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  • Backstage in the Theatre: Scenes and Machines trans. by Jean-Pierre Moynet
  • John Earl
Backstage in the Theatre: Scenes and Machines Jean-Pierre Moynet, translated, introduced and annotated by Christopher Baugh in association with David Wilmore Theatreshire Books, 2015 £25 plus £3.50 p&p from www.theatresearch.co.uk, hb, 335 pp., 61 b/w ill. ISBN 9780953412723

In the not so distant past books about theatre buildings tended to be narrative histories of performers, performances, and managements. One could read such a book from cover to cover and still be very little the wiser about the physical nature of the theatre and its technical apparatus. The architect, the stage machinist and the scenic artist, all of whom made significant contributions to the experience of the audience, were noted briefly, if at all.

Times have changed. The pioneering Curtains!!! or a New Life for Old Theatres (Mackintosh and Sell) survey in 1982 excited wide public, rather than specialised, interest and promoted a lively and sustained discussion of theatre architecture and theatre conservation. We now have well-illustrated, scholarly architectural studies of Frank Matcham, Samuel Beazley and C. J. Phipps and there will, doubtless, be more to come. The statutory listing of historic theatres today which has resulted from protective legislation which began in 1947, invariably includes notes on survivals of stage machinery and apparatus. Scenic artists have been celebrated in books and popular exhibitions. The restoration in 1986 of the great complex of machinery at the Tyne Theatre and Opera House in Newcastle upon Tyne was an early landmark of revived interest in the wonders of the mid-Victorian wooden stage, while in more recent years the working baroque theatre at Český Krumlov has been attracting attention from far beyond the borders of the Czech Republic. More immediately, the backstage tours now offered by many theatres are firm favourites with a growing public, curious to know how modern theatres work.

It was Jean-Pierre Moynet who made the first attempt to satisfy the curiosity of the ordinary theatregoer, who is "interested in the theatre and its secrets and does not fear the loss of illusions if he should see the reality close at hand" (38). His book L'Envers du Théatre, published in Paris in 1873, and now in Backstage in the Theatre made accessible to English-language readers, was a detailed and accessible account of the astonishing variety of scenic devices, machines and illusions that appeared at the nineteenth-century climax of development of the gas-lit proscenium stage.

Moynet trained as an architect and established himself as a painter and lithographer, but from 1849 to 1868 was mostly dedicated to various Paris theatres, as scenic innovator and set designer. In L'Envers he writes in an easily readable style, often addressing the reader directly, "I assume", he writes (Chapter 3) "that the reader has seen the performance from the auditorium. Still quite dazzled by the magnificent spectacle, he wishes to know about the ways in which the marvellous [End Page 60] effects he has admired are produced" (38).

In Chapter 17 he takes the reader by the hand on a step by step tour, "one hour before the play begins" (175), of the seething action on and below the stage, up on the fly galleries and in the workshops. He observes the smell of gas as the gas men screw together leather and rubber pipes. The tour also includes "a small indiscretion": a peep into the dressing room of the corps de ballet (183). Spectacular scene changes are explained and, in the following chapter, Moynet provides an engraving (opp. 250) of a brilliant design for a sailing ship by scenic artist and machinist J. L. Chéret. The ship's superstructure is not only well-observed in every detail, but the whole vessel could be made to roll in a convincing manner.

This is not the first time that L'Envers du Théatre has appeared in English. In 1976 a text "translated and augmented" by Alan S. Jackson with Glen Wilson was published in New York, but this had pictures and explanatory drawings much enlarged from the original and with many illustrations added...

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