Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

90 Chapter 5 Designers and Technicians
Most Americans can imagine what a shabby motel room on California’s Mojave Desert might look like, but Bunny
Christie’s scenic and costume design for this 2006 London production, with lighting by Mark Henderson, beautifully
sets up the bleak but sensual atmosphere (notice the red dress and the blue and yellow light pouring through the
closed blinds) for the action of Sam Shepard’s explosive drama of lust and longing, Fool for Love, which is set in such
a locale. Though deceptively “realistic” in apparent detail, the room looks like no actual motel room in the world.
Juliette Lewis is the intensely passionate May, and Martin Henderson is her on-and-off boyfriend Eddie. Lindsay Posner
directed at the Apollo Theatre. © Geraint Lewis
a theatre poster or program. Scenery, however, is a relatively
new design area. Costume, makeup, and masks
are far more ancient. Scenery was not needed at all in
the Egyptian Abydos Passion Play or the Greek dithyramb,
and it probably played little part in early Greek or
Roman drama, save to afford entry, exit, and sometimes
expanded acting space (such as platforms that rolled
onto the stage) or to provide a decorative backdrop
(by painted panels or rotating prisms) later in the
period. In much Asian theatre, scenery remains rare or
even nonexistent; this is the case in most Chinese xiqu
and—apart from the elaborate stage house itself—in
Japanese n ō drama as well. Nor was scenery of paramount
importance in the outdoor medieval or public
Elizabethan theatres, apart from a few painted set pieces
made to resemble walls, trees, caves, thrones, tombs,
porches, and the occasional “Hellmouth.” Prior to the
seventeenth century, most of drama’s scenic aspects
were part of, or dictated by, the architecture of the theatre
structure itself.
The development of European indoor stages, with
their artificial lighting and flat scenery, fostered the first
great phase of scene design. Working indoors, protected
from rain and wind, the scenic designers of the Renaissance
were for the first time able to erect and position
painted canvases and temporary wooden structures
without fear of having the colors run and the supports
blow away. And with the advent of controllable indoor
lighting in the nineteenth century (first by gas, then by
electricity), designers could illuminate settings and acting
areas as they wished and leave other parts of the theatre
building, such as the audience area, in the dark for
the first time. Designers could now create both realistic
illusions and extravagant visual spectacles—and have the