Construire un feu

ONE OF THE CHALLENGES AND PARADOXES OF THEATRE is to have to represent, from within restricted and often confined dimensions, a multiplicity of spaces, some of which are supposed to evoke an infinite expanse. Shakespeare expresses this difficulty very well in the prologue to Henry V.

“But pardon, and gentles all, the flat unraised spirits that have dared on this unworthy scaffold to bring forth so great an object: can this cockpit hold the vasty fields of France? or may we cram within this wooden O the very casques that did affright the air at Agincourt? O, pardon! since a crooked figure may attest in little place a million. And let us, ciphers to this great accompt, on your imaginary forces work. “(Chorus)

Aware of the limits of the theatrical tool, Shakespeare invites the audience to use their imagination to forget “this wooden O” –the cylindrical Elizabethan auditorium– and imagine that “the theatre is a world”. The strength of the metaphor still holds today, even if scenographic techniques have sometimes tried to “represent” large spaces.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the use of flat wings made it possible, according to the Mémoire de Mahelot –a notebook recording the sets created from 1634 at the Hôtel de Bourgogne theatre– to simultaneously represent a temple, a prison, a garden, a mountain and a sea (set by Clitophon de Du Ryer) on stage. The various locations of the action are painted on canvases arranged to face the audience.
In the second half of the century, at the height of the classical age, the bedroom or living room was the traditional setting for comedies and a neutral palace background (known as the “palais à volonté”) that of tragedies –the use of a single setting preserved the unity of place. The representation of large spaces, however, was possible in “machine plays”, which conjured up the sea and the air as well as forest and mountain settings. Techniques imported from Italy enabled actors to appear from below stage or to fly, which, along with rapid changes of painted scenery, enthralled the audience. Molière’s machine plays, for example, multiply settings in quick succession: Dom Juan (the sea, the forest, a palace), Amphitryon (the air), Psyché (the sea, the air, a city where you can see palaces, a desert space, a magnificent courtyard, a palace surrounded by a garden, a vast countryside, hell with a sea of fire).

The art of creating illusion was taken a step further in the nineteenth century and the Romantic aesthetic. Improvements in stage machinery and above all the virtuosity of pictorial techniques made it possible to represent immense spaces, marked by the historicism that prevailed from the 1820s. The portrayal of “large spaces” incorporated the landscapes and natural elements that were already a feature of sets, enhancing them with a very precise historical vocabulary pertaining to architectural settings that often combined open and closed spaces (cloisters, peristyles, enclosures, squares, garden gloriettes, ruins, cities, open palaces, terraces, lakes). The special effects representing accidents embellished these settings with lightning, thunderclaps, rain, hail, wind effects, moons, rainbows, snow effects, flames, fires and collapses. These visual techniques were sometimes amplified by music, which played a role in dramatising the climatic elements.

When the Comédiens-Français performed at the Roman Theatre in Orange in 1888, they needed no other set than the site itself in this architectural setting, just as later in Avignon, during the festival, when some directors incorporated the architecture of the Papal Palace’s Cour d’Honneur (namely Terry Hands for Richard III in 1972).
In 2019, the Troupe will perform at the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus, in a scenography that will open up fully to the exceptional site.

In contemporary theatres, new techniques are replacing painted canvases, whether video projections or reconfigurations of the stage-auditorium relationship that give greater freedom, as when a traverse staging was used to represent the path through the moor Éric Ruf designed for Peer Gynt, performed on in the Grand-Palais in 2012.