Scenery

Scenery, term covering everything used on stage to represent the place in which an action is performed, including hangings, cut-outs, painted flats, box-sets, built stuff, etc., but not usually movable furniture and props.

Scenery is a comparatively recent innovation in the history of the theatre. Greek plays were acted against a stage wall, which by Roman times had become a grandiose architectural façade, the scenae frons, and the use of stage machinery is indicated by mentions of the ekkyklema and the mechane, but except for the periaktoi of Hellenistic and Roman times the classical stage had no scenery as we know it. In the early medieval period the interior of a church provided the setting for liturgical drama. As the drama moved out of doors the multiple setting began to evolve, with ‘mansions’ representing different localities placed around an open platea, or acting area, the outside wall of the church forming a backdrop; this style was to have a long-lasting influence on the theatres of France. In England, by contrast, mystery plays were presented on mobile wagons, scene by scene, and the public playhouses of the 16th–17th centuries owed much to their portable precursors. Theatres such as Shakespeare's Globe were probably gaily decorated, but apart from movable properties on the platform stage (see FORESTAGE) and in the ‘discovery space’ (see INNER STAGE) scenery in the modern sense was not used. It is first found in the courts of Renaissance Italy where entertainments were presented with all possible splendour. Perspective painting, developed in the mid-15th century, was used to make enclosed spaces seem larger; these principles were applied to theatrical illusion by Baldassare Peruzzi (1481–1537), who was also influenced by the newly discovered architectural treatise by Vitruvius. Peruzzi's pupil Serlio published in 1545 descriptions of perspective stage settings for tragic, comic, and satyric plays. In the second half of the century Bernardo Buontalenti (1536–1608) was using a painted backcloth with telari, three-sided prisms in imitation of the classical periaktoi, forming side-wings. His innovations and those of his pupils (notably Giulio, 1590–1636, and Alfonso, ?–1656, Parigi, father and son) spread all over Europe and were introduced into England by Inigo Jones for the elaborate Court masques of 1600–40.

The scenic system of the masque—the origin of modern scenery—used, in its final form, a decorative proscenium arch behind which sets of wings, called side scenes or side shutters, framed the back scene on either side. This was the flat scene, from which the modern term ‘flat’ is derived. The back scene consisted of pairs of painted shutters, from two to four in number, centrally divided and sliding in grooves placed about half-way upstage. The wings, too, could be in groups sliding in grooves, so that they could be changed according to the changes of the back scenes.

These Court performances of masques had no influence on the English public theatres, which still used the bare apron stage derived from the medieval tradition. Development along Continental lines was prevented by the outbreak of the Civil War and the proscription of playhouses until the monarchy was restored in 1660. In 17th-century Italy the widespread passion for opera gave stimulus to the work of many scene designers, including the great sculptor Bernini, Filippo Juvarra, and above all the Bibienas, whose diagonal perspective, and the growing popularity of landscape painting, gradually changed the whole character of theatre decoration. In Paris, where Mahelot had begun to oust the old-fashioned multiple setting from the Hôtel de Bourgogne, Torelli created a rage for machine plays with his inventions, including the carriage-and-frame method of rapid scene-changing. French taste was moving towards lightness, and fantasy progressing into neo-classicism, as can be seen in the succession of the Vigaranis, Bérain, andServandony at the Salle des Machines; the Quaglio family was to continue the trend in Germany, as did Pietro Gonzaga (1751–1831) in Russia. The increasing elaboration of the Jesuit drama both echoed and influenced developments all over Europe.

Meanwhile in England the Restoration play-house set the basic scenic style for over a century: an apron stage, with up to three pairs of proscenium doors opening on to it, drew on the medieval tradition, while scenes composed of sets of wings and backcloths were a direct inheritance from the flat scene of the masque. England was untouched by the aesthetic movements of France and Italy, and scene design changed little until Garrick brought Philip de Loutherbourg to Drury Lane. Gradually the old architectural setting was abandoned in favour of romantic landscapes, with transparencies and elaborate cut-outs helping to create an attractive stage picture which was still in use 100 years later and lasted even longer in pantomime.

The 19th century saw also an enthusiasm for neo-Gothic design and a growing insistence on painstaking architectural detail. This passion for authenticity had begun with the designs of Capon for Kemble's Shakespeare revivals at Drury Lane, 1794–1802, and at Covent Garden in the 1810s, and was continued by Kean in the 1850s at the Princess's and Hawes Craven working for Irving at the Lyceum, reaching its peak of elaboration with Beerbohm Tree's productions of Shakespeare. This was the great era of stage illusion, of traps, gauzes, and transformation scenes, and of trompe-l'œil scene painting, with every detail painted on stretched canvas—doors, windows, draperies, even furniture, as well as outdoor vistas: William Beverley was one of the period's most successful practitioners. For spectacular pieces such as pantomimes, cut-cloths developed to such excess that the stage picture resembled a lacy valentine. As drama began to follow the rise of realism in literature and painting, these theatrical conventions became unacceptable. The box-set, in use since the 1830s, became the normal means of presenting interior scenes; still constructed of flats lashed together, it was now supplied with real furniture and accessories and practicable doors and windows. When André Antoine founded the Théâtre Libre in 1887 he insisted on complete verisimilitude for his productions of naturalistic contemporary plays (even real food was used, and real fountains played, on stage); but he used scenery and properties to reinforce the mood of a play in a totally new manner.

The French Symbolists attacked the methods of the Théâtre Libre for ignoring imagination and fantasy in the search for the exact. The French poet Paul Fort (1872–1960) founded in 1891 the Théâtre Mixte and in his manifesto enunciated many of the principles later adopted by the modernist school. Scenery was to be simplified, evocative rather than descriptive; there was to be frank stylization, complete harmony between scenery and costume, and the absolute abandonment of the perspective backcloth. Norman Wilkinson and Charles Ricketts, working for Granville-Barker, were to be the main followers in England of the Symbolist approach.

The works of some new dramatists, especially Maeterlinck, were sufficiently imaginative to give scope to the new method. In 1893, when the Théâtre d'Art had become the Théâtre de l'Œuvre, Lugné-Poë presented Pelléas et Mélisande at the Bouffes-Parisiens; Stanislavsky saw it and afterwards admitted how much he owed to the experimental work being carried out in Paris. The Moscow Art Theatre, founded by Stanislavsky in 1898, adopted Antoine's naturalism and the realistic effects of the Meininger company, which had visited Moscow in 1885 and 1890: this low-key manner was in harmony with Stanislavsky's aim of presenting actual conditions of life through drama.

In 1899 Adolphe Appia published his epoch-making work on the reform of staging, Die Musik und die Inscenierung, which stressed in particular the illogicality of placing three-dimensional actors against flat scenery. His proposals for solid settings of extreme simplicity, lit so as to emphasize instead of flattening the human form, were to have an immense influence on 20th-century stage décor. Electric lighting, applied in the theatre from the 1890s, made Appia's ideas practicable and opened the way to other developments in stage design. One of the most widespread was the cyclorama, which evolved from Mariano Fortuny's Kuppelhorizont or sky-dome (see LIGHTING). This solid, curved rear wall could, with shadowless lighting, represent indefinite open space; it was latter used for projected clouds and various effects of light.

The trend towards greater simplicity continued. Gordon Craig was more of a theorist than a practitioner and the most influential of Appia's successors. He evolved a system of large screens, with a few movable features such as flights of steps, to build up an imaginative stage picture with no concessions to realism: his production of Hamlet at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1912 is still controversial. He also urged a theatre completely created by a single man—author, director, designer, costumier- with actors (Übermarionette) under his dictatorial control. However extreme, this theory was in tune with the increasing importance of the theatre director during the 20th century. Max Reinhardt came near to filling the role proposed by Craig. His designers provided scenery as eclectic as his choice of play: he used semi-permanent settings, composite settings, proscenium, apron, and arena stages; mounted productions in theatres, circuses, exhibition halls, ballrooms; and in his historic production of Hofmannsthal's Jedermann (1911) the streets of Salzburg became his stage and the façade of its cathedral his back-drop. In the years 1910–33 Reinhardt dominated the stage of central Europe with his grand theatrical enterprises; his more intimate productions showed great subtlety and individuality as well as an awareness of current trends in the visual arts. The American director David Belasco, in contrast, opted for a kind of spectacular naturalism for the romantic dramas produced at his own theatre in New York, 1907–31. He was adventurous in his use of lighting, and took advantage of developments in stage machinery including the revolving stage.

In the years immediately following the First World War, the European stage saw the brief flowering of Expressionism, taking the form on the one hand of an extreme simplification of scenery and on the other the distortion of inanimate objects to reflect the moods of a play. Komisarjevsky mounted productions of Shakespeare in Expressionist settings at Stratford-upon-Avon during the 1920s and 1930s. Expressionism appeared on the American stage with Robert Edmond Jones's designs for Macbeth in 1921, lop-sided cardboard arches that emphasized the insecurity of the hero's moods and fortunes. Other American scene designers who came to the fore at this time included Norman Bel Geddes and Lee Simonson.

Britain remained for the most part indifferent to Continental and American developments. Lovat Fraser, the only artist who might have inaugurated a movement of far-reaching significance, died young after producing his admirably simple semi-permanent set for a revival of Gay's The Beggar's Opera in 1920. In general Britain remained faithful to realism and the box-set. In France the best designers still tried to get away from the tyranny of the painted scene. Copeau indeed dispensed with scenery entirely, and the sets of Dullin were based on Craig's idea of movable screens. In Russia the Revolution had swept away the conventional forms of theatre décor, reducing the set to bare scaffolding or the sparse clean lines of metal machinery. Décor became symbolic, simplified to the point of abstraction in the then dominant mode of Constructivism. The movement's chief exponents in Soviet theatre, Vsevolod Meyerhold and Alexander Taïrov, adopted a frank theatricality, rejecting all kinds of realism and taking the action among the spectators, who were in turn drawn into the action. Even the Moscow Art Theatre was affected by the artistic ferment of the 1920s; but official reaction against Formalism in all the arts put an end to such experiments and from the early thirties Socialist Realism became the only acceptable manner, in the theatre as elsewhere, for more than two decades. Throughout Europe, the period of fundamental innovation ended in about 1930, the growing threat of war inhibiting the expansion of new ideas; the British and American theatres now began to catch up with Continental developments, helped by an influx of émigré artists and designers.

The popular revues of C. B. Cochran used designers of the calibre of Rex Whistler and Oliver Messel, whose witty, stylized settings owed much to earlier European experiments. The commercial theatre of the pre-war decade was marked by elegance and decorativeness, taken up in the years immediately after the Second World War in a revival of opulent romanticism. But the preoccupations of post-war playwrights—Osborne, Wesker, Behan in Britain, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams in America—forced designers into a visual austerity that extended into the classical repertory as post-war euphoria declined. Monochrome designs, sometimes with minimal colour accents, came into vogue, perhaps in reaction to the pictorial splendour of musicals, which reached a peak in Cecil Beaton's scenery and costumes for My Fair Lady (1956). The increasing use of theatre-in-the-round and flexible staging placed new difficulties in the way of designers. Scene-painting in particular languished. Materials produced by new industries almost ousted the wood, canvas, and papier mâché of traditional scenery: the vast range of plastics, especially, provided novel textural effects and made possible the building of structures at once massive and lightweight. Modern metal alloys, fibreglass, fibre board, plywood, and newly developed adhesives, all helped to widen the designer's range, although audiences tended to resist their more brutal evocations of contemporary artistic trends. Projected scenery had been used by Piscator as early as 1924 and is claimed to have been first used in England in Strindberg's The Road to Damascus in 1937; the technique benefited from post-war developments in optical technology, and was used with particular success by Josef Svoboda, who took up the European tradition (inherited from the Symbolists and the Constructivists by way of the epic theatre of Brecht and Piscator) to achieve a heightened realism that proved applicable to a wide range of subjects. Although the naturalistic box-set is still used for single-setting plays, the great range of technical choice has tended to be applied to a deliberate anti-illusionism, with stage mechanisms and lighting equipment exposed to view. Within this general consensus, styles of interpretation vary widely. (See also COSTUME; DETAIL SCENERY; FALLING FLAPS; FULL SCENERY.)