Theatre Spaces

There aren’t any. The biggest problems with this stage layout is that teachers & students & professional performers don’t know and have little skill and knowledge in how to make it work best. Audience on three sides:
A. Immediately awakens performers to the inclusion of spectators/audience in every single scene of any play being performed.
B. Is NOT the same as “Audience Participation,” like we see in Pantomimes, today.
C. Obliges performers to see, speak to, and hear every single spectator/audience member in every moment of any play being performed.
D. Can be harmed and undermined by directional stage lighting, which tends to blind perfomers to audiences, even when they’re on three sides.
E. Was the format Shakespeare chose for performing his plays, so arguably the best model for performing any play today, not just Shakespeare.
F. OBLIGES movement in performers. It thus heightens imaginative performances.
We all know the poor student performer who “can’t think of any movement to do in this speech, Miss… can you help please?” Audiences ONLY to the FRONT limits these student’s ability for movement because, quite simply, this audience arrangement doesn’t REQUIRE or OBLIGE any movement from performers! In contrast, audience on three sides has the opposite impact: it OBLIGES performers to MOVE.

Performers turning to face each side of the audience during the delivery of Shakespeare’s KEY lines demonstrates just how significant this arrangement can be:
“To be” (to one side)
“Or not to be” (to the other side)
“That is the question” (to the front).

The best version is the mysterious
“Romeo” (to one side)
“Romeo” (to the other side)
“Wherefore art thou Romeo?!” (to the front)
…because performing these lines like this immediately reveals Juliet means “WHY are you called Romeo?” not “WHERE are you Romeo?”
Performing these three lines only to the front misleads students into believing Juliet is SEARCHING for Romeo, because the performer gazes out in only one direction.

Audience on three sides of performers has always been the most common form of professional theatres “over the last 400 years” according to Iain Mackintosh, Architecture, Actor and Audience (Routledge 1993, 25) categorically identifies a “continuity of character” in England’s (or the UK’s) most inspiring professional theatres “over the past 400 years.” These characteristics include being:
1. Small scale.
2. Uncomfortable.
3. With “audience on three sides of the main acting area, with the greater proportion to the front.”

Be VERY CLEAR in your teaching: these characterise every single one of England’s most inspiring theatres over the last 400 to 450 years.

Mackintosh and I disagree on what is CORE to these performance spaces. My own publications emphasise the significance of “on three sides.” Mackintosh agrees this is significant, but not CORE. He prefers to emphasise the “small scale” factor. The so-called “Thrust Stage” is a term dating from c,1890 (not earlier – see Oxford English Dictionary), when Parliament ORDERED the closure of all theatres where performers & audience shared the same space. New laws passed from 1876 -1892 directed Theatre Managers and owners to build a masonry wall, 3ft deep (stretching from basement through the roof line), categorically banning audiences from being anywhere near the stage floor. “Fire protection” was the specious grounds of ).

I have seen a piece where Traverse was used to create a debate for an election and it made the audience feel like they were being persuaded into voting for each person. I hope this has helped.