Curtain

Curtain, screen separating the stage from the auditorium. It was introduced into European theatres with the advent of enclosed theatre buildings in the 16th and 17th centuries. In the English theatre after 1660 it rose at the conclusion of the prologue, which was spoken on the forestage, and remained out of sight until the play was over. It was at first green and was occasionally, for special effects, dropped during a performance; it was not until the mid-18th century that it began to fall regularly to mark the end of an act and hide the stage during the interval. This function was shortly after transferred to the act-drop. When Irving revived Boucicault's The Corsican Brothers in 1880 a crimson velvet curtain was introduced to hide changes of scene during an act.

The front, or house, curtain, so long a feature of all post-Restoration playhouses, is now often discarded, and no provision is made for it in many modern theatre buildings. It can be worked in a variety of ways, including the straightforward ‘flying’ of the fly curtain, which has largely replaced the formerly popular french valance (known in America as a brail curtain), raised vertically in a series of festoons. A variant of this was the contour curtain. There are also the centrally parting draw or traverse curtain, or traveller, and the bunching to outer top corners of the tab (short for tableau) curtain. The term tabs is now applied to any front curtain, and is sometimes misapplied to the curtain set on the stage itself.

Two other curtains in the proscenium are the advertisement curtain and the safety curtain, or iron. The former appeared in the latter half of the 19th century in smaller theatres and music-halls, bearing in various panels painted notices of local shops and manufacturers. Advertisements thrown on the safety curtain by a slide projector later served the same purpose. The safety curtain itself was first installed at Drury Lane in 1794 as a precaution against fire. It consisted of an iron or fireproof sheet which must by law be lowered once during every performance. This has now been made obsolete by modern water curtains and sprinklers.