The Entire Theatre

Today a friend showed me this quote by Richard Schechner. It's taken from Performance Theory which, although written in 1977, seems to have stood the test of time with regard to the basic analysis of theatre and its audiences.

When people go to the theatre they are acknowledging that theatre takes place at special times in special places. Surrounding a show are special observances, practices and rituals that lead into the performance and away from it. Not only getting into the theatre district, but entering the building itself involves ceremony: ticket-taking, passing through gates, performing rituals, finding a place from witch to watch: all this - and the procedures vary from culture to culture, event to event, -frames and defines the performance. " (Page 169)

This comes as an encouragement at a time where the main attention of the project is focusing on the public spaces that are often perceived as supporting the rest of the performance. What many fail to realise, in my opinion, is that there are many more factors than the performance itself that serve to influence an audience's experience of the theatre. Marvin Carlson, a thoerist specialising in the semiotics of theatre architecture writes this in Places of Performance,

The way an audience experiences and interprets a play, we now recognise, is by no means governed solely by what happens on the stage. The entire theatre, its audience arrangements, its other public spaces, its physical appearance, even its location within a city, are all important elements of a process by which an audience makes meaning of its experience. (1989 p.2)

We need to become more sensative to recognising the roll that the whole theatre plays. The countless interactions with the architecture, the marketing, public facilities such as the cloak room , the bar and the toilets, all make up the entire audience experience. Does one reality really stop at the fourth wall where another begins? And is visiting the theatre just about seeing the performance or is it more about engaging in an entire cultural experience?