’ s practice to be present at
Brecht’s rehearsals, at which he constantly produced sketches of ‘the play’ –
groupings of actors, setting and so on. It is no exaggeration to say that , no longer
merely ‘expressing the mood and spirit of the play’, his drawings are the developing
play.
Like the drawings and etchings of Craig, they are ideas for the performance event,
though in this case they are part of an actual rehearsal process, for performances
which did actually take place, and produced by a designer who was very much part of
a collaborative effort.
Brecht was scathing about the production process which then obtained, and still
overwhelmingly obtains, in mainstream theatre:
Normally the sets are determined before the actors' rehearsals have begun, 'so
that they can start', and the main thing is that they evoke an atmosphere, give
some kind of expression, [and] illustrate a location; and the process by which
this is brought about is observed with as little attention as the choosing of a
postcard on holiday. If at all, it is considered with regard to creating a space
with some good possibilities for performance...

19
[ On the other hand]
The good scene designer [Buhnenbauer] proceeds slowly and experimentally. A
working hypothesis is based upon a precise reading of the text; and substantial
conversations with other members of the theatre, especially on the social aims
of the play and the concerns of the performance, are useful to him. However, his
basic performance ideas must still be general and flexible.
This is how a good stage designer [Buhnenbauer] works. Now ahead of the
actor, now behind him, always together with him. Step by step he builds up the
performance area, just as experimentally as the actor.56

Brecht’s early plays are of course collectively known as the Lehrstucke , or ‘learning
plays’ (not, as this word is often translated, ‘teaching’ plays. In the context of the
present paper the distinction is of clear and vital importance.)
Baugh makes the observation:
Lehrstucktheater is radically one without an audience, since the act of theatre is
seen as a dialectic: an active process in which the audience take upon
themselves the role of interpretation and in effect become actors. This contrasts
with traditional views of practitioners and theoreticians, which suggest that the
theatre has, as its base procedure, a series of strategies designed to manipulate
its audience in a variety of predetermined, 'getting the message across' ways.57

This is a crucial point, particularly as it is still more than common to find theatre
directors speaking of their role as ‘orchestrating’ the emotional experience of the
audience.

Here,
the job in hand is to create or build a scene as an integral component of a play's
dramaturgy and which therefore should be considered an act of performance: as
'a combination of thinking and active intervention The scenographer will be
responsible with others for the building of theatre 'gests' involving a
combination of variable performance elements. This is a significantly different
attitude from that which aims for a composed stage picture, with its assumption
that the designer is responsible for the 'setting' which stands on the stage and
which provides a sympathetic and appropriate environment in and on which
performance can occur.58

Neher’s design for The Threepenny Opera [illustration 5] clearly shows the
inclusion of a feature of Stage Design which has not appeared in the course of the
present survey, although not, of course, then used for the first time. I refer to the
enlarged pieces of text which appear as part of the design, and which provide
comment upon the action.
This is a further emphatic move away from the notion of the stage setting as simply a
credible location for imaginary dramatic action. It is not a depiction of ‘place’ at all,
except insofar as the physical reality of the billboards defines the ‘real’ space. Quite
literally, the setting is here making a statement, and is ‘uncoupled’ (I use the word
deliberately, for reasons which will become apparent) from the dramatic narrative,
though very much part of the performance event.
This is an early aplication in theatre of the principle of ‘collage’, functioning in much
the same way as in easel art.

20
Of collage in painting Sayre remarks:
…as William Seitz put it in the catalogue to his ground-breaking and visionary
exhibition of 1961 The Art of Assemblage, the introduction of collage materials
into the canvas ”violated the separateness of the work of art, and threatened to
obliterate the aesthetic distance between it and the spectator…It must be
conceded that, by the introduction of a bit of oil cloth and a length of rope [in
Picasso’s Still Life with Chair Caning], the sacrosanctness of the oil medium
suffered a blow that was as deadly as it was deft59

The establishment of ‘propriety’ , increasingly a guiding principle of stage design

from the mid- seventeenth century, tended inevitably toward a feeling of security;
audiences knew what to expect, and received it with confidence. The process of
recognition is essentially affirmative. The deliberate introduction of the apparently in-
appropriate, in the form of written text, discordant object, or enlarged image, like
Picasso’s ‘bit of oil-cloth’, forced a new level of attention. The ‘passivity’ attributed
to audiences by Appia (supra) is now disturbed by perplexity, or even indignation.

For his setting for the 1967 musical Hair the Chinese-American designer Ming Cho
Lee constructed, not any structure resembling any building or place in America, but a
scaffolding structure upon which was hung a riotous assembly of images of American
life, jointly and severally delivering a statement in counterpoint to the dramatic and
musical narrative. 60
The German designer Wilfried Minks placed a huge pastiche of Roy Lichtenstein’s
Rat a Tat Tat behind the action of Schiller’s Die Rauber ( Bremen, 1966) and hung
images of fighter planes over the stage for the Volksbuhne production in 1967 of
Hochhuth’s Soldaten . In these instances, two taken from the dozens which are
available from the sixties onwards, the setting is both context and counterpoint to the
stage action. Its physical reality is the actual locale of the drama, while its complex
significations weave in and around the words of the author and the actions of the
performers, making, in the mind of each member of the audience, individual
structures of meaning.
This process has been for more than fifty years a key principle underpinning the work
of the Czech designer Josef Svoboda.
Smetana’s The Bartered Bride, presented by the Grand Opera of the Fifth of May in
Prague, 1946…
…created a scandal. My scenography employed a blue cyclorama in front of
which shone a sun made of thin wood strips resembling those at the bottom of a
potato basket…..large blossoms of suspended sunflowers created an instantly
intimate setting for Marie’s and Jenik’s ‘faithful love’61.

His design for Zimmerman’s The Soldiers, in Munich 1969, displayed giant texts,
photographs of sweethearts and prostitutes, surrounding and dwarfing the human
actors. This was the first of two occasions upon which he worked on this piece. Of the
second production he writes:
The Soldiers, both in subject matter and music, is a classically dissonant work
about a girl who dreams of a beautiful life but ends as a prostitute serving army
barracks…..I worked with purely theatrical means. Nine simultaneous scenes in
three three-level constructions made use of the huge elevator lifts in the
Hamburg State Opera. The vertical movement of these constructions, which had
no walls, resulted in confrontations and compositions which helped to create the

21
 atmosphere of normal space and time. Concurrent with the story of an unhappy
girl in bygone days was an ever-relevant indictment of a world that not only has
soldiers but, more important, requires them.62

Clearly here the stage setting is deployed as a highly sophisticated instrument, both
for the creation of mood and the transmission of meaning.

Svoboda’s own book The Secret of Theatrical Space was published in English
translation in 1994, and, for the insights it provides into a great designer’s working
principles, immediately took its place alongside the writings of Craig and Appia , to
whom, in many respects, Svoboda may be regarded as natural successor.
In his work the collage principle, the juxtaposition, or fusion, of distinct and discrete
elements, is exploited to the full:
I proceeded to uncouple skeletal construction from pictorial image. I made of
them two antithetical elements so contrasting that one denied (in fact, excluded)
the other. And if they did create a whole, then it was a distinctly artificial whole.
I made no attempt at a synthesis or a homogeneous form. My directorial
collaborators of the Theatre of the 5th May did exactly the same. They shattered
the illusionistic pseudo-coherence of theatre, de-articulated its individual
genres, with which we could then freely build, handling them contrapuntally, or
merging realities that at first glance seemed incompatible- the past with the
present, historical styles with elements of modern civilisation...It enabled us to
work with the elementary components of theatre and to parody theatre with
theatre63

In direct challenge to Wagner’s concept of gesamtkunstwerk, and Craig’s unified ‘art

of the theatre’, Svoboda asserts:

The basic difference between the synthetic theatre of the 30s and our efforts at
the end of the 50s and 60s was in fact right here: E.F. Burian for example
wanted to achieve synthesis by erasing the boundaries between individual arts,
to create a new homogeneous form from analytically dispersed elements. We,
on the other hand, insisted on a purity of discrete elements, with their
impressionistic union to be completed in the eye and mind of the spectators64

More than any designer since Craig and Appia, Svoboda has engaged in a ceaseless
enquiry into the part design plays in the performance event, as well as a more specific
programme of experiment with available technologies. The following two extracts
from his book make clear the importance he ascribes to both:

After the war we all felt a driving need to continue where the pre-war avant
garde prematurely left off. We wanted to develop their discovery of dramatic
space...but we were already searching for our own new alphabet, namely the
laws relating to the movement and transformation of scenography during the
flow of dramatic action65

The union of art and science is essential and vitally necessary for our time. It
provides art with a rational basis and helps us to carry our investigations further.
If I need a cylinder of light on stage with a dispersion of less than one degree at
its base, I need to gather an entire scientific and technical team to construct such

22
 a cylinder. Only with such a team were we able to put together a hollow
cylinder of light for TRISTAN UND ISOLDE in Cologne in 196966

That the example given here is of a production of Tristan und Isolde strikes me as
particularly appropriate.

In the Laterna Magika, created in 1958 to provide an exhibit for Czechoslovakia at

the World’s Fair, Svoboda provided himself with a laboratory in which to conduct
experiments in the juxtaposition of expressive forms:

We decided to put together a very special theatrical presentation.. We would

articulate the relations between actions on a screen and on the stage as neither
mechanical nor illusionary, neither illustrational film projections (a la Piscator)
nor a naturalistic illusion of reality. Film would remain film and the stage the
stage; we would simply exploit the manner in which we joined the actions on
stage with those on the screen. 67

Svoboda has dreamed of an “atelier theatre…which, as I see it, I'll no longer succeed
in building, [which] would be an architectonically neutral space and would make
possible a different relationship between audience and stage for every production”.68
On the other hand, he recognises:
Europe won't be tearing down its historic theatres, nor will it build new
theatres in large numbers, and so we have to keep seeking new variations for
the functions of old theatre space.69

Nevertheless, it has been a central concern of stage designers and, often enough –or
almost enough- architects, to work in, or create, spaces – ”ateliers”- in which the
physical relationship of audience to performance space may be altered . This has
become possible on a grand scale in the Schaubuhne in Berlin, in which almost any
conceivable configuration or resizing of the space may be achieved electronically, and
it is central to the thinking behind the flexible studio theatres which appeared
throughout the world from the mid nineteen- sixties.
In them it is possible to continue the address to those questions of politics and
aesthetics made necessary by Appia’s recognition of the theatre as an interactive act of
creation. On the whole, however, at least as most of them were conceived, they offer
limited possibilities for (only) conventional forms of staging. More recently the
restrictiveness, and prescriptiveness, of even these adaptable spaces, have been more
keenly felt.
Many have rejected conventional theatre spaces altogether – Peter Brook and Ariane
Mnouchkine are the best known of those who have occupied, either temporarily or
permanently, old, unused, sometimes derelict or delapidated former factories and the
like. On occasion – notably, for instance, in the case of Pieter Stein’s production of As
You Like It, audiences are required to move around, change seats, shift position, in
order to focus on particular passages of action. 70
Writing of the period from 1970-75 Giorgio Strehler was able to claim:
Our Recent history allows us great possibilities of theatrical expression, as
opposed to the prejudices which once obliged us to hold to a single style. This
explosion, this infinite multiplication of possibilities - which, at first glance,
may seem a diffusion of effort but, on the contrary, allows us to gain the open
spaces - is perhaps the most extraordinary phenomenon of our time.71.

23
 This expansion of possibilities in staging convention has not taken place without
the involvement of playwrights, many of whom now deliberately challenge notions
of ‘normal’ time and space. Indeed, it is now difficult to confer the status of ‘auteur’
upon any member or members of the production team. In the modern theatrical
experience ‘auteur-ship’ is a collaborative and interactive function, and includes,
crucially, the audience as active in creating their own experiences. For Simonson,
“The reality of a theatrical performance is itself an illusion….”72 This remained, and
still remains, the case for as long as the ‘reality’ of the play is conceived as
something other than the performance event itself. To quote Simonson in full:
The playwright's imagination is never confined to the frame of any stage. He
sees with his mind's eye. He will, for the sake of having his play performed,
accept any compromise or any degree of illusion, however inadequate, that a
particular type of playhouse can give him. But when he writes 'sky," it is the
actual heaven he sees and not a back-drop or a plaster cyclorama. The stars
glitter; he does not waste a minute wondering whether they are to be miniature
electric bulbs, silver spangles, or to be projected by a lantern slide, whether, in
fact, they can be reproduced at all. When he writes "forest" he treads an actual
wood where love-letters can be nailed to the bark of trees and he can sit on
stumps, gather flowers and leaves, hear birds sing, or lose his way. He is never
impeded or inspired by the thought of how any of this can be achieved with
paint, canvas, or papier mache' screens, or cloth draped in folds…A play occurs
first of all when it is written. It is enacted in the mind of the playwright before
it is acted in front of an audience. Before it is performed in the theatre it has
already taken place.73

In this theatrical model, the staging of a performance is indeed the ‘tail of the
poet’s kite’; perhaps, without the tail, the kite might even fly a little, though not
well. Simonson’s playwright is blithely unconscious of, or indifferent to, the
practical complexities of realising his/her (for Simonson, of course, it is ‘his’)
imaginings, or, more importantly, innocent of the potential of performance.
In his analysis of the essence of the theatrical experience, Simonson reveals the
misconception that informs his hierarchical construct of theatrical processes:

For audience, playwright and actors are engaged in a tacit conspiracy every
time a play begins, united in saying, ‘Let’s pretend; let’s make believe’. Once
that resolve is taken and the interest of an audience is sufficiently aroused, the
audience does believe in the reality of what it sees and hears. Everything on the
stage, by the magic that a successful drama communicates, becomes what it
pretends to be.74
(my italics)

This is partly right, but not in the way in which it is meant. The modern audience
does indeed believe in the ‘reality of what it sees and hears’ – because that is what it
sees and hears. The notion that any element of a stage presentation ‘becomes’
something that it ‘pretends to be’ is, at best, patronising to an audience conceived as
passive and manipulated spectators and auditors. In almost the final paragraph of
The Stage is Set Simonson paraphrases St. John’s Gospel: “In the modern theatre, as
in every other, the beginning is in the word”75. While that might have remained true
for the ‘modern theatre’ of his time, successive challenges to the primacy of the

24
 word among theatrical languages have ensured that it is so no longer. When Eugenio
Barba’s Odin Teatret scaled a state building in Peru to hand the Minister of Culture a
rose, there were no spoken words, no dialogue, but there was music, action, colour,
space, and meaning.76
The truth is that no part of a kite is more or less essential to its flight than any other.
Many contemporary playwrights conceive of their art in this light, seeing
themselves, not as the first of a succession of authors (interpreters) of a text 77, but as
participants – leaders, perhaps – in the creation of the performance experience.

The great achievement of the theatre up to the 20thc was to achieve synthesis, so that
it became conceivable for Gordon Craig to write of the art of the theatre.
The dramatic discovery of the last century has been to recognise the diversity of
experience within the one performance event, and between performances.There is no
longer ‘an’ art of the theatre.
So, to conclude, we find that after all Aristotle is right, if we apply that meaning of the
word ‘spectacle’, which implies a non-participating ‘spectator’. The modern theatre
cannot afford, however, so to conceive of its audience, since the one distinctive
feature of ‘live’ theatre - the only one which cannot better be achieved by other
media, is the very presence of the audience. To continue in any sense to pretend that
the spectator is ‘not there’ is a denial of the one element which, as we cross the
millenium divide , gives the live theatre a reason to survive.
To return to my specific theme, the function – or functions - of design, of costume,
setting, sound and light have come to be acknowledged as central , rather than
peripheral, to the art of stage presentation. They are recognised as a new language ,
or, rather, they are newly recognised as a very old language, which has, like all
languages, its own poetics..
I can do no better than to give the last word to Josef Svoboda:
"The designer's participation in production has had the most varied
designations. The Germans, and we Czechs, following them, have referred to
stage "outfitting"...in English-speaking countries "stage design" is the usual
term; in France,"decoration". These terms reduce a designer's collaboration to
"framing" the dramatic work, rather than sharing in its complete creation.....To
render a more precise, more complete, and more meaningful designation of our
artistic role, I prefer the term "scenography".78

25
1
Rozik, Eli The Language of the Theatre Glasgow Theatre Studies Publications,
University of Glasgow, 1992 p2
2
ibid. p.45
3
ibid pp 75/6
4
Fischer-Lichte, Erika, The Semiotics of Theatre, Indiana University Press, 1992.
Originally published as Semiotik des Theaters,1983, Gunter Narr Verlag, Tubingen.
P104.
5
Cheney,Sheldon Stage Decoration 1928, Chapman & Hall,London. Opening
sentence.
6
Fuerst ,W.R & Hume ,S.J.,XXthc Stage Decoration , 1928, London, Alfred A. Knopf
7
Simonson, Lee The Stage Is Set, 1932, Harcourt, Brace & Co, reprinted 1946, p40
8
Planche, J.R.R. Reflections and Recollections, vol.2, 1872, p 135
9
Grotowski’s attention to the detail of his scenography is painstaking. He
famously insisted upon:
“elimination of plastic elements which have a life of their own (i.e. represent
something independent of the actor's activities) [which] led to the creation by the
actor of the most elementary and obvious objects. By his controlled use of gesture
the actor transforms the floor into a sea, a table into a confessional, a piece of iron
into an animate partner, etc." Grotowski,Jerzy, Towards a Poor Theatre.
Richard Schechner comments, additionally, "Surely the need for scene design in our
theatres is an attempt to overcome the limitations of ready-made space as well as an
outlet for mimetic impulses. A strong current of the new theatre is to allow the event
to flow freely through space and to design whole spaces entirely for specific
performances. Grotowski is a master of this, using very simple elements and
combining these with meaningful deployment of the audience and precise
movement of the performers so that the spatial dynamics of the production
metaphorize the drama". Schechner,R. Actuals:Primitive Ritual and Performance
Theory. In THEATRE QUARTERLY v1 no.2, 1971.
10
Simonson, Lee, op cit p37
11
Booth, M. Victorian Spectacular Theatre RKP 1981 p30-31. In this work Booth
gives the best available account of the close interrelationship of pictorial art to the
stage throughout the Victorian period.
12
Baugh, C., Garrick and Loutherbourg, Theatre in Focus series, Chadwick-
Healey,1990, also Philippe James de Loutherbourg and the Early Pictorial
Theatre: some aspects of its cultural context in Themes in Drama no9, The
Theatrical Space, C.U.P 1987, pp99-128
13
Rosenfeld, Sybil A Short History of Scene Design in Great Britain, Blackwell 1973, Georgian Scene
Painters and Scene Painting, C.U.P., 1981
14
Fitzgerald, Percy Principles of Comedy and Dramatic Effect , Tinsley,1870, p12,
quoted in Booth, op. cit. P15
15
Rosenfeld, S., 1973, p 92.
16
Brecht, S., Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theatre in TDR vol 14 no3 (T47)
1970 p.46
17
Fischer-Lichte,E.,op cit p.100
18
Fried, M. Absorption and Theatricality:Painting and Beholder in the Age of
Diderot. U. California Press 1980 Introduction, p5. See also notes 32, 33
19
Odell, GCD Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving, vol 2 Dover 1966, reprinted
from Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920 p 329-330
20
Mayer, D. Playing Out the Empire: Ben Hur and Other Toga Plays and Films, O.U.P. 1994 and
British Theatre in the 1890s, C.U.P. 1991
21
Booth, op. cit, p 101
22
ibid p 121
23
Irving , writing in The Times quoted by Odell, op.cit. p440
24
Fischer-Lichte, Erika, op cit p106
25
Mainly, and most eloquently, in Le Naturalism au Theatre, 1881
26
Elam, Keir The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama , Routledge, London and New
York, 1980.p22.
27
Fitzgerald, Percy The World Behind the Scenes,1882?, Chapter 1, passim.
28
Given in a paper, as far as I know as yet unpublished, to the conference Theatrical
Space in Postmodern Times, in Prague, June 1999, The Provincetown Players’
Contribution to American Scenography.
29
Odell, G.C.D., op. cit., vol 2, p315
30
Account from Henry Morley, The Examiner, Oct 15, 1853, quoted here from Odell,
op.cit., p323
31
Fuerst and Hume Twentieth Century Stage Decoration, 1928 page
32
Beacham, Richard, Adolphe Appia, Artist and Visionary of the Modern Theatre,
1994, Harwood Academic Publishers, p11
33
Appia, Adolphe Theatrical Experiences and Personal Investigations, in Beacham,
Richard, op cit p43.
34
Simonson, op cit pp309-344. The title of this section ‘Day-Dreams:the Case of
Gordon Craig’ is indicative.
35
Bablet, Denis, The Theatre of Edward Gordon Craig, 1962, translation Daphne
Woodward, Heinemann Educational Books, 1966, p 78
36
see note 34
37
Appia, Adolphe , quoted in Simonson, Lee, The Art of Scenic Design, Harper &
Bros. New York 1950,p.20. Trans. Simonson.
38
Fuerst & Hume op cit ref
39
Simonson, Lee, (1932) p353
40
Appia, from Simonson (1950) pp22-3
41
Fried M., op cit, passim, as well as Art and Object hood, in Minimal Art: A Critical
Anthology, ed. Battcock, G., Dutton, N.Y., 1968
42
Sayre, H.M. The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde since 1970,
U. Chicago Press 1989, Introduction, p 1. The references in this article to Michael
Fried were prompted by Sayre’s critique in this introduction.
43
Beacham, R. (1994)p146-147
44
Schechner, R. op cit
45
Beacham, Richard, op cit (1994)p266
46
Appia ,Actor ,Space, Light ,Painting quoted Beacham, op cit p 94
47
ibid
48
Beacham, Richard, op cit pxiii
49
Friedrich Kiesler, Debacle of the Modern Theatre, in The Little Review, Winter
1926, pp 65 & 70
50
Prampolini The Magnetic Theatre and the Futuristic Scenic Atmosphere, in The
Little Review, Winter 1926, p 105
51
Fried, M. Art and Objecthood op cit pp139-143
52
Lodder, Cristina Russian Constructivism Yale U.P. Newhaven & London 1983,
 p170 , chapter entitled Theatre as the Assembled Micro-Environment.
53
Simonson, (1932) p93
54
Sayre, H.M. op cit page ref
55
Baugh, C. Brecht and Stage Design; the Buhnenbildner and the Buhnenbauer in
Thomson & Sacks (eds) The Cambridge Companion to Brecht , C.Up. 1994 ,
pp236-7
56
Brecht, Gesamwerke vol xv pp442-3 trans Baugh and Juliette Prodham, in Baugh,
op. cit.
57
Baugh, ibid, p 237
58
ibid p 239
59
Sayre, H.M. op cit p8
60
Ming Cho Lee quote from Aronson and ref.
61
Svoboda, Josef The Secret of Theatrical Space,1993, trans J.F. Burian, 1994,
Applause , ny ,p.42
62
ibid, p 80
63
ibid, p 16
64
ibid, p 21
65
ibid p 15
66
ibid p17
67
ibid p110
68
ibid p 20
69
ibid p19
70
Paterson, Michael, Peter Stein, in the series Directors in Perspective, C.U.P. 1981
pp 134-149.
71
Strehler, Giorgio quoted in Stage Design Throughout the World 1970-75. ed.
Hainaux, Rene, English edition 1976, Harrap. P 7.
72
Simonson,1932,p65
73
ibid. p38
74
ibid, p48
75
ibid p464
76
Documented in the film On the Two Banks of the River
77
For the notion of ‘successive authorship’ I am indebted to Amelia Morrey,
currently researching for PhD at the University of Hull, and also a playwright
whose work engages with many of the questions raised in this paper.
78
Svoboda, op cit p 14.