In the early and middle years of the 20th century, women began to take on roles previously barred to them. The male-dominated world of theatre, as with all of society, began to shift, although change was slow, and equality is yet to be achieved.
For long periods of its history, theatre has been considered morally problematic, and a risk to social order. This applied especially to women in the theatre, with being an actress associated with having low morals, even being a prostitute. At various places and at various times, women were banned from the stage altogether. Theatre, holding a mirror up to society, reflected a social order that privileged men in every way possible. In the 19th century, the status of theatre itself began to change; as theatre grew rapidly as an entertainment popular with all strata of society, the reputation of actors rose, with the most successful becoming ‘stars’ in the sense we understand it today. Some actresses, too, achieved fame, but backstage workers remained almost exclusively male, and their contribution largely unacknowledged. In the late 19th century, a shift began that was to accelerate after the First World War, as a small number of women took on significant roles in theatre production.
Marie Louise Fuller, later known as Loïe Fuller, was born in Chicago in 1862 (Q323). She was a professional child actress, and performed as a dancer in burlesque and vaudeville shows. She went on to develop a unique type of dance, involving flowing costumes and carefully controlled lighting. Having failed to find the serious artistic reception she sought in America, she moved to Paris in 1892, where she became recognised as part of the artistic Avant Garde. In this environment of experimentation and innovation, she continued to develop her performance style, so that costume and light became the principal, almost the sole, elements of her dance. The abstract imagery of her performances was an inspiration to the Symbolists and Futurists alike.
Fuller’s lighting was highly rehearsed, using a team of between 14 and 38 technicians to manually control the brightness, colour and direction of the lights, sometimes uplighting through a glass floor. The lighting and its operators was as much part of the choreography as Fuller herself. She also took out numerous patents to protect her innovations, including chemistry to create specific lighting gel and costume colour effects. In the language we might use today, Fuller was an artist, a performer, a designer and a technologist.
In London in the 1930s, three women formed a theatre design collective called The Motley Theatre Design Group, or simply Motley (Q30012). Two sisters, Margaret (known as ‘Percy’) and Sophie Harris, and Elizabeth Montgomery had met at art school, and rapidly started designing productions for John Gielgud and Michel Saint-Denis. They went on to design many productions in London’s West End, in New York, and elsewhere – sometimes working together, and sometimes separately, but always under the name of Motley. Saint Denis went on to found the London Theatre Studio (1936–1939), a new theatre school which incorporated courses in theatre design taught by the Motleys – the first time theatre design had been taught within a drama school, rather than an art school, in the UK. Percy and Sophie went on to teach theatre design at the Old Vic School, London (1948–1952) and Percy subsequently set up the Motley Theatre Design Course (1966–2011).
The shared ethos of the three women was one that built on the new philosophies of theatre art that had been in development since the start of the 20th century: they believed set and costume design should be an integral part of the performance, responding to and supporting the themes and narratives of the play, not superficial decoration. Their success as designers, and in particular their involvement in education – with many of their students going on to successful careers – means their influence on theatre design in the UK and beyond has been substantial.
Motley is significant not just for its impact on theatre design practice. It is also an important example of the role of collectives in developing emerging fields of practice. Other examples include Richard Pilbrow’s Theatre Projects (Q29724), which gathered a generation of lighting designers together for mutual support and to share work, when that professional role was nascent, and the designers’ collective Mesmer, which more recently fulfilled a similar role for the emerging field of video design for theatre. When young practitioners are trying to establish not just themselves but a new way of working, operating as a collective provides support, sharing of knowledge, experience and contacts, and a more visible identity. For Motley, carrying the additional burden of being women in a world almost exclusively of men, the collective model was key to their success.
Since the formation of Motley in the 1930s, there have been notable women practitioners in all fields of theatre design and technology: the stage manager, Maud Gill (Q30582); the lighting designer, Jean Rosenthal (Q23051); the live music sound engineer and tour manager, Berenice Hardiman (Q30580); the lighting technologist Anne Valentino (Q30578), and more. But these names are disproportionately few. Today, with women’s equality gradually improving but far from achieved – in theatre as in society – women have banded together in new ways, forming associations for mutual support and to raise the profile of the issue of inequality: Women in Lighting (WIL), Women in Stage Entertainment (WISE), Parents in Performing Arts (PiPA), Stage Sight, and others. Inequality – measured in terms of gender but also of other underrepresented groups – is perhaps the greatest challenge the theatre industry is facing today.