Innovative Design on European Stages: From Salzburg to Glasgow

Innovative Design on European Stages From Salzburg to Glasgow Glenn Loney The major importance of effective design of sets, costumes, and lighting in the success of a European stage production during the summer festival season often passes unnoticed by Jet Set spectators who go to such performance meccas as Salzburg mainly to be seen-rather than to see. Less defensible is the indifference of critics, who frequently dismiss or ignore the contributions made by talented designers, working closely with directors and conductors. Because opera and dance productions are generally reviewed by music critics, concentrating on the technical skills of the performers , this neglect of design is understandable, if not forgivable. Theatre critics, on the other hand, usually have a better grounding in theatre history and practice. They are in a position to point out the significance of design innovations or the relevance of daring scenic images to the text-and subtext -of a classic of the drama. The theatre-riches of a European summer in festival-time, especially in terms of design, make many American festivals look dowdy or even laughable by comparison. America has its excuses, of course. Summer budgets are meager; European festivals are heavily subsidized to attract tourists. American summer audiences are offered a preponderance of Shakespeare (no royalties and the chance for bare-bones productions on "Globe Theatre" stages), outdoor historical drama (cowboys, Indians, and Daniel Boone in rustic settings), and tired revivals of musical comedies (minimal scenery to display some non-acting TV personality). The predominance of realism on the American stage for much of the 20th century has also discouraged the creation of spectacular scenic milieusquite wrong, in fact, for epics like Long Day's Journey into Night-or the invention of daring, even surreal, visions of a play's environment-which 97 might have been a godsend for a work such as Edward Albee's The Lady from Dubuque. In short, Americans who go often to the theatre, the opera, or the dance still see a much more limited range of design styles and applications than do British and continental audiences, or those fortunate Americans who are able to visit such summerfests as Bayreuth, Munich, Salzburg, and Edinburgh . To overcome the language-barrier and attract an international public, most festivals wisely emphasize dance, opera, and music performances . Music, it's often said, speaks a universal language. But, for those festivals, such as Edinburgh, which insist on presenting outstanding dramatic productions, not only in the language of the host-city but also in the tongues of the world's major theatre companies, the strong visual impact of a staging can do much to mitigate linguistic problems. A stunning design, a noted classic or a provocative new script-with synopses in various languages in the program-and brilliant acting are generally elements enough to ensure the success of a production with a polyglot audience . In the Old World, audiences for both opera and legitimate theatre are by now accustomed-or at least not astonished and upset-when they see an opera or a play, which is set in the dimension of reality, treated, instead, by the designer as an entirely new visual adventure. After all, expressionism, surrealism, constructivism, and symbolism are hardly new styles in Europe, so designers are encouraged, both by modernist tradition and by appreciative spectators, to avoid a banal realism, in favor of projecting images of the action, the locale, the atmosphere, or the theme which deal in essences rather than factual details. Such bizarre notions as Mozart's Magic Flute being played on a space-craft hardly ruffle German operagoers, so used are they by now to unusual visual conceptions. If one sees such things in America, in fact, the productions are almost always on opera stages, and they are frequently the work of Europeans such as Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, one of the most innovative-and yet decorative-of designers. Ponnelle also directs the shows he designs, so the integration of all aspects of the production can be quite remarkable. (When one of his ideas misfires, however, the results are disastrous.) The truth is that American designers who are fortunate enough in these depressed times to be asked to design new...