Theatre

When people talk nostalgically about the magic of theatre, they often refer to the moment when the house lights go down and the curtain goes up. In fact, you’d have to go to a pantomine to be sure of seeing a curtain these days. There have been a few rare exceptions: Peter Gill’s recent production at the National Theatre of ‘The Voysey Inheritance’ turned curtains into a talking point, and the tradition was neatly alluded to in Jonathan Kent’s production of ‘The Faith Healer’, now playing on Broadway, in which a curtain was drawn swiftly across the stage to reveal a different setting behind it. Feature continues

The decline of the curtain is partly linked to the influence of Bertolt Brecht, who damned escapism and insisted that members of the audience should watch with their minds rather than their emotions. Such ideas were linked to the rise of a different kind of theatre, one in which the audience either sat in a semicircle, or on three sides of the action, leaving no place for a curtain to hang and no place for a scene change to hide. The immediate response was to have the lights go out and come up in a different colour, and the stage management come on and change whatever was necessary. Sometimes they did it with such a flourish that they won a round of applause. Then the actors got involved. Every director I’ve spoken to refers to the days when, as Max Stafford-Clark puts it, ‘the nobles turned kleptomaniac and stole the furniture at the end of each scene.’ The reward for surviving the banqueting scene in ‘Macbeth’ was to go off with a couple of goblets.

Today, directors look for less clumsy ways of coping with the problem. We tend to think of directors as interpreters of the text, but in fact much of their job is practical and pragmatic, their solutions dictated by the shape of the stage and the size of the budget. Back in the red curtain days, scene changes were barely discussed until the technical rehearsal. Today, many directors and designers plan what they are going to do before rehearsals start. Plays have changed too. As Stafford-Clark says, ‘In eighteenth-century plays, writers give the characters a psychological reason to come onstage and a psychological reason to go off. Whereas now writers are influenced by TV, so they just imagine one scene beginning and another ending.’

There are sometimes rather a lot of these scenes – 40 of them in ‘The Overwhelming’, directed by Stafford-Clark and now playing at the National Theatre. In order to keep the action flowing, he and his designer Tim Shortall came up with a single image, that of a statue of the Madonna, which carried all sorts of appropriate resonances, and then used sound to suggest the different locations, from the water splashing at the poolside to the street sounds of the market.