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

Spotlight
Henslowe’s Diary
How can we research the theatre design of the past? We
can, of course, study the ruins of the buildings, or piece
together evidence from references to the theatre in literature
and in the plays themselves. But occasionally a
truly enlightening resource survives from an older era that
provides access to the physical reality of playmaking. For
the Renaissance—arguably the theatre’s greatest period
of artistic innovation—we are lucky to have just such a
source of information. The diary of Philip Henslowe, the
owner of The Rose theatre and producer of many of the
Theatre 91
plays of Christopher Marlowe, lets us peer into the day-today
reality of theatre management.
The diary lists daily profits for productions, tracks countless
loans and expenses, records payments for the rights to
new works, and in general shows the ebb and tide of popularity
and interest in the Elizabethan stage. One of the most
illuminating sections is his inventory of props, which gives
us precious insight into the design elements of the past.
Some of the props are still unexplained, such as a “black
lether gearken, & Nabesathe.” Other entries, however, give
us a crisper image of celebrated plays, as with “one caldron
for the Jew” (for Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta) and “the sittie
of Rome” (a model of that city for Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus).
These fragments have helped us better understand
the theatre design of yesterday as a historical reality.
audience focus on their work without worrying about the
weather outside the theatre doors.
The result was that a new class of theatre artists
came to public consciousness. Early designers such as
Sebastiano Serlio (1475–1554), Aristotile da Sangallo
(1481–1551), and Giacomo Torelli (1608–1678) in Italy;
Inigo Jones (1573–1652) in England; and the Frenchman
Jean Bérain (1637–1711) became as prominent as
the playwrights whose plays they designed. Indoor stage
scenery, painted in exquisite perspective, took on even
greater sophistication under the artists of the Royal and
Romantic eras in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The proscenium format, which was created primarily to
show off elegant settings, has largely dominated theatre
architecture ever since.
The painted flat scenery that the proscenium gave
rise to has been only one of many competing scenic formats
in the modern era, usually divided into two general
categories. Realistic scenery attempts to depict, often in
great detail, a specific time and place in the real world
where the play’s events are presumed to take place. Metaphoric
scenery favors, instead, visual images that seek to
evoke (or to suggest, abstract, or make a visual statement
about) the production’s intended theme, mood, or social/
political implications. Metaphoric scenery tends to
remind us—at least when we first see it—that we are in
Contemporary eastern European
design is almost always radically
abstracted from realism. In his
design for Waiting for Godot,
Romanian Silviu Purcarete (who also
directed) set aside Beckett’s stage
directions entirely and created a
setting of iron scaffolding and plastic
sheeting. The play’s iconic tree was
raised above the actors’ heads; only
its roots were shown. A prompter
sat on the stage, following the script
and playing a gong. At the end
of each act a three-piece combo
appeared at the rear of the stage—
at the end of act 1 wearing full-body
bunny costumes, at the end of act 2
bare-headed and hacking furiously
at their instruments rather than
playing them. The staging certainly
emphasized the play’s “absurdity”
but was oddly affecting as well.
© Sibiu International Theatre Festival