''Vladimir Nabokov's Comic Quest for Reality' - Nottingham eTheses

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our own world
,
and with its own laws and rules.
Good theatre can make us forget about all the tricks
it has to use in order to achieve this, about the
costumes, the make-up and the stage-props. In fact,
these can all work together to create a new world
and a new and independent reality, in which we can
believe and in which we can get caught up and involved.
Bad theatre does not have this effect. If theatre
is made so poorly that it is easy to see through all
its tricks and devices and if, also, someone comes
along and points them out to us, the impression of
a reality of the kind described above will not be
evoked at all, or it will be quickly destroyed.
This is the case with the "performance" in
Invitation to a Beheading. All the items of stageproperty
are exposed for what they are; they are
soberly analysed, and their mechanisms and working,
or their refusal to work, laid bare. They are easily
recognized as cheap imitations: wax apples and artificial
aquamarines, and unbreakable glasses. A trueto-life
spider is found to consist of "a round plush
body with twitching legs made of springs, and there
was, attached to the middle of its back, a long
elastic... " (IB, 195). As Cincinnatus is driven to
Thriller Square, clouds move across the sky in a
naturalistic setting. But they move "jerkily" as only
stage clouds do, and it is quite obvious that they
are "the same ones... over and over again" (IB, 202).
This, of course, is a blunder of the prop man, and