Stage Equipment

STAGE EQUIPMENT The mechanical equipment of present day stages exists for two purposes : (I) to change settings; (2) to light the stage. They are best considered separately.

Scenery Shifting.

The necessity of shifting scenery is sup posed to be one of the characteristics of modern stagecraft, and the introduction of the first effective device to shift settings in the course of a play is assumed to be the turning point which deter mined the structure typical of playhouses to-day. The unity of place in the Greek theatre is usually pointed out in contrast and the assumption is common that imaginative Greek audiences, like those of the mediaeval market places and the Elizabethan inn yards, did not need the realistic simulation of changes of locale. Nevertheless, this orthodox doctrine is only relatively true. No theatre of the Western world has ever been satisfied with com pletely immovable scenery. The attempt to vary and change the backgrounds of a play has existed from the beginning of drama in Europe.

Even the Greeks needed the literal descent of their gods from the machine—an obvious derrick that hoisted them over the per manent background of a palace or temple wall. And both Haigh and Flickinger agree that Greek dramatists felt the necessity of showing scenes inside the permanent and immovable background of their tragedies and comedies alike, and so put on a tableaux stage the murders which by literary convention had to take place off stage and could be described only by a messenger or a chorus. "This was a small wooden platform (eccyclema) rolling upon wheels which was kept inside stage buildings. When it was re quired one of the doors in the background was thrown open and it was pushed forward on the stage. . . . On it were seen the corpses of the murdered persons, the murderers standing over them with weapons in their hands. . . ." This device was also occasionally used in comedy. Flickinger cites the fact that traces of the tracks for the wheels of this scene wagon are said to have been found in the ruins of one of the Greek theatres in Asia Minor.

Although the mediaeval market-place theatre did not shift its scenery as a whole, it built the various scenes of its morality and miracle plays side by side. The actors shifted to the sets and walked from heaven to purgatory and to the hell-mouth, as the action of the play demanded. (See the well-known print of "The Valenciennes Passion Play" reproduced in almost any handbook on the mediaeval stage.) Certain of the prompt books of other mar ket place festivals have been discovered which call for a succes sion of realistic effects, such as the water that was piped to the roofs of houses in the market place and then, at a given signal, re leased as the deluge; the machinery that literally hoisted Jesus up on high, or made the angels tremble and totter before their fall. It is doubtful whether the discovery of shifting scenery, usually ascribed by the authorities to designs by Inigo Jones and Webb in England, was not anticipated in Italy by the contemporaries of Serlio and Sabbatini. In any case Vasari contains references to Italian court masques where the heavens opened, gods appeared in chariots and descended, while mounds, bearing cherubs and flower ing bushes and caverns breathing smoke, appeared through the stage floor, thus implying a use of machinery that would have taxed the resources of the Drury Lane Theatre of yesterday. The effort to change the stage-picture is incessant. For some inexplicable reason it never occurred to any of these earlier experi menters to lower a curtain, hide the stage and do this shifting of scenery out of sight. Jonson describes a device used by Inigo Jones in staging Tethy's Festival: "Three circles of lights and glasses" moved circularly so distracted the spectators that they "scarcely discerned" that the scenery had changed from a seaport to a cavern. Sabbatini's handbook lists the various methods of distracting an audience's attention for just this purpose : someone in the back of the hall may pretend to start a brawl, a sudden fanfare of trumpets or the roll of drums may be sounded.