Stage | guardian.co.uk: All performers hope for applause – but the new London West End production of Uncle Vanya twice feels at severe risk of receiving a slow hand-clap. Because the play is written in four acts and Chekhov has specified a detailed different setting for each, the curtain comes down in the middle of each half and remains lowered for what seems like several minutes while the set is changed. The only consolation for audiences is that the other two transformations are able to take place before we come in and during the interval
12 comments:
I'm going to make a broad statement and see what happens here: bring back intervals. The two-act structure is very well ingrained in the modern Western theatregoer, but it very much wasn't throughout the 18th and 19th, leading up into the early 20th centuries. Remember that plays often used to be broken up by shorter vignettes and interstitials, much like the evening of Noh drama or like the opera of the same period. And remember that the theatre of that time didn't have the luxury of adjustable lighting - they had a curtain, and that was it. The dramas of that time are written for a longer interval - rather than being concerned with losing audience attention, you may find happier patrons being able to use the facilities, smoke another cigarette or get another drink at the bar. The choice to take a shorter change and use the break as an opportunity to expand the story with a newsreel or characters out on stage can be engaging and not terribly distracting, but if it won't work for your play, JUST TAKE THE BREAKS THE PLAY WAS WRITTEN WITH.
A contemporary show that made the best use of odd intervals was the Lord of the Rings musical that played in London in the last decade. For a story well known to be in three parts, and with stories that covered MANY locales, they needed to cover a huge scene change from the battle at the end of Part II into Part III. So, they brought the curtain down, and for five minutes brought the action of the story out into the audience, where Orcs wandered the aisles and intimidated audience members, while music carrying the audience out of the battle and into the next scene covered the change.
Of course, there's also an obligation to get the change done as quickly as possible. Stage Managers, rehearse your scene changes, even the Interval ones. You'll be sure you can get it done in time, and if the change must be done in front of the audience, you can complete it looking professional and not overly distracting.
As someone coming with background experience as a stage manager, it's always the worst when as you write down the notes for a scene or you type up what needs to happen during a scene change and your instincts say, "this one is going to be trouble." As a manager, you can point out that this will be troublesome and that it'll need to be rehearsed quite a few times, but there's really nothing to be done about the design. As a manager you can't just say "well, this set change is so illogical, we should just put a slipcase over the sofa and be done with it", the design that is in place must be executed. So, the article's comment about "black-clad stage managers onstage with headsets" being dull and dragging the show down (which is the implication of using that reference immediately before describing the dullness of the shows), is quite inaccurate. The real issue here, is the designers who design without logical limits. The modern theatre-goer won't sit still for four hours and spend 15 to 20 minutes of that watching not the action of the play, but the movement of sets or a drawn curtain with slight shadows of movement at the bottom crack. Set and prop designers (and directors) need to know when enough is enough, and that sometimes, using 8 different chairs for each scene isn't logical, but 3 types of chairs and 5 types of slipcovers is a bit more practical. It's understandable that designers can get lost in the world of the play and want to include all the details of an 18th century parlor, but if there's 3 different houses with different parlors, the paintings that need to change and come off the wall every scene might not be necessary.
I agree that this is tricky to have such an elongated scene change that, regardless of how many times you practice will be awkward. Sometimes you just can't help it and the audience just has to deal with that time. It can also be a little bit of a social experiment to see what they will do with that time. Depending on how flexible the play and the script are, you can even see if there is some kind of entertainment in between if the prolonged change gets annoying for the viewers. The only problem with the change is that the story on stage gets interrupted and we pull the audience out of their world. That can get annoying. On the bright side, there is intermission and the top of the show so really, the audience tolerates a few minutes in the dark only twice.
As someone who is frequently behind the scene I belive that change overs can really make or break a production. First of all the scene changes can make the overall run of a show much longer than it needs to be. Audiences do nto want to be sitting in their seats longer than they have to. Also good change overs can actually look good onstage and be apart of the design.
Scene changes are rarely non-awkward. However, one must accept that they are an inevitable part of the theatre. And, unlike traffic jams, which have been the bane of everyone's existence since the dawn of cars, a difficult scene change can improve over time. It's about two things. 1) A crew's ability to work with one another to make sure everything happens as efficiently as possible and 2) A manager's ability to anticipate trouble spots and work them into the run as needed. With enough rehearsal, the awkward can at least be minimized. Everyone who's ever been on nay type of crew knows that depending on how the change is handled, it either CAN be theatre's traffic jam, or an unfortunate part of live shows that passes by before you quite knew it was there.
This is where stage management becomes fun for me. These shifts that make you work for your paycheck. Yes, I understand the the arguement made about lessening the set, but if given the budget, there is always a way to do it in the time necessary. In the article, the author dicusses the use of a revolving stage. This would have been the best applcation to do away with the problem in this production. If this was out of budget, make large platforms that rotate between acts that can be preset in the wings for the next scene. As for things on walls, have people prepped in the wings to do so. Yes, I believe that designers should also have logical limits to what they incorporate in the set, but in the real world stage managers have to deal with this changes often. There is something to be said about working transitions for hours during tech and finally having everything click into place. And as for the comment about scene shifts being a "traffic jam" of the show, that is only a result of decisions made by the director and designer. If the director has over extended the design and the budget of said design, and all other options to aid the stage management team in the transition have been exhausted, that is when the transitions becomes a traffic jam. But I have seen elaborate large scale transitions happen in almost no time at all, and while it may not be easy or cheap, if it really is a "traffic jam" to the production, they resources should be given to the stage manager to correct it.
Scene changes can sometimes suck, simple as that, and if a show has very specific sets then the director needs to find a way to change the set without loosing the audience. It's not impossible, but it requires some creativity. The director could just take a break when the set needs to be changed, the show would be a little longer but it would prevent the audience from sitting restlessly in their seats waiting for the curtain to go back up. That is not the only option but for a 18th of 19th century piece that might be the best option. As for more creative scene changes, when I went to go see one man two guvnors in the west end this summer, they achieved all their scene changes by lowering the curtain, but bring a live band out in front to the curtain to play musical. Some of the songs were actually music and some were more joking numbers played on water goblets by cast members. It effectively prevent the anxious boredom of scene changes from setting in.
I once heard a flawless scene change described as a dance. If everything can be moved, not necessarily effortlessly, but cleanly and with that certain elegance that usually comes with rehearsing a scene change over and over again, the audience can actually really enjoy watching the scene change. If the change takes longer than the normal 15 seconds but isn't long enough to bring up the house lights and let the audience breath, There shouldn't be any harm in letting the audience see the world transform in front of them. this of course can be hugely affected by the design of the set; if something has to be dragged across the stage instead of pushed on wheels, it certainly doesn't look very nice, but there are ways to make it work. Sometimes its necessary to spend as much time planning a scene change as choreographers do on the big dance numbers. In the end, the stage can look great, the audience gets to see how things work, and no one minds that it was only a scene change.
THANK YOU BRIAN! If a playwright wrote the play with three acts and intended there to be two intermissions, why fight it? Just take the act breaks where they script dictates they be, and the flow of the play will be better. Believe it or not, but playwrights and scenic designers actually do keep scene changes in mind when they create a new play or design. What is to be gained by fighting what was intended for the play? Opera takes numerous act breaks, intermissions, and intervals for a reason! Take La Boheme for example. The score outlines three very different sets with a return to the first set in the last act. It takes time to make these changes happen. That's why opera would lower the curtain, raise the house lights a little bit so people could read their program or converse, and do the change in the time it required. Then the lights would go out, the curtain would raise, and the story would continue. It's a culture thing. If people are expecting there to be long intervals, then they won't mind the time the changes take. It is today's culture that tries to force scene changes that should take minutes into mere seconds. If someone can't sit still for 2 minutes and quietly wait for a scene change to happen behind a curtain, then don't come to the theater!
There is also something to be said for practicing a scene change and having a REALISTIC goal for the time in which the change needs to happen. I was ASMing a show once where the intermission change had to happen in full view of the audience and was completely choreographed by myself and the technical director in order to ensure everything happened in the exact order that was needed. The director's only stipulation was that we "make it look good." It ran 47 minutes the first time we ran the change. The producer bet me we could get it under 7 minutes by the time we were ready to open, but having choreographed the change and worked with the crew for a few days throughout tech, I knew we would only get it down to 11 minutes. Instead of accepting his bet, I bet him in return that it would be an 11 minute change. That way I was giving him my honest opinion of how long the change would take, and was standing by that opinion. In the end the change ended up running about 11 min 7 seconds every night. The most important thing was that I set out a realistic goal and then worked to meet that goal. Everyone on the production team knew what to expect, and they were happy when we met their expectations.
I always hated scene changes because nothing is moving forward. It is because of this I think that the scenic design and director should think about this during the creation of the production. Many playwrights are very specific in the scenery like said in the article, buy think there are plenty of ways of changing a scene but not changing the furniture. The author said that by keeping lows amounts of furniture is dangerous to loss the crowd to the movies however I disagree maybe people who go to see plays like Chekhov do not intent to go to the movie. All in all I would enjoy if somebody worked on ways to smooth out all scene changes in plays.
Maybe the problem is that we think of scene changes as a break in the action. Because nothing is happening in the script besides some white space followed by "Act Two," we throw our arms up in the air and scream "THERE'S A SCENE CHANGE EVERYBODY BE PATIENT WE HAVE TO CHANGE THE SET GET OVER IT OR LEAVE!" If locations HAVE to be changed, and the director/designers decide the production HAS to have fully realized realistic sets for each location (problem #1, but I'll forgive it for the sake of argument), why not use the scene change to further enhance the storytelling? If a character is moving from location A to location B, why not incorporate their journey somehow as the set is changing? Why not further the action instead of insisting with our heels dug in that nothing is happening besides a technical change of scenery?
Perhaps this isn't an issue for stage managers to fix. Like Jess said, even with rehearsals and a great ASM/TD team, some scene changes may be impossible to get in under 11 minutes. In this case, the stage managers were on the ball, doing it to the best of their ability, and it still sucks. It's not something they can fix. Perhaps this is a question instead for directors and designers to ponder. In an age of constant redefinition, why not make the scene change an event? Why not allow it to become its own theatrical beat with a beginning, middle, and end that is engaging and theatrically stimulating? Then stage managers can manage it and make it great and everybody is happy?
I have a lot more to say on this topic and in response to some of the comments above mine. But I'll let it rest. For now.
On a completely different tangent off of something that was mentioned in the article. Have people's attention spans really decreased that much due to the changes in things like tv? I guess, depending on the play, you could have a mini vaudeville-esk show if the set change was long enough, but otherwise, I would think that warning an audience of set changes that last more than 3ish minutes would be a good idea, because it would both give them an idea of how long the set change would take, and reassure them that this was supposed to happen.
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