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

116 Chapter 5 Designers and Technicians
Costumes
Costumes have always been a major element in the theatrical
experience. They are vehicles for the “dressing-up”
that actors and audiences alike have always considered a
requirement for theatrical satisfaction.
THE FUNCTIONS OF COSTUME
Costumes serve both ceremonial and illustrative functions.
The first theatrical costumes were essentially ceremonial:
the himation (a gownlike costume) of an original
performer in Prometheus Bound was derived from the
garment worn by the priest-chanter of the dithyramb;
the comic and satyr costumes, with their use of phalluses
and goatskins, were likewise derived from more primitive
god-centered rites. The priests who first enacted the
Quem Queritis trope (liturgical text) in medieval Europe
simply wore their sacred albs, hooded to indicate an outdoor
scene but otherwise unaltered. The actors of the
classic Japanese nō drama also wore—and wear today—
costumes that relate more to spiritual sources than to
secular life. These ancient uses of costuming served primarily
to separate the actors from the audience and elevate
them to a quasi-divine status. They became indeed
larger than life in the fourth century B.C. Greek theatre,
where principal actors wore thick-soled kothurnoi so
as to stand much taller than ordinary humans—a literal
dressing-up that gave their characters a superhuman
magnitude.
By the time of the Renaissance, the ceremonial costuming
of the ancient theatre had given way, at least in
the West, to costumes designed to distinguish individual
characters and historical periods. The Italian commedia
dell’arte boasted dazzling, highly distinctive costumes
so each of its traditional characters—such as Arlecchino
with his multicolored patches, Pantalone with his red
tights and slippers, and Il Dottore with his black cap and
ankle-length black coat—could be instantly identified by
what they wore. Elizabethan actors were often favored by
their patrons with the gift of their cast-off but still elegantly
detailed garments. Such costumes valued distinction
over historical accuracy: while a 1595 drawing of an
Elizabethan production of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus
shows the ancient Roman general wearing a toga
appropriate to his historical era, it also portrays other
male characters wearing standard Elizabethan attire.
Modern costuming, however, is based on an overall
design plan. This plan became important during the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as realism began
to arrive in Western theatre. Realism led to an interest
Plays often indicate design colors for symbolic importance. In A
Streetcar Named Desire, playwright Tennessee Williams emphasizes
the raw sexuality of cardplaying New Orleans workingmen by
specifying that they wear “bright primary colors,” while the delicate
lady who visits them has the name of Blanche—French for “white”—
and dreams of her deceased gay husband, named Grey. In this 2002
London production, designer Bunny Christie underlines Williams’s color
symbolism by clothing Glenn Close, as Blanche, in a white dress, white
hat, and sheer white gloves and accessorizing her with a sheer white
handkerchief and white rosebuds in her hair. © Geraint Lewis
in historical accuracy in design, which required consistency,
and by the early 1800s, painstaking efforts would
be made to ensure that the design of every costume in a
play (along with every prop and set piece) was accurate
to its era. Thus a production of Julius Caesar would recreate
the exact clothing worn in first century B.C. Rome,
a Hamlet production would mirror the dress and architecture
of medieval Denmark, and a costumer for Romeo
and Juliet would seek to make garments just like those
worn in Renaissance Verona.
The passion for historical accuracy no longer dominates
the world of costume design, but it helped pave