Traps

Traps, devices by which scenery and actors can be raised to stage level from below. They are now used mainly in pantomime, but were formerly essential for the acrobatic trickwork of the dumb ballet, for ghostly apparitions, and for the sudden metamorphosis of one character into another. Although the modern theatre makes very little use of traps, they can still be found in some older theatres, arranged in a traditional pattern and capable of being used for their original purpose. To accommodate them the joists of the stage floor are cut and specially framed, and the opening is concealed in a variety of ways. Corner traps are used for conveying a single standing figure. Nearer the centre of the stage is the star trap, which projects an actor on stage at great speed, and is used in pantomime for the arrival of the Demon King. Almost in the centre of the stage is the large rectangular grave trap, which measures roughly 6 ft. long and 3 ft. wide. It has a platform below, which can be raised and lowered, and takes its name from its use for the graveyard scene in Hamlet, just as the less commonly found cauldron trap, usually square and placed further upstage, is named from the witches' scene in Macbeth. One of the most ingenious trap mechanisms was that devised for the apparition in Boucicault's The Corsican Brothers (1852), which had to rise slowly out of the earth while gliding across the full width of the stage. This Corsican trap, or ghost glide, consisted of two long sliders, the first of which drew the trap across the stage while the second closed the aperture behind it. An inclined rail track below the stage carried a small boat truck on which stood the actor playing the ghost. Two other traps were the slote, which could be used for people or scenery, and the vamp trap, consisting of two spring-leaves in the backcloth or stage floor so arranged that the actor's body appeared to pass through a solid wall. It is said to have taken its name from Planché's The Vampire; or, The Bride of the Isles (1820), in which it was first used. For the swift substitution of one character for another a pair of traps, similar to the corner traps, was placed side by side, so geared that one rose as the other fell. When the actor on stage took his place on the raised trap, his partner stood ready on the lower trap; at the crucial moment the traps were released, and in a second a different figure stepped from a part of the stage floor so near the original spot as to be indistinguishable from it. (See also FOOTLIGHTS TRAP.)