Treading the Boards
SHAKESPEARE, WHEN attempting to stage the battle of Agincourt with no effects other than a dozen actors and a stage, tells his actors to “think when we talk of horses, that you see them / Printing their proud hoofs i’ the receiving earth”. The difference between this and, say, an Arthur Miller sentiment is the notion of the fourth wall: Miller excludes his audience, demoting to them to the status of a fly on the wall, while Shakespeare engages the imaginations of actors and audience alike.
What a crime then that our theatres are not designed with this in mind. What we have here in England is an abundance of theatres built in the sixties and seventies along Graeco-Roman lines, with proscenium arch and large audience spaces. The design of two of our benchmark theatres, the National’s Lyttelton and the RST Stratford, both fail to acknowledge the relationship between the actors and their audience.
Thirty years ago when epic was the way to go (the National Theatre’s showpieces were Galileo and Royal Hunt of the Sun) this was appropriate.
But do we not lose a bit of the magic of Queen Mab when we see Mercutio miked up, speaking to people not just forty metres from the stage, but in the dark? Where is the theatre in that? Arrive on the scene Michael Boyd and the RSC: down with the mainhouse, and up with a small stroke of genius: a temporary theatre, The Courtyard, will be used until 2010, during which the construction of a new mainhouse will take place, an exact replica of the temporary one.
The plan is for a ‘one-room thrust’ theatre based on the Elizabethan courtyard structure, with the audience looking on from three sides as the stage, well, thrusts into them. Eight hundred and ninety of the thousand seats will be within ten metres of the stage, compared to the current RST which has only three hundred and seventy.
The RSC hit the nail on the head: “With the new auditorium, we want to bring actors and audience together in a single room so that the actors can have a conversation with the audience.” A brilliant idea that plays such as Shakespeare’s rely so heavily upon.
11th May 2006