Theatre-in-the-Round

Theatre-in-the-Round, form of play presentation in which the audience is seated all round the acting area. One of the earliest forms of theatre, it was probably used for open-air performances, street theatres, and such rustic sports as the Mayday games and the Christmas mumming play, and was revived in the 20th century by those who rebelled against the so-called ‘tyranny’ of the proscenium arch.

Modern theatre-in-the-round first came into prominence in the Soviet Union, where in the 1930s Okhlopkov in his Realistic Theatre produced a number of plays on stages with the audience on all sides. At the same time, in England, Robert Atkins was producing Shakespeare in the Ring in Blackfriars, an interesting experiment which seemed to have no immediate impact. It was in America, where the idea had already been mooted by Robert Edmond Jones in 1920, that the first theatre-in-the-round was erected at the University of Washington in Seattle in 1940. It had an elliptical acting area and auditorium contained within a circular foyer, the space between them on two sides being used for prop rooms and a lighting control booth. In the rapidly expanding world of American university drama, theatre-in-the-round flourished. Outside the universities, the most important exponent of the new method was Margo Jones, working in Dallas. The Circle-in-the-Square (1951) made this type of production familiar to Off-Broadway playgoers, and in 1961 the Arena Stage in Washington, DC, was opened.

In England the New Victoria Theatre, Newcastle-under-Lyme, the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, and the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester are permanent professional theatres-in-the-round. A number of new theatres, both professional and amateur, have been built with Flexible staging, in which theatre-in-the-round is an option. Inherent technical problems include special demands on lighting and set designers, as well as the need for frequent movement by the actors in order to give all sections of the audience a view of each character's face; there are also audibility problems.

A fertile development of theatre-in-the-round is the ‘promenade’ production, of which examples have been seen at the Round House and at the Cottesloe Theatre, in which the players move around the auditorium for the different episodes in the play, with the standing audience clustering about them.