13BEHIND THE SCENESWHEN IWAS TAKEN TO THE THEATRE AS ASMALL BOY what interested me most of all was the stage scenery. Th
13
BEHIND THE SCENES
WHEN I WAS TAKEN TO THE THEATRE AS A SMALL BOY what interested me most of all was the stage scenery. The interest was not an aesthetic one. No doubt the gardens, balconies and palaces of the Edwardian `sets' looked prettier to me than they would now, but that had nothing to do with it. Ugly scenery would have served my turn just as well. Still less did I mistake these canvas images for realities. On the contrary, I believed (and wished) all things on the stage to be more artificial than they actually were.When an actor came on in ordinary modern clothes I never believed he was wearing a real suit with veritable waistcoat and trousers put on in the ordinary way. I thought he was wearing - and I somehow felt he ought to be wearing - some kind of theatrical overalls which were slipped on all in one piece and fastened invisibly up the back. The stage suit ought not to be a suit; it ought to be something quite different which nevertheless (that's where the pleasure comes) looked like a suit from the stalls. Perhaps this is why I continued, even after I was grown up, to believe in the Cold Tea theory; until a real actor pointed out that a man who played a leading part in a London theatre could afford to, and would certainly rather, provide real whisky (if need were) at his own charges than drink a tumbler of cold tea every evening shortly after his dinner.No. I knew very well that the scenery was painted canvas; that the stage rooms and stage trees, seen from behind, would not look like rooms or trees at all. That was where the interest lay. That was the fascination of our toy theatre at home, where we made our own scenery. You cut out your piece of cardboard in the shape of a tower and you painted it, and then you gummed an ordinary nursery block on to the back to make it stand upright. The rapture was to dart to and fro. You went in front and there was your tower. You went behind and there - raw, brown cardboard and a block.It was best of all when the door at the back of the stage room opened to show a little piece of passage - unreal passage, of course, its panels only canvas, intended to suggest (which one knew to be false) that the sham room on the stage was part of a whole house. `You can see just a little peep of the passage in Looking Glass House ... and it's very like our passage as far as you can see, only you know it may be quite different on beyond.' Thus Alice to the Kitten.'
Biological needs, producing, or stimulated by, temporary physiological states, climb into a young man's brain, pass on to the mysterious stage and appear as 'Love'-it may be (since all sorts of plays are performed there) the love celebrated by Dante, or it may be the love of a Guido2
or a Mr Guppy.3
We can call this the contrast of Reality and Appearance. But perhaps the fact of having first met it in the theatre will protect us from the threat of derogation which lurks in the word Appearance. For in the theatre of course the play, the `appearance', is the thing. All the backstage `realities' exist only for its sake and are valuable only in so far as they promote it. A good, neutral parable is Schopenhauer's story of the two Japanese who attend an English theatre. One devoted himself to trying to understand the play although he did not know a word of the language. The other devoted himself to trying to understand how the scenery, lighting and other machinery worked, though he had never been behind the scenes in a theatre. `Here', said Schopenhauer, `you have the philosopher and the scientist.''