An artificial island on the Arno

Netherlandish Master, after Jacques Callot, 

The Mock Battle Between the Weavers' and Dyers' Guilds

on the Arno in Florence on 25 July 1619 (detail), c. 1620

In seventeenth century Florence there was an annual festival in which the Weavers' and Dyers' Guilds fought for possession of an artificial hill, built in the middle of the river.  This painting of the event, in Frankfurt's Städel Museum, was based on an etching by the French artist Jacques Callot (1592-1635).  Several museums have copies of Callot's print, which was made in the form of a fan.  The Grand Duke, Cosimo II, had these fans made before the event and distributed to the spectators.  It would be good if one of the people shown in the foreground of this picture could be seen holding one of those fans, but I can't see one. Callot may have included one though in his original design, as a Courtauld blog post about the print explains.

From a landscape perspective I would love to know more about this artificial island.  Who designed it?  How was it made?  It looks pretty big.  How was it anchored so that it didn't drift away or collapse under the weight of the battling weavers and dyers? An earlier artificial island on the Arno, complete with a temple, had been constructed as part of the extravagant wedding celebrations for Cosimo and Maria Magdalena on the 18 October 1608.  It was the stage for a re-enactment of Jason and the Golden Fleece and you can see it in the print below by Matthaeus Greuter (1564–1638).  But this doesn't look as impressive as the one built in 1619, which resembles a real landscape.  Did this hill only look real from a distance?  Were actual trees used?  I imagine a group of picnickers rowing out to enjoy this temporary idyll on the night before the battle.

Has anyone done a study of such islands?  They seem to have featured prominently in various European festivals and royal pageants.  In 1638, for example, another Medici, the Queen of France, was led in procession to an artificial island in the Amstel River for a display of dramatic tableaux. In England, Queen Elizabeth was entertained at Kenilworth Castle in 1575 with a famous display that included a floating island with the Lady of the Lake attended by nymphs (these festivities may have inspired Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream). There is an interesting description on the Brown University site, of one of these islands, made for the marriage of Louise-Elizabeth of France and Philip, prince and grand admiral of Spain, in August 1739.  It was not designed to resemble a natural island; this was pure stagecraft - it even contained a salon for an eighty-piece orchestra.

'The structure was suspended on two large boats which were concealed beneath the artificial rock outcroppings along the island’s perimeter. ... The citizens of Paris would instantly recognize that the island was not part of the natural landscape, but an illusionary construct on the river’s surface. However, rather than detracting from its ability to awe, in fact it added to the island’s captivating quality. The entirety of the structure was created for the conspicuous consumption of the spectators.'

Emerald City

I’ve been looking through a library copy of The Art of the Hollywood Backdrop, a huge, glossy and expensive book based on material in the Art Directors Guild archives. Among its many full page illustrations there is a relatively brief history of painted backdrops in Hollywood, followed by short chapters on some key figures: George Gibson, Ben Carré, Duncan Alanson Spencer and two family dynasties, the Coakleys and the Strangs.

George Gibson (1904-2001) is possibly the most interesting of these from a landscape perspective, partly because he was also a well regarded water colourist and leading figure in the Californian School of plein air artists (many of whom worked in Hollywood). Gibson had been trained at Glasgow School of Art before emigrating to America during the Depression.  He had quite a low opinion of some of the backdrop artists he found working at MGM...

‘We had a large backing of mountains and pine trees to paint. At that time we had to work off fixed scaffolding with standing levels seven feet apart with a forty foot high backing. The pine trees in the foreground of the backing ran full size top to bottom. [When we] struck the fixed scaffolding, the only part of the pine trees that matched was their trunks. Every section on the seven levels [of scaffolding] had a different version of pine needles because each artist had his own conception of what pine needles should look like. It was obvious that they hadn’t been painting in the out-of-doors, or even bothered to look critically at a pine tree, if ever.’ 

Gibson was put in charge of work on backdrops for The Wizard of Oz, Brigadoon, North by Northwest, Forbidden Planet and many others.  The book includes photographs of the sound stages on which such movies were acted out, with their foreground props merging quite convincingly with painted landscape backgrounds.  There is an example of one landscape setting he painted himself, a church in the snow which can be seen in The Brothers Karamazov (1958).  However, many of the old backdrops have long since been damaged and lost.

When Mark Cousins was directing the Edinburgh Film Festival in the mid 90s he decided to draw a link between The Wizard of Oz and the city of Gibson's birth.  "We thought it would be fun and challenging to transform Edinburgh Castle into the Emerald City. No-one knew about the Gibson connection at that time."  I'm not sure what this transformation entailed, but certainly the connection has now been established and you'll find Gibson referred to in several online guides to Edinburgh.

Boisgeloup in the Rain

Picasso 1932: Love, Fame, Tragedy is a wonderful exhibition, well worth the five stars Laura Cumming gave it in The Guardian.  There are many highlights but I suspect few critics will draw anyone's attention to the presence of five modestly-sized landscapes, painted at Boisgeloup where the artist was staying in the spring of 1932.  I was looking at these earlier today, having walked through relentless rain to reach Tate Modern.  The weather was apt - as John Richardson points out in his biography of Picasso, 'Easter was very wet that year; most of these views are striated with driving rain - an effect that van Gogh had borrowed from Hiroshige - otherwise they are surprisingly prosaic.'  This is certainly true in comparison to the marvellous sequence of Marie-Thérèse paintings Picasso was working on at the time.  As Laura Cumming writes, their 'atmosphere runs from midnight to bright day, across the seasons and centuries from some ancient grove to modern-day Paris. She dreams; he conjures the myths.'  Boisgeloup in the Rain can't really compete with this.

Pablo Picasso, Landscape with Dead and Live Trees, 1919

Source: Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain because image published in 1921)

In 1932 Picasso's creativity was so all-embracing that it seems to have encompassed every genre of art, including landscape.  But I'm not surprised to find, looking back, that this is the first time I have featured him on this blog.  Picasso's attitude to landscape is captured by John Richardson in connection with another of his occasional paintings of the view outside (see above).  This was painted in 1919, shortly after Picasso had completed work on sets for Tricorne for the Ballets Russes.  

'Designing for the ballet had left a theatrical stamp on his perception of nature.  To the right, farm buildings constitute "wings" (as in Tricorne); to the left, two trees cry out to be scaled up, hung on gauze, and used as a repoussoir to imply recession without recourse to perspective.'

Richardson quotes Picasso's dealer Paul Rosenberg, writing to the artist with 'the most inconceivable news' that he had actually managed to sell this painting, 'the one you thought unsaleable, le paysage rousseauiste.'  

'Rosenberg's hyperbole was presumedly supposed to encourage his artist to do more landscapes, because they would appeal to collectors weaned on impressionism.  Rosenberg failed to realize that Picasso was not a paysagiste at heart.  Nature fascinated him, but only insofar as he could bring it within reach and have his metamorphic way with it.'

Coulisses de Forêt

 Six friezes for a paper theatre, 1880-1920
Source: 50Watts

I have been rather busy of late, as the tidal wave of consequences from the Referendum has swept over and fundamentally altered my place of work, and so it's been hard to find time to think about landscape and art.  However, I've just looked back at some draft posts and come upon the material here, which I wrote in 2011 after reading Will Schofield's 50Watts blog, where he reproduced various sets of scenery, like the one above, from a Dutch Puppetry Museum database.  They are all in muted colours, like memories of childhood.  When we were growing up I wasn't that taken with the Pollock’s Toy Theatre my parents got us; more recently, however, my sons did play a little with a Czech magnetic theatre.  The novelty wore off quite quickly though.  In an essay on the toy theatre, Robert Louis Stevenson looked back on the pleasure he had experienced admiring and painting these scenes and figures.  But then what?  'You might as well set up a scene or two to look at, but to cut the figures out was simply sacrilege; nor could any child twice court the tedium, the worry, and the long-drawn disenchantment of an actual performance.'

Another of my favourite blogs back in 2011, the now defunct Venetian Red, did an informative post on the history of toy theatres and their enthusiasts (you can read it here).  Writers and artists who remembered them with fondness included Goethe, Jack B. Yeats, Cocteau and Chesterton, who asked

“has not everyone noticed how sweet and startling any landscape looks when seen through an arch? This strong, square shape, this shutting off of everything else, is not only an assistance to beauty; it is the essential of beauty… This is especially true of toy theatre, that by reducing the scale of events it can introduce much larger events… Because it is small it could easily represent the Day of Judgement. Exactly in so far as it is limited, so far it could play easily with falling cities or with falling stars.”

Marcel Jambon, set design model for Verdi's Otello, 1895

Source: Wikimedia Commons

I wonder if there were painters who toyed with toy theatres while working up their compositional ideas, like set designers experimenting with their scale models?  Thomas Gainsborough, after all, was said to have 'built model landscapes in his studio, consisting of coal, clay or sand with pieces of mirror for lakes and sprigs of broccoli to represent trees, in order to help him construct his compositions.'  The set of Coulisses de Forêt below could have been used to design a hunting scene with framing trees and repoussoir stag, except, I suppose, that by the time it was printed in 1889, art had largely left behind these classical conventions.  The Toy Theatre blog says that the Épinal-based firm behind this example, Pellerin, produced scenes that were 'very distinctive in style and very French, but for all that rather second rate. The Pellerin sheets were like its other cut-out products, intended to be made, set up and looked at but not performed. There were no Toy Theatre plays as such, only tableaux.'

Coulisses de Forêt, 1889

Source: Geheugen van Nederland

---

Postscript
It is a month later and I have just seen a toy theatre - the one used at the start of Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander.  As I mention in my most recent post, I visited the Bergmancentrer on Fårö and it is on display there. I have included a photograph below (sorry about the unavoidable reflection from the window opposite).  The sign above the stage means 'Not for Pleasure Alone'.  The film begins with running water and then cuts to this theatre, where a young boy's face is revealed as he pulls up the background landscape scenery.

Southern Light Stations

Inspecting a tiny stereoscopic cloud study in 

Noémie Goudal's Southern Light Stations

Here's the Photographers' Gallery summary of the work on display in Noémie Goudal's Southern Light Stations exhibition.

'In Towers, large-scale follies or telescopic structures sit within vast, featureless landscapes, as if suspended between heaven and earth, while Stations depict seemingly free-floating spheres, reminiscent of celestial bodies: the sun, moon and planets. Closer investigation of the images reveals ropes, scaffolding and smoke referencing their construction. The exhibition centrepiece is an observatory-style architectural structure, offering a selection of stereoscopic cloud studies.'

Goudal has been identified as part of a group of younger photographers 'choosing to foreground the formerly ‘repressed’ aspects of the medium', i.e. the physical means and technical processes necessary to create an image. The apparatus required to keep her spheres in place comes over though as more than just a reaction to photoshop and a means of focusing attention on the actions of the artist.  It gives the Stations photographs a mysterious quality, as we wonder what purpose they serve - are they remnants of some installation or performance, or envirographic instruments of the kind imagined by the British Exploratory Land Archive? As she says in the interview embedded below, the work is partly based on early astronomers like Copernicus and the instruments they might have used.  The gallery's central observatory like-structure with its stereoscopic viewers provides a way to imagine studying the form of clouds before the invention of the telescope.

The exhibition includes one Stations photograph that takes up a whole wall.  Watching my son walking up to this it looked as if he was on a stage set, and then as if he might enter the imaginary space.  In a short essay on the artist's work Marta Gili sees her images in terms of an emptying of the landscape. 'As in the theatre of The Absurd it could be said that here nature is represented in order to be vacated, like a stage ultimately intended to be inhabited by other sets, which are in turn nothing other than masks of something that might have been or might have taken place in another time, past or future, or another place, near-at-hand or far off.'  This theatrical element is echoed by Bernard Marcelis who writes of the way Goudal has chosen to situate her constructions in caves and islands, places that are 'imbued with a certain dramaturgy, or at least are propitious to reconstructions or particular mises en scenes'.  In a third essay reprinted on the artist's website, Sebastien Montabonel and Emma Lewis relate her imagined spaces to Foucault's notion of heterotopias. 'Building a stage on which our imaginations can play out, a narrative in which we are protagonists, Goudal’s images brings us, as viewers, back to ourselves.'

Hills are all that is necessary, with a few trees for shade

Alfred Jarry on his bicycle

 
In his essay 'Of the Futility of the 'Theatrical' in the Theatre' (1896) Alfred Jarry offered 'a few words on natural decors, which exist without duplication if one tries to stage a play in the open air, on the slope of a hill, near a river, which is excellent for carrying the voice, especially when there is no awning, even though the sound may be  weakened.  Hills are all that is necessary, with a few trees for shade ... Three or four years ago Monsieur Lugné-Poë and some friends staged La Gardienne at Presles, on the edge of the Isle-Adam forest.  In these days of universal cycling it would not be absurd to make use of summer Sundays in the countryside to stage a few very short performances (say from two to five o'clock in the afternoon) of literature which is not too abstract.'

 

Photograph of Maurice Pottecher's Théâtre du Peuple at Bussang in 1895

Jarry seems more interested in the idea of making theatre accessible to people than he is in the artistic possibilities of staging drama in real landscapes.  As Arnold Aronson notes in The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography, an open-air Theatre of the People had in fact recently been established by Maurice Pottecher, with a stage backing onto a hillside.  Discussing a performance there in 1896 the editor of the Mercure de France expressed a wish that 'some audacious young director - M. Lugné-Poë, for example - would take the opportunity to present plays in the parks around Paris.'  However, that year M. Lugné-Poë was busy inciting a riot with the first performance of Jarry's Ubu Roi...

Aurélien-François Lugné-Poë was the director of the Théâtre de l'Œuvre, which had opened in 1893 with Maeterlink's Pelléas and Mélisande.  The following year he staged Henri de Régnier's La Gardienne, the play Jarry mentions in the context of outdoor theatre.  Régnier's words were recited from the orchestra pit whilst the actors moved silently on stage, partly hidden by a green gauze veil.  The backdrop was a Symbolist landscape of blue trees with a purple palace, painted by Édouard Vuillard.  According to the critic Jules Lemaître it was like 'a Puvis de Chavannes fresco imitated by the unsteady hand of a colour-blind baby.'  All this did not go down well with audiences, who were particularly baffled by the lack of synchronisation between speech and actions.  It is easy to imagine Régnier's poetry casting more of a spell under the trees of a real forest.

KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE

 

 Still from Ka Mountain by OpenEndedGroup

In 1972 Robert Wilson and his avant-garde theatre group the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds staged a seven-day non-stop performance across an entire mountain landscape in Iran, called KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE: a story about a family and some people changing.  Maria Shevtsova describes it in her book on Robert Wilson as 'a site-specific fantasia, a ritual and a pilgrimage across the seven hills of the arid rocky terrain of the Haft Tan Mountain.' It 'involved an old man's journey up one of these hills while a host of unconnected events occurred simultaneously on all seven.  Every day a different Byrd played the old man as if to suggest, by the change of actor, the idea of he seven stages through which human life supposedly passes.  The old man paused at various stations identified by cut-outs of such symbols of Western civilisation as Noah's Ark, the Acropolis and the New York skyline.  These served as relay points for the performers and were where the spectator-participants could stop and rest, if they had not dropped out already.  (Indeed, few managed to last the week.)'  A dinosaur stood at the summit and the performance ended with the face of a giant ape going up in flames.  But 'the mountain itself with its searing heat during the day and intense cold at night could be said to be the prime actor in this epic whose greatest significance probably lay in the personal inner journeys undergone by its makers.'

 Still from Ka Mountain by OpenEndedGroup

In an animated film made recently by the OpenEndedGroup, Robert Wilson describes his design for KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE.  The image above shows a sketch of the setting for the 'Overture' to the performance: an oasis-like Sufi garden with a view up to the mountain.  This was where, as Osia Trilling, wrote in The Drama Review (June 1973), 'the audience was able to get a foretaste of some of what was to follow later.  Here they caught their first glimpse of the livestock Wilson had collected, some of them in uncomfortably small cages, including a bear, a lion, various horses, donkeys, poultry, deer, goats and an elephant.'  If this sounds a bit dodgy from the perspective of 2013, consider Wilson's unrealised plan to blow up the top of the mountain at the end of the seven-day pilgrimage...  'At this, the Shiraz Festival authorities, who had proved unusually accommodating until then, drew the line.'  How playful this proposal was is not clear: Trilling tried to elicit information from him in an amusingly unhelpful interview ("What is the meaning of Ka in your title?" - "I dunno.")  In the end Wilson was content to set an emblematic Chinese pagoda on fire - its cut-out form can be seen on the left next to the burning ape in the photograph below.  Basil Langton recalled the scene in, 'Journey to Ka Mountain': the landscape on this last night became 'a fiery torch that burned all night over the sleeping town of Shiraz - by accident or design, a symbol of "mountain theology" and the fire-worship of ancient Persia.'

Basil Langton's photograph of the burning ape on Ka Mountain

See The Drama Review, Vol 17, No. 2, June 1973

Footnote:
Paul Kaiser of OpenEndedGroup has alerted me to 'a huge new work we're making about a cross-section through the broken city of Detroit', which sounds like it will appeal to readers of this blog.  Their site includes earlier artworks and some fascinating writings, including something on the background to their film Ka Mountain.

They played one evening in a grove of oak trees

 The Ben Greet Players in scenes from As You Like It

Photographs from The Craftsman, September 1907

In 1886 the English actor and impresario Ben Greet came up with the novel idea of forming a professional theatre company dedicated to performing plays at outdoor locations.  One of his actors later recalled that "the pieces most generally chosen were 'The Tempest,' 'The Dream,' 'Twelfth Night,' and 'As You Like It.'  Seasons lasting six weeks were sometimes given in the Botanic Gardens, Regent's Park, while on country tours, care was taken to have an option over a neighbouring playhouse in case of rain - which is not quite unknown In England!  In Llandudno (Wales) we played 'The Dream,' in a beautiful natural amphitheatre, known as 'The Happy Valley,' before 10,000 people, a memorably unique occasion."  Greet himself explained to an interviewer why they mainly stuck to Shakespeare comedies: "frock coats and grey trousers don’t seem to fit in with the green background of nature. Doublet and hose is the only wear that the public like, and I quite agree with them."

Ben Greet at an outdoor theatre on the shores of Lake Minnetonka

The company was based in America from 1902 to 1914 (when Greet returned to London to take over the Old Vic) and a Google search will reveal various references to their performances in old newspapers.  In June 1911 for example they were in Princeton: '"A Midsummer Night's Dream," which will be given to-night, is above all plays, adapted to outdoor production and has been produced with much favor at many colleges. The woodland effect will be easily achieved on the Princeton campus, and the performance should be both charming and instructive'.  In 1908 President Roosevelt invited Greet's Woodland Players to perform on the lawn of the White House - on this occasion they opted for a play based on Greek myth rather than a Shakespeare comedy.  However, it wasn't all plain sailing: 'Greet, ever mindful of the box-office, was convinced, during one Canadian alfresco matinee, that two latecomers had slipped into the back row without paying — they were discovered to be two bears.'

 

 'The poetic value of forest settings'

To what extent did the outdoor environment and surrounding landscape affect the way people experienced these plays?  Some anecdotes are given in a 1907 article in The Craftsman by Selene Ayer Armstrong, entitled 'Under the greenwood tree with Ben Greet and his merry woodland players: their happiness in the simple things of life a lesson in the joy of living.'  At a performance of The Tempest on the shore of Lake Michigan, 'the weather was fine until the play began, when one of those sudden storms frequent on the lake front was threatened.  Trees were swayed by the wind and a few gentle raindrops fell.  The sky grew black at the very moment in which Miranda, who grasped the possibilities of the situation, pleaded with her father to allay the storm. [...] On another occasion, when the company was presenting "Midsummer Night's Dream," Titania, looking up at an uncertain moon, spoke the line "The moon, methinks, looks with a watery eye," and a gentle rain began to fall.  The audience simply laughed heartily and raised its umbrellas for the moment, while the play continued uninterruptedly.'  The article concludes with the memories of an audience member who had seen A Midsummer Night's Dream in Rockford, Illinois:

"They played one evening in a grove of oak trees on the bank of the Rock River.  The river flowed behind them, and from somewhere in the trees soft music was heard.  It was in August, and in the distant background a wonderful harvest moon, all red, came up.  The actors, in their Greek costumes, seemed the most natural and beautiful part of the scene.  As a spectacle, I shall never forget it.  We all showed signs of tears, and I cared not whether a line were spoken, had I but been allowed to look."

The Rialto Bridge from the Riva del Vin

Michele Marieschi, The Rialto Bridge from the Riva del Vin, 1737

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The National Gallery's recent exhibition 'Venice: Canaletto and his Rivals' set the works of Canaletto alongside other Venetian painters like Luca Carlevarjis, whose choice of views and festivals at the start of the eighteenth century were a model for the later artists, Bernardo Bellotto, Canaletto's nephew who left to work at the courts of northern Europe (I included one of his views of Warsaw in an earlier post), and Francesco Guardi, whose poetic vision of the city looks forward to Turner.  Perhaps unsurprisingly given the theatricality of Venice, three of the artists in the exhibition began as scene painters: Canaletto himself, his early rival Michele Marieschi, and Antonio Joli.  Canaletto's father was a scene painter and so was his brother.  At this time the trade was often passed to the next generation and the Galli-Bibiena family, who were designing theatrical sets around Europe throughout the eighteenth century, can be seen to have influenced some of Marieschi's compositions.  Antonio Joli worked in the theatre at Modena and Perugia before coming to Venice.  He later visited England, decorating the house of John James Heidegger, director of the King's Theater at Haymarket and a renowned producer of Venetian-style masquerades.

The National Gallery podcast recently had a brief interview with theatrical historian Julie Dashwood on the influence of theatre design on Venetian view paintings.  She discusses perspective, lighting and framing before the interviewer turns to one of Joli's paintings showing the Doge’s Palace, Campanile and St Mark’s Square seen from the waters of the Bacino di San Marco.  "This surely can’t have anything to do with set designs? I mean ships and boats and the rest of it, can it?" "It can," replies Dashwood.  "The Renaissance stage - and in this the baroque stage is not a break, it’s a continuity of what happened in the Renaissance - they loved special effects. And they loved being able to create the effect of water and rain on stage and bringing in all kinds of machines. They had cloud machines – you can see the clouds here.  ... Of course Joli is able to bring it all into one painting and he creates a sort of stage ... the darkened auditorium if you like is on one side and the real action, the big-wigs, the grandees are coming in to play up their parts on the water, which is their stage, and then going into the city, which is their stage."

Dover cliff

This posting concerns King Lear, ‘which it is surely impossible for anybody who cares about poetry to write on without some expression of awe’ (Frank Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language). There is an awesome description in Act IV of the view from the top of a cliff, when Edgar tells his blinded father, Gloucester

‘Come on, sir; here's the place: stand still. How fearful
And dizzy 'tis, to cast one's eyes so low!
The crows and choughs that wing the midway air
Show scarce so gross as beetles: half way down
Hangs one that gathers samphire, dreadful trade!
Methinks he seems no bigger than his head:
The fishermen, that walk upon the beach,
Appear like mice; and yond tall anchoring bark,
Diminish'd to her cock; her cock, a buoy
Almost too small for sight: the murmuring surge,
That on the unnumber'd idle pebbles chafes,
Cannot be heard so high. I'll look no more;
Lest my brain turn, and the deficient sight
Topple down headlong.’

This description is a reminder that landscapes appear relatively rarely in plays – there is not normally a reason for a character to describe what lies before them. But here, Gloucester has been blinded and cannot see the danger ahead of him. Edgar says “Give me your hand; you are now within a foot / Of the extreme verge: for all beneath the moon / Would I not leap upright.”

Reading the play to myself, I pictured the distant fishermen like the peasants in Breughel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icraus, unaware of the drama being enacted in their midst. In his essay ‘Perspectives: Dover Cliff and the Conditions of Representation’, Jonathan Goldberg likens Edgar’s description to a Renaissance painting, with Gloucester asked to imagine distant objects progressively smaller, reducing them to near invisibility. Goldberg thinks Shakespeare was influenced by ideas of perspective which were being incorporated at this time into English stage design by Inigo Jones.

Watching the play you can’t stop to admire the view – the action continues and Gloucester falls, although not to his death. I went to see King Lear performed at The Globe theatre last week, a place which doesn’t give any real scope for landscape stage sets or other illusionistic devices to help the audience visualise the scene. Trystan Gravelle (Edgar) and Joseph Mydell (Gloucester) stood at the edge of the stage and delivered their lines surrounded on three sides by groundlings with upturned faces just feet away. It was hard to imagine a precipitous cliff and the distant pebbles below.

Nevertheless, this whole scene is curious as it’s not clear how much of what Edgar describes is really there. He tricks his father into believing he has fallen down the cliff and survived, telling him:

‘Hadst thou been aught but gossamer, feathers, air,
So many fathom down precipitating,
Thou’dst shiver’d like an egg; but thou dost breathe,
Hast heavy substance, bleed’st not, speak’st, art sound.
Ten masts at each make not the altitude
Which thou hast perpendicularly fell:
Thy life’s a miracle.’

Earlier, as they approach the cliff, Gloucester cannot picture their location and his ‘view’ actually resembles the one we in the audience have – no slope, no sea:

Glo. Methinks the ground is even.
Edg. Horrible steep: Hark! do you hear the sea?
Glo. No, truly.

We, just as much a Gloucester, have to rely on the power of Edgar’s language to visualise what he could apparently see before him.

A hot gust of wind blows across the colourless sea...

'The night had brought little relief from the heat, and at dawn a hot gust of wind blows across the colourless sea. The KNIGHT, Antonius Block, lies prostrate on some spruce branches spread over the fine sand....' So begins The Seventh Seal...

In his little BFI Film Classics book about the film Melvyn Bragg says how the opening of the film resembles a play. But in a theatre we would not see the landscape, and it is the setting of this scene that seems to me crucial. The screenplay describes the knight opening his eyes after a morning prayer: he 'stares directly into the morning sun which wallows up from the misty sea like some bloated, dying fish. The sky is grey and immobile, a dome of lead. A cloud hangs mute over the western horizon. High up, barely visible, a seagull floats on motionless wings. Its cry is weird and restless.' It is at this point that the knight turns round and sees Death.

Rugged coasts and islands are perhaps the most archetypal Bergman landscape. In addition to his use of Hovs Hallar in Skåne for The Seventh Seal, I think primarily of the way he used the Stockholm Archipelago in Summer with Monika and his repeated use of the island of Fårö, which first appeared in Through a Glass Darkly. Fårö is, according to, Geoffrey Macnab, a "a remote, windswept place with a landscape that appears flat and barren. There are countless pine trees, fields with ancient stone walls, a succession of sand and shingle beaches, and more sheep than humans." It was on Fårö that Bergman lived until the sad news of his death was announced yesterday.

Dawn growing grey

In Greek drama, before the invention of the skene (a scene building), the open air theatres had no sets beyond what was provided by the stage and the sky. It is possible to identify moments where the landscape was brought into play: references to the rising sun which would have coincided with the dawn, when some performances started. For example, at the start of Euripides play Iphigenia at Aulis, Agamemnon tells an attendant

Away! already the dawn is growing grey, lighting the lamp of day yonder and the fire of the sun's four steeds...

William Turner of Oxford, Before Sunrise, 1847

Source: Libson & Yarker (public domain)

Another play that starts before dawn is Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, where a watchman waits for news of the capture of Troy. Reading these lines now can take you directly to a sense of the time and space in which these plays were first performed...

Moonlit lake

There is a lot to say about the history of landscape in theatrical scenery, especially the way it has influenced painting. Examples would include the stage-like compositions of classical landscape painters like Nicolas Poussin, the use of theatrical models by Thomas Gainsborough, the early work of David Roberts as a scene painter...

One thing that struck me recently reading Anton Chekhov’s play The Seagull was how interesting it would be to collect together the various ways set designers have interpreted a landscape in the play: the lakeside setting of Kostya Treplyov’s ‘decadent drama’. (One could do this for a scene in any play that has been performed repeatedly – I pick this because Chekhov uses an interesting symbolic landscape). At the start of The Seagull, the lake is blocked by a stage, but it is revealed when the play-within-the-play commences, with the moon on the horizon and Treplyov’s actor, Nina Zarechnaya, sitting on a white rock. The whole thing reads like an Edvard Munch painting.

Some outdoor versions of The Seagull have used real lakes. In the theatre there must be many approaches to this landscape, partly depending on the director’s view of Treplyov and the comedy of this particular scene. However, a search on the internet yields almost no production stills, so this interesting survey of theatrical recreations of a writer’s lake must remain imaginary for the time being.


Postscript June 2015
I was reminded of this post seeing that the play is currently being staged at Regent's Park's Open Air Theatre. 'In the first half, John Bausor’s scenery builds on the stage’s natural backdrop of trees and foliage to create an Arcadian vision befitting both the setting of rural Russia and Konstantin’s own vision for theatre. This contrasts with the set for the final acts whose prosaic wooden floorboards proclaim the total sterility of society' (The Londonist).  But what of the lake?  There is no actual lake to be utilised, but reading the reviews I see that there was an artificial one on stage and, in a departure from Chekhov, at one point some servants go skinny dipping in it.

On the subject of landscape and theatre design, I've written more recently about two early examples of environmental scenography: the open-air Theatre of the People in France and the performances of the Ben Greet Players in Britain and America.