Grooves

Grooves, characteristic of British, as opposed to Continental, stage machinery, by means of which wings and flats were slid on and off stage in full view of the audience, the top and bottom of each flat running in a groove between two strips of timber built into the stage structure. The origin of the groove can be found in the Court masque, as seen in the designs of Inigo Jones. Although stage directions in plays from 1660 onwards refer indirectly to the use of grooves, the first direct mention of them dates from 1743, at Covent Garden. They were also used in early theatres in America, where in 1897 they were referred to as ‘old-fashioned’. During the time they remained in use, several innovations were made to enable the scenery to be changed more quickly, the most efficient being the drum-and-shaft system. Even so grooves had many disadvantages. As they always had to run parallel to the front of the stage, because of the difficulty of placing them obliquely on a raked floor, masking was poor, and spectators in side boxes could see deeply into the wings. Because of the rake the wing flats became progressively shorter upstage, so each could be used only in one position and interchangeability was impossible. Sometimes the scenes stuck in the grooves, or moved raggedly. These factors combined to bring about the abolition of the grooves system in favour of the Continental carriage-and-frame, which was first installed at Covent Garden in 1857. The last London theatre to use grooves was the Lyceum, where they were removed in 1880 by Irving. Grooves remained, however, for some years in smaller theatres, and a pivoted variant is found in the 1880s which enabled wing and groove to be twisted to any angle. Eventually even this modification gave way to forks, in which the tops of the wings were held as by an inverted garden-fork. The modern system of supporting flats by braces superseded all these earlier methods.