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

94 Chapter 5 Designers and Technicians
The three witches float in a Stonehenge-like ruin in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which was performed at New
York’s Park Avenue Armory in 2014 and superbly illuminated by Neil Austin. The play was directed by Kenneth
Branagh (who also played Macbeth) and Rob Ashford, with scenery by Christopher Oram. © Stephanie Berger
The design was both metaphoric (the boxing ring wasn’t
“really” flying, but its movements suggested the largerthan-life,
mythic quality of the conflict) and realistic
(the costumes, choreography, and material texture all
simulated an actual boxing ring—see photo in “What Is
Theatre.”).
Postmodern design elements made their appearance
in the theatre of the 1980s and 1990s. Because the postmodern
emphasizes disharmonies and associations, it
travels a somewhat different path from the departures of
modernist innovators such as Craig and Appia. Much as
postmodernism, as a dramatic movement, suggested the
“death of isms”—that is, a lack of any single, overarching
idea or set of rules—postmodern design disrupts unifying
stylistic themes and replaces them with seemingly
random assemblages of different and unrelated styles.
We can think of postmodern design as “quoting” historical
periods or intellectual sources to disrupt the linear
flow of consistent imagery or effect. Postmodern design
also tends to reconfigure, or blatantly refer to, the theatre
facility itself, through (for example) painted scenery
deliberately made to look “fake,” particularly in contrast
to seemingly arbitrary found objects strewn about the set,
and with theatrical devices meant to comment on—and
to mock—their own “theatricality.”
Successful postmodern design is not merely an intellectual
exercise, however. Its ability to combine disparate
historical elements and highlight theatrical artifice can,
at its best, surprise and provoke the audience while
resonating with the deeper themes of the play. Bob
Crowley’s setting for Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of
Love, portraying the English poet and classical scholar A.
E. Housman, is a postmodern deconstruction of Roman
architectural and sculptural forms, reflected in the River
Styx in Stoppard’s version of the classical Hades (the
mythological Greek world of the dead). And Richard
Hudson’s set design for The Lion King fills Broadway’s
New Amsterdam Theatre—stage and house alike—with
multiple and ingenious recapitulations of African, Asian,
and American avant-garde design in a joyous celebration
of the theatre’s truly global virtuosity.
The best scenic design today is so much more than
mere “backing” for the action of a play. It is instead the
architecture of the play’s performance that, when fully
realized, is intrinsic to the play’s action: it is the place
where the play exists; it also determines exactly how the
play exists and, along with other factors, helps reveal the
play’s deepest meanings.
SCENIC MATERIALS
Scene designers begin their work with the words of
the text and the images in their minds, but at a certain
point they begin to concentrate on the materials with