Architecture and drama are sister arts, but like most sisters they fail to bring out the best in each other. Indeed by the end of this book it might seem that they have been deliberately avoiding each other’s Company. The great formative minds of drama—the Greek playwrights, the authors of the Miracle Plays, Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Moliere, Corneille, Racine— were all happy enough with the barest necessities of performance. Ibsen and Chekhov asked for little more. Strindberg’s preferred ‘intimate theatre’ was an ordinary room. And conversely, those theatres of most architectural interest—Greek theatres of 300—100 bc, Roman theatres from ad 100—300, the theatres of Renaissance Italy and of Europe and America between 1700 and 187£—all belong to periods when the art of drama was at a low ebb.

Are theatres, in fact, judged primarily in functional terms? The ways in which each successive architectural style has tackled the problem of seating a large number of people in comfort facing a stage are in themselves of con-siderable interest. Should we ask for anything more? What has the relation-ship been between the theatre äs architecture and the living drama of its time? In a general way, of course, the form of drama has determined the form of theatre. But in any particular instance it is clear that the form of theatre has normally conditioned the form of drama. Only very occasionally have dramatists insisted on a change in theatre design in order that their works may be more efficiently performed. Wagner is the most obvious example. Far more often they have written, äs a matter of course, to fit the performing conditions of their time. The two really revolutionary periods of change in the history of European theatres—in the Renaissance and now in the mid-twentieth Century—have come, äs far äs one can judge, through the insistence of patrons, producers, theorists, actors, even architects. The cry for new theatres in which to perform a new drama has been raised before there was any new drama to perform.

The three ‘beginnings’ of European drama offer an intriguing series of parallels. In ancient Greece, in the early Middle Ages and in the Renaissance, one sees physical settings for drama being evolved simply so that large numbers of people can participate in the same event. In each case, these physical settings generated conventions which the audiences accepted but which in turn began to modify the event that they had come to witness. Imperceptibly they placed a gulf between the audience and the event, in the sense that the stage became increasingly a world of its own,

governed by its own laws. When a new form of drama, with a different physical setting, took the place of the old, the relationship between audience and event was re-established in a new way. At present, the theatre finds itself in a stränge half-way position, anxious to preserve the repertory of the past, searching for new conventions, trying to decide what kind of architecture, if any, is suited to its needs, hankering after the ritual of earlier periods but unable to break free from the demands of entertain-ment. What, indeed, is the ritual aspect of drama? How did it arise? Can it be recaptured?

The great festival of Dionysus at Athens (the City Dionysia) took place at the end of March and the beginning of April. The first two days were devoted to processions, sacrifices and hymns; the third to comedies; the fourth, fifth and sixth to tragedies (a trilogy plus a satyr play each day); and the festival ended on the seventh. Plays were chosen several months in advance. The successful authors were allocated a patron (a wealthy man who paid for the production), actors and chorus, and at the end of the festival a prize was awarded for the best comedy and the best tragedy. We have long lists of these prizewinning plays, but only a handful actually survive : seven by Aeschylus, seven by Sophocles, eighteen by Euripides and eleven by Aristophanes. Upon these few texts, the writings of commen-tators like Aristotle, Pollux and Plutarch, and the remains of the theatres themselves, our whole knowledge of Greek drama has to be based.

Drama had begun only a generation or so earlier. It had developed from ceremonies performed in honour of Dionysus, involving ödes sung by a dancing chorus dressed äs animals, maenads or satyrs. Gradually they took in more and more mythological material (stories about Dionysus himself were supplemented by stories about other heroes such äs Theseus, Jason and Prometheus) and the chorus leader came to be the performer of semi-dramatic monologues in which he assumed the character of the hero.

As time went on the ritual features were given less prominence than the dialogue and mime which carried the story along, but they remained present until the very end. Most Greek tragedies centred round an altar, the chorus remained on stage throughout the action, singing invocations to the gods and commenting on the plot from a moral and religious point of view; and each trilogy of serious plays ended with a satyr play in which the origins of the drama in a rustic fertility celebration were easily recognizable.

Technically, the form inherited (and probably largely created) by Aeschylus was taken over without much change by his successors. It was analysed in his usual methodical way by Aristotle in the Poetics. In Aeschylus’ time all stage conversations were literally dialogues—only two characters appeared on stage at the same time; Sophocles added a third (comedy was more liberal in this respect). The action represented was supposed to take only äs long äs the play itself and the place normally emained the same throughout, although here again, comedy was much freer. Violence and death always took place off-stage and were described to the audi­ence by a messenger. Strängest of all to a modern playgoerwould have been the convention by which all the characters were masked and wore false shoes to make them appear taller. Masks and costumes made it easy for the audience to teil what sort of character was being represented [PL i]. Pollux, writing in the second Century ad, describes forty-four comic masks and twenty-three tragic ones. Nothing like naturalistic acting was attempted. In the large open-air spaces of Greek theatres (which were built to hold prac-tically the whole population of a city) this would have been impossible anyway. Masks, costume, movement and language were all stylized, giving the dramatic poet freedom only within quite narrow limits. Even so, the three playwrights whose work has survived were notably individual in their approach—Aeschylus (^2^—4^6 bc) used the dramatic form to examine the rules by which men should live with each other and with the gods; Sophocles (496—406 bc) found wisdom through suffering by the acceptance of an implacable destiny; while Euripides (48^—406 bc) was more inter-ested in psychological observation and the portrayal of ordinary human beings in situations of stress.

It must always be remembered that the surviving buildings are all later than the surviving plays. Aeschylus’ own theatre was almost certainly of wood. The original acting and dancing area (the orchestra) was simply a circle cut into the hillside, surrounded on three sides by tiers of seats. By the time of Sophocles and Euripides this circle was probably reserved for the chorus, while the actors stood behind it, possibly on a slightly raised platform (this point is still in dispute). There was no scenery, but there must have been a few props (tombs, altars, etc.) and some sort of mechanical devices for apparitions and furies. Somewhere at the back was a place for the actors to prepare—originally, it seems, a tent (the root meaning of the Greek skene), then a wooden hut and later—how much later we do not know—a stone building [Pl. 2]. The area between this changing room and the orchestra (in front of the skene, pro-skenion) was what was to become the stage.

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The only site to preserve these early arrangements in clearly recognizable form is Epidauros, in the Argolis, which, according to Pausanias (writing in the second Century ad), was designed by the architect Polycleitus, and which would therefore date from the middle of the fourth Century bc. ‘The Epidaurians’, he says, ‘have within their sanctuary a theatre that in my opinion is specially worth seeing. Those of the Romans surpass all others in decoration, and that of the Arcadians at Megalopolis is of unequalled size; but what architect could rival Polycleitus äs regards harmony and beauty? For it was Polycleitus who built both the theatre and the tholos.

This dating may be accepted, although like most other dates in classical archaeology it is open to challenge. The sanctuary of Epidauros was one of the richest and grandest in Greece, and neither the scale nor the technical quality of the present remains were beyond the abilities of the period. It was remodelled in the second Century, however, and the task of deciding which particular features belong to the original and which to the remodelled theatre is by no means simple.