By: Rebecca Stanton
Illustration by: Francesca Corno
Filling the main theatres of the West End are huge, commercial shows with expensive sets and celebrity casts. Musicals based on nostalgic classics like Back to the Future or The Devil Wears Prada are popping up alongside decades-long running theatrical staples like Les Miserables, The Mousetrap, and Wicked. With their flying cars, breathtaking costumes, and full-out musical numbers, the success of these shows, in part, comes down to their use of theatrical spectacle.
When referring to theatre, ‘spectacle’ denotes the wonder and awe created by the combined use of set, space, music, movement, and special effects that engage audiences and enhance storytelling. Its importance as a theatrical device stretches back to Ancient Greece with Aristotle in his ‘Poetics,’ describing spectacle as one of the six elements of tragedy alongside plot, character, thought, diction, and music. Of these elements, however, he suggests that spectacle is the least important.
As technology has advanced; audience expectations have shifted and capitalist commercialisation has made theatre an increasingly competitive industry. The theatrical use of spectacle is ever heightening. But in this Olympics of spectacle, is the essence of theatrical storytelling being lost to mere sensation? In its burgeoning competitiveness, has theatre stagnated? Or is this critique an exaggeration altogether?
The purpose of theatre is a vast, divisive, and often inconclusive question. Depending on the ideas of different practitioners, many different stances can be adopted. If you asked Brecht what the purpose was, it might be a didactic message of political activism; if you asked Stanislavski, it could be a reflection of human emotional and psychological truths. To make a moral judgement on spectacle is somewhat counterproductive. What truly matters is, perhaps, how spectacle serves the story being told.
In the past, the prioritisation of theatrical spectacle has led to stagnation and stereotyping in theatre that reinforced social inequalities. For example, in the 19th century, elaborate spectacles became central to the theatrical experience. The impact was felt significantly within women’s roles; written into passive, sexualised parts that reinforced the infamous Victorian Whore/Madonna binary, the spectacularised depiction of women in popular Victorian theatre accentuated and reinforced limiting middle-class assumptions of gender roles.
The antithesis of theatrical spectacle is minimalistic theatre. Like the interior design movement, minimalist theatre sees a stripping back of the set, leaving relatively few set pieces or props. Considered one of the leading theatrical practitioners of minimalism, Peter Brooks described it in a 2013 interview as a recognition that “the human being is greater than the greatest stage effects.” In minimalist theatre, theatrical ‘magic’ is created through the actor’s own skill set, transforming ordinary objects into extraordinary ones. It focuses on the audience’s perception of the actor as a fellow human being, fostering a sense of intimacy between performer and spectator that forces audiences to engage intellectually with the theatrical action.
On a more practical level, however, minimalist theatre is a much more accessible style. The sets, special effects and costumes used to create spectacular performances are expensive and the tickets, especially on the West End, level increasingly around the £100 mark. Minimalist theatre, however, at its ‘most minimal’ merely relies on actors, audiences, and space. This brings down production and (sometimes) ticket prices much lower. It is therefore a more democratic, more pure form of theatre that focuses on the artistry of the actor-audience relationship, no matter how much money is in either’s pocket.
Equally, the minimal could be argued to be as much of a spectacle as the maximal in theatre. Maybe the real spectacle is inherent to the nature of theatre itself: something to allow audiences to indulge in. Perhaps this tension between the spectacle and the minimal is a false dichotomy, and there is no judgement to be made. Both theatrical forms arguably have an important role to play in our evolving theatrical landscape. If used to aid the director’s artistic vision and enhance the power of storytelling, both are powerful tools for crafting and styling a production.
However, relying on spectacle as a crutch for attracting audiences, prioritising it over storytelling, turns theatre into mere visual entertainment and opens the gates for stagnation and stereotypes in theatre that support social inequities. To continue to progress the theatrical art form and to attract new audiences and tell relevant, important stories, theatre must remain open to new, diverse ideas and voices that look beyond the desire for spectacle.
