Scenography as Dramaturgy

In the post-war era, a generation of practitioners made use of all aspects of stage design – total scenography – to create theatre that promoted their artistic, philosophical and political aims. Scenography was now central to the making of meaning.

Joan Littlewood outside the Theatre Royal, Stratford East

Despite the radical visions of the preceding decades, in the mid 20th century much theatre was as yet untouched – still predominantly commercial, conservative, and middle class. The post-war period saw a generation of theatre makers who brought their radicalism to new audiences, and began a process by which the new techniques of the avant-garde would become mainstream, even if the ideas and principles that motivated them were often left behind. For practitioners as diverse as Bertold Brecht, Joan Littlewood and Samuel Beckett, scenography was central to this project.

After The Threepenny Opera (1928) and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930), Bertold Brecht (Q69) and his stage designer Caspar Neher (Q30589) developed their concept of ‘epic theatre’ further in the 1950s: the decisive criterion was not its beauty but its ‘realism’. For Brecht this meant presenting human behaviour to show not only its outward appearances, but also the social laws underlying it – a departure from the portrayal of tragic individual fates, from the classical illusionary stage and its illusory reality. In theatre, reality should not only be recognised, but also seen through. Therefore, the means must be recognisable not only in the play but also in the stage design. For this purpose, Brecht’s long-time stage designer Caspar Neher invented a stage style in which everything decorative and not relevant to the action was only hinted at. Rather than creating an illusion, the aim was to draw attention to the artifice of theatre – a principle Brecht described as Verfremdungseffekt (translated as ‘alienation’ or ‘defamiliarisation’ effect). Audiences should not empathise with the characters, but be moved to action. This aim was served by bright lighting, almost exclusively with white light, with the spotlights in view. Commentaries were projected onto the (half-height) intermediate curtain, and scene changes took place with the curtain open. Together with a stage that was extremely sparsely but carefully furnished in detail, Brecht hoped to activate the audience’s imagination.

Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot at the Avignon Festival, 1978

In the 1930s, Joan Littlewood and Ewan MacColl set up a series of theatre companies, with overtly political intentions. They were concerned about the rise of fascism in Europe, and wanted to promote trades unions and the rights of workers. They were inspired by many avant-garde European practitioners and theorists, reading extensively the writings of Bertolt Brecht, as well as Vsévolod Meyerhold (Q71), Erwin Piscator (Q72), Rudolf Laban and Adolphe Appia (Q249). In 1945 Littlewood founded Theatre Workshop, initially as a touring company and later based at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East (Q8197). Littlewood mixed many traditions to make her work, using whatever techniques would help her engage the audience and get her messages across. The 1963 musical Oh, What a Lovely War!, about the First World War, make use of projection of archival material such as newspapers, as well as a device that could display short texts in a grid of light bulbs, announcing casualty numbers and other headlines, as well as many sound effects. These techniques were those Littlewood had developed over many productions, from her studies of the work of Brecht and others. The designer John Bury (Q30588) worked with Littlewood before going on to the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, taking an ethos with him of distilling a design down to its essentials, to communicate ideas effectively to an audience.

The plays of the Irish dramatist, Samuel Beckett, are not overtly political, as with the work of Brecht and Littlewood. Rather, they can be seen as an absurdist, nihilistic response to the events and culture of the 20th century. In Beckett’s plays the scenography is frequently embedded in the text, where stage directions are often as important to the meaning of the play as the spoken lines. The characters in Waiting for Godot, inhabit a largely empty space. The sun and moon rise and set, indicating the passing of time symbolically, with no attempt at illusionistic realism. While many interpretations of the play and its scenic environment are possible, demonstrated by different productions over the years, some things are fixed by the author’s intent: decoration and the superfluous is impossible, for to add to the sparse space of the script would be to give opportunities to the characters – a chair to sit on, an object to comment on. It is a central premise of the play they have no such possibilities, only their own limited resources.

Some of Beckett’s other plays require even more specific staging: in Not I, we see just a mouth speaking, picked out by a narrow beam of light in otherwise total darkness. In Happy Days, the central character is trapped in a mound up to her waist, and later to her neck. In Breath, a play that lasts only about 35 seconds, no characters appear on stage, but light, human sounds and a pile of rubbish, revealed and then hidden by the curtain, create the minimalist narrative. Again and again in Beckett, the scenography is not a pleasing backdrop to the play, it is not a ‘container’ or a ‘world’ within which the action takes place, it is not a commentary on the play or its characters. It is an integral part of the meaning and its communication to the audience, without which the play would not, could not be itself.

Brecht, Neher, Littlewood, Bury, Beckett and many other post-war theatre makers contributed to a significant shift in the role of the materials of performance: costume, light, sound, image, scenery are no longer contextual, but part of the meaning-making of the work: scenography as dramaturgy.