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theatre

Place or building in which dramatic performances for an audience take place; these include drama, dancing, music, mime, opera, ballet, and puppet performances. Theatre history can be traced to Egyptian religious ritualistic drama as long ago as 3200 BC. The first known European theatres were in Greece from about 600 BC.

The earliest theatres were natural amphitheatres, where the audience sat on open hillsides. By the Hellenistic period came the development of the stage, a raised platform on which the action took place. In medieval times, temporary stages of wood and canvas, one for every scene, were set up in churches and market squares for the performance of mimes and miracle plays. With the Renaissance came the creation of scenic illusion, with the actors appearing within a proscenium arch; in the 19th century the introduction of the curtain and interior lighting further heightened this illusion. In the 20th century, alternative types of theatre were developed, including open stage, thrust stage, theatre-in-the-round, and studio theatre.

Famous theatre companies include the Comédie Française in Paris (founded by Louis XIV in 1690 and given a permanent home in 1792), the first national theatre. The Living Theater was founded in New York in 1947 by Julian Beck and Judith Malina. In Britain the National Theatre company was established in 1963; other national theatres exist in Stockholm, Moscow, Athens, Copenhagen, Vienna, Warsaw, and elsewhere.

Traditional Japanese theatre includes Nō and kabuki.

Centres of world theatre

In the USA the centre of commercial theatre is New York City, with numerous theatres on or near Broadway, although Williamsburg, Virginia (1716), and Philadelphia (1766) had the first known American theatres. The ‘little theatres’, off-Broadway, developed to present less commercial productions, often by new dramatists, and of these the first was the Theater Guild (1919); off-off-Broadway then developed as fringe theatre (alternative theatre). In Britain repertory theatres (theatres running a different play every few weeks) proliferated until World War II, for example, the Old Vic; and in Ireland the Abbey Theatre became the first state-subsidized theatre in 1924. Although the repertory movement declined from the 1950s with the spread of cinema and television, a number of regional community theatres developed. Recently established theatres are often associated with a university or are part of a larger cultural centre.

The actor and the audience The basic physical requirements of any organized drama are an area in which the actor(s) can enter, perform in, and exit from without impediment, and an area, normally with some kind of controlled entry, in which the spectators can stand or sit. Everything else – scenery, props, costumes, technical effects, a changing room for the actors and space to store accessories – may be regarded as more or less refinements, however important they may be in practice. In the course of its development drama has witnessed numerous changes in the physical conditions and relationship of these two basic requirements, the stage and the auditorium, not to mention the remarkable variety of styles in scenery, costume, and the other elements of spectacle.

Greece and Rome The religious origins of Greek drama led to the first known theatres being built on sacred sites in close proximity to the temples. At first, plays were performed in theatres consisting of wooden stands or seats on a slope with an open playing area that was clearly visible to the large crowd of spectators.

By the mid-5th century a wooden skene (scene building), probably of two storeys and with three entrance doors, was being temporarily erected as a background to the performance, and its front painted to suggest a particular location. In the skene the actors could dress and wait for their cues, while its roof could support rudimentary machinery, such as that required for the customary descent of the god at the end of the play. Around 425 BC the skene became more elaborate, so that it consisted of a long front wall with projecting wings (paraskenia) at the sides. In front of the skene was the columned proskenion (whence proscenium) where the actors performed, while the chorus occupied the circular orchestra, in the middle of which stood an altar. By 330 BC in Athens (earlier in Syracuse) the orchestra and auditorium were constructed of stone. The audience could enter the auditorium through gateways at ground level on either side of the theatre, and walk round the edge of the orchestra to reach the seats on the surrounding slope. The great stone theatre's semicircular plan provided for an audience of 20,000–30,000 people sitting in tiers on the surrounding slopes; it served as a model for the theatres that were erected in all the main cities of the Graeco-Roman world.

The changes in Greek theatre that took place over several centuries ran parallel with the decreasing importance of the chorus. At first comprised of 50 persons, and acting only in the orchestra, it gradually dwindled to a few performers. The actors, who had gradually become detached from the chorus, thus grew increasingly prominent, so that in the newer theatres of the Hellenistic period the focus of attention ceased to be the orchestra and became the stage on which the actors played. The latter was now raised and supported by a row of columns. The skene was made much larger, and its front, which was now ample, was fitted with large openings (thyromata) into which large painted panels (probably more ‘realistically’ painted than previously) could be set. In general, there was also a movement towards greater architectural, as well as scenic, elaboration.

In addition to the official drama there is some literary and pictorial evidence of private shows put on by the travelling players of burlesque and farces, often in the houses of the wealthy. These performances took place on simple wooden raised stages, the front of the stage perhaps being decorated with a painted panel or drape. Scenic decoration was at a minimum, as were props.

Around the end of the 2nd century BC the stage of the official drama was further enlarged so that it encroached on the orchestra (which now became only slightly more than a semicircle), the scenic background was enlarged and embellished, and the acting platform itself became much deeper. The Hellenistic colonists built stone theatres, and when the first was constructed in Rome in 55 BC (soon followed by two others) important new features were displayed. The auditorium (cavea) was now strictly semicircular, as was the orchestra, which in some theatres was used for extra seating or gladiatorial contests, and the theatres themselves were now normally built on level ground. The stage, which was lower and deeper, was backed by a highly embellished frons scaenae (the front of the scene building). The proskenion (now Latinized as the proscaenium) was decorated with columns and other architectural refinements, and a front curtain was added, which could be lowered into a trench in the orchestra, while other curtains were used to cover parts of the frons scaenae. The building was enclosed with high walls, also often architecturally elaborate. Finally, the bringing together of the architectural elements into a single entity resulted in the top of the frons scaenae being level with the top of the auditorium, so that the entire theatre could be covered with a large awning (velum).

Playhouses of this sort, and of increasing splendour, were built in many Roman towns and cities. Ironically, little of any dramatic merit was ever performed in them and they were largely given over to various kinds of spectacle. Equally ironically, Roman actors had, for the most part, none of the dignified status of the Greek actor. Examples of Roman theatres exist at Orange, France; St Albans, England; and elsewhere.

Medieval theatre With the advent of organized Christianity and the collapse of the Roman Empire the regular theatre disappeared, the only survivors being the performers of mimes and pantomimes, who continued a very early Greek theatrical tradition. Although we know little of their activities, there is no doubt that they continued to perform, presumably on the most rudimentary stages, when opportunity allowed. The tradition that they represent re-emerges, though still obscurely, in the high Middle Ages, in occasional references to entertainers variously described as mimes, scurri, and histriones.

The staging of the liturgical plays of the medieval Church was governed by the physical conditions of the church or cathedral and by the devotional purposes of the music-drama. These purposes could be adequately served by the use of visual symbols that were easily identifiable by the audience. It was unnecessary – and undesirable – to use properties with some claim to visual realism: the clergy was not interested in presenting the Christmas crib or Easter sepulchre as authentic reproductions of the real historical objects, but as visual signals to the enduring spiritual significance of the crib or sepulchre. However, the expansion of the liturgical narrative into anything more complicated than the most simple of actions entailed the presentation of several different, easily identifiable locations. To achieve this it was necessary to provide a multiplicity of visual symbols, often drawn from everyday contemporary life, which were then used to direct attention to the most exalted of spiritual meanings.

The area in which the visual symbol of place was set was known as the locus, and if this locus was a place where someone lived, it could also be known as a domus or ‘mansion’. It might be either a simple chair (sedes), or a chair supplemented by a curtain or gate. When the dramatic narrative was expanded and it became necessary to provide several symbols, the extension was lengthwise, down the nave. By the end of the 12th century the full length of the church could be taken up with the multiple loca and the open and unlocalized acting-area adjacent to them, the platea. The spectators may have been placed in the side aisles, though a better view of the action and an improved acoustic probably resulted from the audience occupying the triforium and clerestory.

The belief – severely questioned in recent years – that the cycle-plays developed directly out of liturgical music-drama has tended to distract attention away from the possible influence of popular performance techniques on the vernacular religious drama. The 12th-century Anglo-Norman plays, Mystère d'Adam and La Seinte Resureccion, as well as the plays of the Arras poet-dramatists, Jean Bodel and Adam de la Halle, certainly incorporate popular elements. The English Interludium de Clerico et Puella and the French Le Garçon et l'Aveugle, both of them simple farces, survive as indications of the fare offered by itinerant secular actors. These were performed on rudimentary booth stages, probably consisting of a stage of planks and a curtain behind which the actors could prepare and await their cues. It is perhaps due to the influence of such a popular acting tradition that even in the earliest vernacular religious plays vigorous and informal conventions are adopted, including the scurrying of ‘devils’ around the acting area and into the audience.

The vernacular religious plays – whether miracle play cycles, moralities (see morality play), or saints' plays – conformed in general to the loca and platea convention of staging already described. It is certain, though, that there were two basic variations on this pattern: the station-to-station form, in which moveable pageant wagons were used for performances at different locations in the town; and the stationary place-and-scaffold structures representing separate locations. The latter was the usual method of staging in medieval France and many of the German-speaking countries, while in England both types were used for cycle and non-cycle plays. If the pageant stages were but one manifestation of a great deal of pageantry for state and civic occasions, as they almost certainly were, evidence of their structure and scenic decoration can be gleaned. They were impressive, being brightly coloured and using sophisticated machinery such as windlasses, and furnished with an array of richly decorated scenic emblems such as hills, fountains, forests, ‘heavens’, and ‘hell-mouths’.

The Renaissance The Italian rediscovery of classical dramatists, especially Plautus and Terence, in the 15th century led to attempts in schools and academies to reconstruct the physical conditions of their original performance. The emphasis was firmly placed on ancient Roman practice, not only because there was much more interest in Roman comedy than in Greek drama but also because interest in classical staging centred on the rediscovered works of the Roman Vitruvius, whose De Architectura was published in Latin in 1486 and in Italian in 1521. The great monument, still surviving, to the antiquarian pursuit of a reconstructed classical theatre is the Teatro Olimpico, which was designed and built by Palladio and Scamozzi in Vicenza in 1585. Although the intention, according to a contemporary observer, was to ‘construct a theatre according to the ancient use of the Greeks and Romans’, the visitor will recognize the remarkable similarity of the Teatro Olimpico to the Roman theatres, with their splendid frons scaenae, rather than to any surviving Greek theatres.

The growing interest in the 16th century in perspective scenery, however, displaced to a large extent the original scholarly interest in staging classical plays or their imitations in the original manner. We know that a perspective setting was used in Ferrara in 1508, though this was probably a painted backcloth; but by 1531 Peruzzi was designing scenes that showed a perspective street in a three-dimensional set. The main debt to Vitruvius was now restricted to his classification of the scene into three categories – comic, tragic, and satyr-drama – and his use of periaktoi – triangular revolving prisms on each side of the stage, each side being painted to indicate a separate locality. In 1545 Sebastiano Serlio published an influential work that helped disseminate further the idea of perspective scenery, and in 1589 Bernardo Buontalenti staged a play in which Serlian frame-and-canvas angled houses were included in a perspective which comprised views of three streets. The scenery was changed for each of the six intermezzi (spectacular items between the acts proper) in this play, though it is not clear if this was done by means of periaktoi or through early use of sliding flat wings. To stage these spectacular intermezzi a sophisticated range of machinery was developed. The truly revolutionary scenic discovery of the early 17th century, however – which was to dominate European theatre for the next three centuries – was that of painted side wings, which could not only offer interesting perspective scenes but could be easily changed to reveal a number of different scenes in the course of a play or opera.

While momentous developments were occurring in Italy in the late 15th and 16th centuries, popular medieval traditions of staging flourished throughout the rest of Europe. The religious plays continued to be staged regularly in England until the final quarter of the 16th century, and the professional itinerant actors performed their interludes on stages erected against the hall-screens of Tudor halls and on curtained booth stages wherever they could find an audience.

The commedia dell'arte, which emerged in Italy in the 16th century, quickly won widespread popularity in European courts and villages. It is largely in this native medieval tradition that English and Spanish theatres and staging conventions of the late 16th and early 17th centuries are to be understood, and the same is true for those of the German-speaking countries of the period, and even, to some degree, for those of France.

In the course of the 17th century the conception of spectacle, which originated and was developed in Italy, spread throughout Europe as a result of the efforts of such designers as Bernini, Torelli, and Inigo Jones. Perspective scenery, the use of elaborate stage machinery to achieve spectacular effects, and the proscenium-arched stage were absorbed by all the European countries, though in the process the Italianate style of staging developed unique national features as it encountered native traditions in specific historical circumstances. In France, the later drawings of Mahelot show an increasingly unified perspective effect. In England, it was Inigo Jones, who had trained as a designer in Italy, who introduced and experimented with Italian innovations in his designs for masques and plays presented at court. Jones developed a system of flats moving in grooves in and above the stage, the backcloth being formed of two shutters that could open to reveal another elaborate scene behind. In Italy, the need for quick scene changes in opera led to the development of elaborate machinery to remove the flat wings with their profiled edges (which ‘receded’ through the simple expedient of the decreasing size of the flats upstage), and replace them with other wings comprising another perspective vista. The most common methods of doing so were the ‘chariot-and-pole’ and the ‘drum-and-shaft’ techniques. In the former, the wings were hung on a pole so that they just cleared the floor, and the poles were fixed through slits in the stage to wheeled carriages running on rails in the cellar; the system was duplicated at each wing position and all were connected to a central shaft in such a way that one wing could move off-stage as another moved on. A similar effect was achieved by attaching ropes from all the flats to be moved to a revolving drum under the stage, which then worked on the lever principle.

Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre in England The most important piece of pictorial evidence relating to English stage conditions of the Elizabethan period is the copy by Van Buchell of de Witt's drawing of the interior of the Swan Playhouse. This shows a large platform stage supported by what appear to be wooden trestles, and a back wall with two large doors, above which is a balcony occupied by several people (who might be either spectators or actors). Above the stage is a sloping roof supported by two large and ornate pillars, which de Witt recorded as being wooden and painted to give the appearance of marble. Above the sloping roof is the ‘hut’, with its flag to signal that a performance would be given that day and with a trumpeter. The stage and dressing room area appear to constitute an architectural entity, more or less distinct from the frame of the building. Spectators could be accommodated in the three tiers overlooking the arena, access to which was by stairways marked in the drawing by the word ingressus, or around the three sides of the stage. The area labelled orchestra (with its corresponding area on the other side of the stage) accommodated those gentlemen who were prepared to pay considerably more than the rest to sit near the stage. Presumably, the balcony above the stage would be used solely by actors if the play required scenes to be played ‘above’, or by spectators if this was not the case. The entrance to the playhouse was through a main door directly beneath where de Witt was sitting when he drew the sketch.

Since there is no good reason to doubt the essential reliability of the de Witt sketch we must assume that it accurately depicts the physical conditions of one Elizabethan playhouse. At the same time, we may expect considerable variations in detail among playhouses of this period, even while a basic architectural and stage form predominates. Evidence for both beliefs is forthcoming from a number of documentary sources, including the surviving contracts for the building of the Fortune Theatre (1600) and the Hope Theatre (1613), panoramic maps which include illustrations of playhouses, evidence from plays and contemporary literature, and such relevant foreign evidence as the woodcuts of the Nürnberg Fechthaus (1627). These sources indicate that the acting platform was in general very large, for the Fortune contract specifies a stage 43 ft (13.1 m) wide and between 30 ft (9.1 m) and 40 ft (12.2 m) deep. The ‘heavens’ supported on pillars were apparently normal in playhouses built between 1590 and 1610, but were probably not a permanent feature of the earliest theatres. The ‘heavens’ was so named because the ceiling was painted with a Zodiac on a blue background, thus serving as a symbol of the celestial world. A trapdoor in this ceiling allowed the descents of characters or scenic units like thrones from the loft. There is no evidence of the so-called ‘inner-stage’, allegedly set into the back wall; it is likely that ‘discovery’ or other ‘interior’ scenes were presented in a curtained area immediately behind one of the stage doors, or in a moveable structure set against the back wall. Finally, playhouses of the Elizabethan or Jacobean periods could be circular, octagonal, or square in shape, and – if de Witt's evidence is correct – they could accommodate a large number of spectators, for he claims that the Swan could hold 3,000 people.

The notion that the Elizabethan and Jacobean stages had little or no scenery has been strongly questioned. It must be remembered that the company with which Shakespeare was associated (the King's Men) regularly performed in places other than the Globe Theatre; in the indoor Blackfriars, from 1608; in the banqueting halls of the royal palaces; and in the provinces, when plague was rife in London. It seems certain that there was a basic similarity between the staging conventions normally employed at the Globe and those regularly employed at these other locations. If this is so, it is incredible that the actors performed with little or no scenery at the Globe, for there is ample evidence of the use of a wide variety of scenic units such as castles, battlements, palaces, cities, tombs, and caves in Tudor interludes and entertainments at court. That such units were also employed on the stages of the public playhouses is confirmed by the list of properties (dated 1598) that survives in the papers of Philip Henslowe, a leading theatrical entrepreneur of the time. It would, in any case, be remarkable if the kind of staging common during the late Middle Ages and that employed during the Restoration – both of which offered plenty of scenic effects – was interrupted by an almost complete absence of scenery during the Elizabethan and Jacobean period. The idea that Shakespeare's theatre was characterized physically by almost bare stages in small, soberly timbered playhouses must be put aside, and replaced by the image of sumptuously decorated and coloured architecture, and stages occupied by the same utilitarian but impressive scenic emblems that were used in court entertainments and religious and civic pageantry.

17th and 18th centuries in Europe Spanish playhouses of this period had much in common with the London playhouses. The first permanent Spanish playhouse was built only three years after the first London one, and although there were differences in physical conditions, the Spanish corrales resembled their counterparts in London in being open-air, with stages equipped with a balcony, trapdoors, and doors fitted into the back wall, and spectators congregating in the yard or sitting in the surrounding three tiers. Scenic units similar to those in use in England were also employed. In France, there had been a continuous tradition of indoor performance from the late 14th century, and in 1548 the Confrérie de la Passion had converted a hall in the Hôtel de Bourgogne into a theatre for the performance of secular plays. The evidence to be gleaned from the surviving detailed sketches and notes (most of them by the designer Mahelot) for productions between 1633 and 1678 indicates that French staging continued to owe much to the simultaneous staging of the medieval period. The various scenic units needed to identify locations in a play were all on stage throughout, just as they were in performances of the mystères. In Mahelot's sketches, however, Italian influence is apparent in the way the units are placed in receding rows, to obtain a perspective effect, and in the Serlian designs of the wood and canvas houses. For farce, which was a popular attraction at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, the style of staging was influenced by the traditional commedia dell'arte scene, with its two side houses.

Italianate stage practice spread from the court theatres of the 17th and 18th centuries to the public theatres. The tragedies of Corneille and Racine were played in a neutral palace setting derived from Italian precedent and the formal concern with the Unity of Place (see unities). The reopening of the English theatres at the Restoration signalled the triumph of the perspective and proscenium stage, though at first a traditional apron stage protruded in front of the proscenium arch, and two pairs of doors were fitted to allow the actors easy access to the main acting area. Gradually, however, the doors were replaced by boxes and the apron further and further curtailed, though it was not until 1843 that the apron stage entirely disappeared from British theatres. In general, however, late-17th-century theatres were conservative in that scenery was conceived of as a background accompanying the development of the action rather than as scenic environment in which action was understood to be taking place.

18th and 19th centuries The history of theatre architecture and scenery in these centuries consists to a large extent in the elaboration of developments already apparent in the late 17th century. In Europe generally, the 18th century was the age of the opera houses, with their sumptuously decorated horseshoe auditoria round the proscenium-arched stage, and their galleries divided into boxes providing excellent acoustics but not always a good view. Towards the end of the century, especially in England, there developed a movement towards greater historical realism in costume, and later in scenery. William Capon made a number of designs for painted backcloths in the final decade of the century, which incorporated careful antiquarian research into the portrayal of ancient buildings and street scenes. In the last quarter of the century Phillipe Jacques de Loutherbourg made romantic landscape designs for plays and nondramatic shows which were based on careful observations of real landscape, and experimented with lighting techniques designed to simulate natural light and shade.

The movement towards greater historical accuracy continued apace throughout Europe in the 19th century. This tendency was not, of course, the result solely of dedicated antiquarianism, for it also allowed theatres to attract large audiences with the prospect of wings and painted backcloths offering impressive pageantry and spectacle. In England, this type of staging was associated especially with the Shakespearean productions of Charles Kean in the 1850s. Spectacle was also the keynote of the popular melodrama of the 19th century, and elaborate machinery was invented to reproduce, with maximum effect, such sensational events as train crashes, horse races, and ships in storm-tossed seas. The box set, an arrangement of painted flats joined together to form three walls, with realistic doors, windows, fireplaces, and so forth contained in them, was introduced by T W Robertson in his domestic melodramas of the 1860s; and mechanical devices such as elevator platforms, sliding stages, and revolving platforms were developed to effect easy transformations of three-dimensional sets. Most significant of all, however, were the advances in stage lighting; by 1830 gas lighting was being used in London, and first limelight and then electric lighting were introduced during the second half of the century. As a result, the darkened auditorium and the illuminated and realistically decorated stage became entirely separated, the front curtain became increasingly vital, and behind the proscenium arch ever more naturalistic settings were sought.

Naturalism Naturalism in scenery, costume, and acting was the logical culmination of the lengthy movement towards a more convincing illusion of actuality in photographic terms which originated with Italian scenic experiments of the 16th and 17th centuries. In Paris, André Antoine founded his Théâtre Libre in 1887 so that serious naturalistic plays could be produced in an appropriate manner. Similar theatres, like J T Grein's Independent Theatre in London and, more importantly, Stanislavsky's Moscow Art Theatre, were also established in the final decade of the 19th century. Curiously, however, naturalism was hardly established as the new scenic orthodoxy in Europe and the USA before the more creative designers and directors were experimenting with new styles and conventions.

20th century The 20th-century theatre was a place of experiment and innovation, as much in staging methods as in artistic and intellectual terms, in which numerous styles existed side by side. Even at the Moscow Art Theatre, which is usually associated with naturalistic productions, highly experimental non-naturalistic methods were in evidence at the turn of the century. Early reaction against photographic naturalism in stage design is linked with the names of two designers whose ideas had much in common, Adolphe Appia and Edward Gordon Craig, who were part of a general movement called ‘Theatricalism’. Appia's most significant contribution was his working-out of a complete theory of electrical stage lighting, which he advocated should be used in conjunction with abstract, nonrepresentational settings. Craig's ideas constitute a complete antithesis to the naturalistic theatre's concern with precise historical detail; like Appia, he rejected illusionism and advocated a theatre of romantic ‘mood’, in which dance and mime would be prominent.

In France, the reaction against elaborate effects and naturalistic detail is evident in the work of Jacques Copeau during and after World War I. Copeau insisted that the art of the theatre is the art of acting, and in some of his productions used only lighting and a few key props to establish the setting. This emphasis on the actor and acting has been evident in France ever since, especially in the theories of Antonin Artaud, who was greatly influenced by Oriental conventions of performance, as well as in the work of such directors as Jean-Louis Barrault and Peter Brook (much of whose work has been done in France).

Experimental work was also done in the Russian theatre at the beginning of the century, especially in the period immediately following the Revolution. Two former students of Stanislavsky were prominent: Evgeny Vakhtangov and Vsevolod Meyerhold. The latter is famous for his theory of biomechanics, aimed at developing acrobatic skill and emotional discipline in actors. During the 1920s Meyerhold dispensed entirely with traditional staging methods, filling his acting area with machinery and elaborate abstract arrangements of scaffolding. In Germany, the expressionist movement developed a form of presentation in which states of mind were evoked by stylization of the décor and acting, and by the elaborate use of lighting effects. Aspects of previous experiment in several styles were incorporated into the epic theatre of Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht, who sought to ‘distance’ the spectators from the stage spectacle so that they could think more critically about what they saw.

In one form or another, the contemporary experimental theatres continue to explore and develop the implications of all the major influences of the 20th century. In recent years, the work of such companies as the American Living Theatre, the Polish Laboratory Theatre (see Jerzy Grotowski), and Peter Brook's International Centre for Theatre Research (as well as his productions for the Royal Shakespeare Company in Britain) have excited much interest and some controversy. In the commercial theatre in Europe and the US staging conventions that were once regarded as experimental are now regularly employed in a suitably adapted form, though traditional naturalistic settings are still much in evidence. And while many existing theatres are of 19th-century design, and cannot be satisfactorily modified to accommodate modern theories of staging, numerous theatres have been built in recent years which dispense with the proscenium arch and combine features associated with medieval and Elizabethan stages together with the facilities offered by modern technology.