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What a Circus! What a Show!Dateline: 21st April, 2002 Helicopters that descend from the flies; scenery that moves itself arond the stage cars that fly out over the audience: spectacle has become as important a part of music theatre as music. And, boy, do audiences love it! Last week Chitty Citty Bang Bang (the show with the flying car) was greeted with a standing ovation from a rapturous audience. But Wednesday night's audience was so rapturous: it didn't get to see the show because the famous flying car - the expensive flying car, for it is said to have cost £750,000 - didn't work. Such things are not new, of course: do you remember the problems the RNT had in its early days with the hydraulics of the all-singing, all-dancing stage? If an actor or singer is ill or otherwise unable to take part, out steps the understudy. Musical directors, too, have lists of deps, people who can deputise for sick or unavailable musicians, but what do you do when the machinery or electronics go wrong? Cancel the show, what else? 2000 people were disappointed last week. Of course, they either got their money back or were given replacement tickets for another night, but that's poor recompense for being told you have to go home at the time the curtain was due to go up. It's very poor recompense if you've booked early and made a special trip to London for the show, as quite a number in the audience undoubtedly had. It's no one's fault, obviously. We all know that machinery can jam and electronics fail without warning and we should be prepared for such eventualities. But we aren't: we expect our computers will work properly and are shocked when they crash; we expect to be able to connect to our favourite website and get annoyed when IE tells us "There is a problem with the site you are trying to reach..." Spectacle isn't new. Ancient Greek theatre had its crane which flew in (to use the modern term) the god at the end of the play so he could unravel the complications of the plot (hence, of course, the phrase deus ex machina). There was also, we are told, a wheeled platform on which tableaux were presented to the audience. We also know that the eighteenth century theatergoer loved complex scenery and sets which would change during the play without any apparent (to the audience at any rate) human involvement. Tudor and Stuart monarchs, of course, were particularly fond of pagentry. Royal masques and other entertainments were full of spectacle and the taste persisted for many years. Pantomime in the nineteenth century was occasionally enlivened by the stage being flooded and, for instance, Sinbad's ship sailing across. I still remember one panto from my childhood when the background to one scene was a real waterfall which stretched the width of the stage. On a more mundane level, so-called practical traps (trapdoors in the stage through which characters can make an entrance) have been with us for centuries and occasionally in panto, characters would be virtually catapulted out of a trap. And where would Peter Pan be if Peter and Wendy couldn't fly? Theatre's sister art, film, makes tremendous use of spectacle, and always has. Eisenstein and Griffiths were the greatest exponents in the early years, but it is a taste that has lasted till today. Look at the tremendous success of Star Wars and the closing scenes of Close Encounters. And most recently, of course, the technical team of Lord of the Rings has won award after award, and consider how successful that film has been! Aristotle even mentions spectacle in the Poetics. He wasn't very complimentary, regarding it as a poor second to other aspects of theatre, but even he admitted it had its place. Nothing's changed, really, in the centuries between the Greeks and us, except that the special effects have become more complex as our technology has developed. I suspect that Aristotle was not alone in his denigration of spectacle: I can imagine the contemporary equivalents of theatre critics fulminating about how these modern innovations were cheapening drama, although few can have come up with such a memorable dismissal as Clive Barnes' classic comment on the British musical, "We come out whistling the scenery"! Articles Indices: |
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