INTRODUCTION TO THEATRE MAKING
Drama 102
THE TEMPEST
As we explained last week, this class is about the fundamental task facing all theatre-makers:
The text is the wellspring.
Drama: The literary artifact created by the Playwright
Theatre: The physical even arising out of a dramatic text.
Theatre is related to drama in the same way that music is related to a score.
Each theatrical event is uniquely shaped by the circumstance and choices of its makers.
Drama – the text - endures.
Theatre – how an Audience experiences this text during a staging of it - is constantly changing.
Historical and Cultural Context – covered in introduction of the Arden edition of the play:
All these aspects of Shakespeare’s historical/cultural landscape are profoundly important to understanding the themes of the play.
There is, however, another set of contexts which we need to understand in order fully understand the text. The theatrical assumptions.
With very few exceptions, dramas are written to be staged. Certainly this is true for Shakespeare. The reason a playwright goes to the trouble of writing down a text is because he or she wants to create theatre.. It follows then, that a clear understanding of the notion of theatre which the playwright had in mind when he or she wrote their text is of significant importance to understanding the text.
What function did the theatre fulfill? What kind of audience were they writing for? What kind of actor? In what kind of place did they imagine the action unfolding? What were the theatrical conventions of the time?
Be very clear: I am not arguing that one must be “true” to the author’s original intentions or that we should make our own productions identical to that of the originals. In fact we couldn’t do so if we wished to. The “theatrical event” is tied to a historical and cultural moment. It disappears as soon as it is over. And can never be reproduced. I am suggesting, however, that and understanding of the the original circumstances helps us get a better understanding of the nature of the text so that we can better make our own theatre out of it.
Since I am a set designer, it makes sense to me to approach this subject by looking at the physical circumstances. Chris and Gabrielle might start from a different place, but ultimately all lead to the same conclusions
The Elizabethan Playhouse
Tempest : First performed in 1611.
At the time, two kinds of theatres:
Outdoor like Globe 2,000 to 3,000 people
Indoor like Blackfriars 500 people
Very different socially and economically, but from the standpoint of the circumstances of theatrical production, they were very similar.
Actors on a shoulder or head high stage sharing a square or polygonal space with the audience. Below the actors is the audience of the PIT. Wrapping around the room everywhere but immediately behind the actors are more audience. Directly behind the actors is a structure called the TIRING HOUSE. It had multiple openings for entrances and exits but little if any facility for changing its visual character.
The stage of the outdoor theatres was covered with a roof, as were the galleries, but the Pit was open to both the sun and the rain. Plays were performed during the afternoons to take advantage of the sun. A very small fee would admit one to the Pit where spectators stood, while more affluent spectators could pay additional money to sit in one of the galleries.
Note that admission was charged! The Elizabethan Theatre was a for-profit-venture. Shakespeare was a shareholder in his theatre company. He shared responsibility for running the company, and took a share of the profits.
The so called Private theatres, were not actually private, but were significantly more expensive to attend. The spatial arrangement of the pit was similar to the outdoor theatres, but benches were provided for spectators. There were also seats on the stage. Although candles were used in the Indoor theatres, performances still occurred in the afternoon because the sunlit windows was needed to illuminate the plays, as well as to allow the rich patrons to get home before the still dangerous dark..
Textual evidence suggests at least two openings in the tiring house The action of many plays seems also to call for spaces at stage level and above for, the hiding of eavesdroppers, etc. We see these in the Tempest at the appearance of the banquet (3.3.25) and the discovery of Ferdinand and Miranda in the last scene of the play. Scholars have come to call these areas the INNER BELOW and the INNER ABOVE, but the evidence for where they were located, what they looked like, and how they were used is inconclusive. We know that the stage was equipped with Traps below the stage, from which devils and ghosts emerged, and that the roof over the stage, called the HEAVENS, was equipped with machinery for “flying” actors and props such as the appearance of Juno in the Masque of Act 4.
The critical elements of this arrangement are:
These elements combine to create a specific theatrical context:
The result was a theatre of the here and now. The drama may have been set in a far off land, but the theatre was happening in the current moment in the current place. The action was understood to be a construction of the playwright’s, the actors understood to be performers playing a part.
Taken together these create a paradigm of theater.
Most scholars call the paradigm I have just described as “Presentational Theatre”. Definitions vary, but more or less: A theatre in which there is little or no impulse to illusion.”
I prefer to call it the “Platform Stage”. This strikes me as being both more descriptive and more accurate.
In the Platform Stage, the performance space is nothing more than a technical device organized to allow the performers to be seen and heard. Essentially, the stage is a platform. The drama may be located anywhere in any time. But, by virtue of the absence of separation between the performers and their audience, the theatrical event is conceived as an constructed or contrived event located in the theatre here and now.
Again, note the distinction of terms. The DRAMA of Tempest is located on an uncharted island in the middle of the Mediterranean. But for Shakespeare the THEATRICAL EVENT was located in the theatre right now.
How does this paradigm express itself within the text?
The bare platform puts the burden of story telling on what the characters say and do. In practice, most playwrights working in the Platform paradigm put virtually all emphasis on what is said.
Which is not to say that the Platform Paradigm was not concerned with how things onstage looked. In fact, it was deeply interested in spectacle. Remember that I said earlier that Shakespeare’s theatre was a profit making venture. Shakespeare may have been a great artist, but he was also a business man. He had a vested interest in making theatre which was popular. Then, as now, spectacle was one way of achieving this.
Because the approach to storytelling was one in which the performers were obviously “play acting”, the playwright is not limited to people’s “real” behavior.
Real people don’t necessarily behave this way, but the theatrical paradigm gave the playwright freedom to use any device he wished to help tell the story.
Because the events onstage were understood as having been constructed out of the authors imagination, anything was possible.
How does this help us as theatre makers today, thinking about how to stage Tempest?
It allows us to understand that although Shakespeare’s theatrical goals are perhaps quite similar to our own – to entertain, to enlighten, to illuminate – his means were fundamentally different. Its not that Shakespeare believed in fairies or that they really talk to themselves when alone. For him, what people really do was beside the point. His plays change location all the time, not because he interested in complicated technology, but because for him it was as easy as writing a line of dialog and so why not if it helped tell the story. As contemporary theatre makers, of course, we are concerned with technical considerations, and we have very different ideas about what does or doesn’t make “sense” on stage. But understanding the underlying assumptions which conditioned Shakespeare’s imagination as he wrote the text provides an important way to get a handle on the structure or architecture of the text.