Theatre Design & Technology - Fall 1987 - 11

he concept of theatre space
covers many different
notions.
The more strictly dramatic space - that which
our imagination evokes in
us, for example, on reading
Hamlet. I am not going to deal
with that space.
The represented space - that
which appears to us as the playing
area, filled wi th scenery and
swept by beams of light: I will certainly touch on that, but it will
not be the main thrust of my talk.
Then there is the question of
theatre within urban space - an
extremely interesting subject I
Imagine analyzing how, since the
end of the nineteenth century, the
most important theatre entercontinued on p. 10

NO
MORE

THEATRES!

Problems of
Contemporary
Theatre Space
by John Russell

BY ARNOLD ARONSON

Brown

bout 250 years ago, English
satirist Jonathan Swift wrote
A Modest Proposal in which
he suggested eating babies as a
solution to starvation and
population control. Echoing
French theoretician Antonin
Artaud's decree, "No More Masterpieces," let me issue my own modest
proposal: "No More Theatres!"
Our official pundits bemoan the
lack of good playwrights, or the dominance of conceptual directors, or poor
actor training as reasons for a moribund theatre. I would like to suggest
that, at least in part, it is the theatres
that are ruining the theatre.
In a recent issue of TDetJT we reprinted an article from Japan by the
late Dr. Shizuo Toyama. We did so because Dr. Toyama was a significant figure and this was an important study. It
was a scientific analysis of optimum
seating distances from the stage for a
spectator, based on the spectator's ability to discern eye movement. How
many theatres around the world have
been constructed recently using such
information as a basis for decision
making? Quite a few, I imagine. Yet
where were Dr. Toyama and his colleagues when some misguided architect built or rebuilt Drury Lane, La
Scala, the Porte St. Martin, or the Theatre of Dionysus? Where were the engineers to tell the creators of Epidaurus that their acoustics would be
better if only they would install a few
reflective panels (supplemented, of
course, by an infrared listening
system)?
continued on p. 61

n a provocative article, Denis Bablet has announced that he no
longer believes in the usefulness
of multi-form theatres which are
planned to accommodate a variety
of audience-stage relationships.
Now, he says, the task of scenographers and theatre-builders is to create
"hollow spaces." (The phrase is taken
from an unpublished note made by
Gordon Craig in 1922.) Within these
voids, a new "spatial harmony of ...
actor, stage and house" should be "conceive[d] and establishledJ for each new
production, each work having within
it its own scenographic architecture
and its own line of action."
M. Bablet does not argue in favor of a
fixed stage of any shape or size, and
nowhere specifies how audiences
should be arranged to face an acting
area. Theatre is no longer a "viewing
place"; plays will not be presented, but
audiences conditioned to enter into
the drama. Each production will have
its own "construction," placed within
a hollow space; each will aim at "engaging the spectators in the exci tement of a new adventure, ... immersing them while holding them in
suspense. "
As supporters of this vision of theatre, Bablet lists Europeans of world
renown: Adolphe Appia, Max Reinhardt, Peter Brook, Victor Garcia, Jerzy
Grotowski, Tadeusz Kantor, Ariane
Mnouchkine, and Peter Stein. Everywhere he finds evidence that in such
"empty spaces" lies the true theatre of
the future: "Look well- they are growcontinued on p. 51

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