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The Sound of Theatre: from the Ancient Greeks to the Modern Digital
Age
By David Collison
Hardback: 269 pages plus indices
Published by PLASA at £29.99
Dateline: 30th November, 2008
Put it down to kismet, but I've been reading The Sound of Theatre
by David Collison, which has obligingly offered an explanation for a
puzzling sight I beheld recently at the theatre - that of performers
lip-synching with each one's lips perfectly out of time with the words
by the same millisecond!
But there is much more to this book than mere mechanical explanation.
In this exposition Collison manages to combine detailed scholarly research
with personal anecdotes, which renders it as much professional autobiography
as technical study.
The book starts in the epoch before Christ where the Greek tragedies
required thunder and earthquake to manifest the fury of the gods and
moves on through the centuries, and often across national boundaries,
describing how different effects were arrived at.
Since electric lighting came to theatres well before electrical sound,
by necessity sound effects were created using manpower and the ingenuity
of backstage crew well into the 20th Century. An effect in The Ghost
Train (mid-1920s) required a team of ten men, operating four items
of equipment for lighting and 15 for sound - a lidded milk churn, two
types of drum and a garden roller amongst them - to produce a frenetic
explosion of activity that provided such a convincing rendition of a
moving train on stage that the effect rather became the star of the
show. Such stories illustrate that when it comes to the ambitious demands
directors and designers, nothing much changes!
The second section of the book opens with a chronology of sound recording.
If this seems like a rather dry deviation from the principal thread,
it redeems itself by having some titbits of social history and biographical
pieces about celebrities of the day such Bing Crosby or significant
figures such as Alexander Graham Bell; this is another successful technique
for making the 'techy' sections more readable, though I have to admit
to skimming over - what were for me - the very scientific bits. I suspect
the boffins who read this book will do the same but the other way round:
Never mind Bing, what about the high impedance signal!
Collison covers the different ways that amplified sound has been exploited,
encompassing, as well as effects recording and voice reinforcement whys
and wherefors, the hardware components and layouts required to achieve
the desired impact and distribution across the auditorium. He follows
the development of each through to the digital age dividing episodes
according to the innovators and key players in each phase.
Of greatest interest for me was the progression from the early days
of subtle, indiscernible augmentation for the support of actors who
could not (or would not) project, or singers required to compete with
brassy orchestrations, to the blast them out of their seats approach
of the rock musicals and beyond. Partly the added interest was sparked
by the familiarity of the shows he used as examples but partly because
I picked up on strands from earlier chapters coming together: "parallel
lines that meet", if I may quote from one of his examples - Company.
There are unlikely to be many better qualified to write this book than
David Collison. His career started in the 50s with a mechanical wind
machine and spanned decades of innovation in the field of theatre technology.
He has been described as "a technician of genius" by theatre
heavy-weight Sir Peter Hall, and recently received the US Institute
of Theater Technology Distinguished Career Award in recognition of his
contributions to this oft-overlooked art form.
With Christmas rapidly upon us this book is certainly worthy of consideration
of a place under the tree for the boffin in your life, as well as those
whose interest lies in the technical aspects of theatre but whose approach
is less serious.
Sandra Giorgetti
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