Word: prosceniums
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Ougly Hell. As master of the court revels from 1605 onwards, Jones revolutionized English stage techniques, importing the Italian proscenium arch and exiling the simple "wooden O" of Shakespeare's stage for three centuries. From Florence, he adapted stage sets that consisted of serried ranks of flats painted in perspective, with a distant vista on the backdrop, "the whole worke shooting downewards," as Jonson said, "which caught the eye afarre off with a wandring beauty...
...realistic. The remaining two, used in every act, are unfortunate red concoctions resembling giant Jackson Pollack paintings; they seriously throw off the basic realism of both play and production. Also intruding on the believability of a Dublin tenement are strange hairy things which hang without visible purpose from the proscenium...
...more than physically confusing. It is enormous, so much so that any attempt to build intimacy among characters becomes impossible. Lithgow and director George Hamlin have left the Loeb's three-piece proscenium arch fully opened and have used a good deal of the available depth as well. The result is that actors who might look too small for their roles even on a normal stage are drowned in space...
...they carry more intellectual clout. Says Karel Reisz, who directed Morgan!: "The literacy gap between the people who are making films and those who are seeing them has narrowed." The kids still flip for spoof spectaculars like Goldfinger, but they just don't believe in 40-acre bathrooms and proscenium-size smiles. "The grand image no longer awes the spectator," says Director Claud Lelouch (Un Homme et Une Femme). "He recognizes a smooth but forced décor and performance as unnatural. There is much less hypocrisy in films today...
David Wheeler's production departs from Brook where it shouldn't and follows it where it must. This is inevitable, since the play really doesn't exist apart from its interpretation. Wheeler substitutes a broad cineramic "happening" stage for Brook's deep proscenium, paralyzing the underlings and thrusting the chorus in our laps. This is fine, for he makes good use of vertical poses (pyramids, piggy-backs, tableaux) at the expense of marching scenes and horas. But there are other problems. Kimball and Kimbrough, while excellent, are all too evidently acting toward their roles from their personalities (which shouldn...