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Limelight: Control and the Independent Lighting Designer

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2010

Alan Hughes
Alan Hughes
Affiliation:
University of Victoria
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Extract

No special skill is required to light a stage; we need only switch on the fluorescents, or perform in daylight like the Greeks and Elizabethans. Our troubles began when we decided that we wanted to control light. The sun remains as intractable as Phaeton found it, so we excluded it by enclosing our theatres. Even then, the battle with artificial light was long and hard, Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg's Eidophusikon established the goal: a measure of control that could duplicate on stage and in motion the painterly variation of color and chiaroscuro that had been mastered on canvas in the High Renaissance and Baroque.

Type
Notes and Documents
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , November 1985 , pp. 182 - 185
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1985

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References

NOTES

1 Burke, Joseph, English Art 1714–1800 (London: O.U.P., 1976), p. 220Google Scholar. Even earlier than Loutherbourg, Algarotti and Naverre had called for chiaroscuro in stage lighting after the manner of Rembrandt, Giorgione and Titian; see Bergman, Gosta, Lighting in the Theatre (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1977), pp. 178–80.Google Scholar

2 Fitzgerald, Percy, The World behind the Scenes (London: Chattoand Windus, 1881), p. 18Google Scholar: Henry Irving's Faust prompt-book, Rylands Library, Manchester.

3 Circles of light five feet in diameter, cast at the same range by the limelight and a Strand Patt. 23, were measured for intensity. A variation of 35–80% was found across the beam of the former, but over 80% in the latter excluding the rim, which read as low as 7% of the hot-spot in some places.

4 The Faust prompt-book calls for limelights equipped with diaphragms, an option on many ellipsoidal-reflector lights today.

5 Most of the beam cast by the Patt. 23 was about one-third brighter.

6 Goodman, Lawrence P., “More Light on the Limelight,” Theatre Survey, 10. no. 2 (Nov. 1969), 115CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rees, Terence, Theatre Lighting in the Age of Gas (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1978), pp. 42–43.Google Scholar

7 The Theatrical Observer, 1493 (1826)Google Scholar, quoted in Byrne, M. St. Clare, “Stage Lighting,” The Oxford Companion to the Theatre, 2nd ed. (London: O.U.P., 1957), p. 467Google Scholar: Fitzgerald, Percy, “The True Principles of Stage Scenery,” Journal of the Society of Arts, 49 (1900–1901), 477.Google Scholar

9 Rees, pp. 24, 35–36.

10 Ibid., pp. 133–35.

11 Stoker, Bram, “Irving and Stage Lighting.” The Nineteenth Century: and After. 69 (1911). 907–10Google Scholar; Hughes, Alan, “Henry Irving's Artistic Use of Stage Lighting,” Theatre Notebook. 33, no. 3 (1979), 100–09.Google Scholar

12 Described in Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester. 64. no. 2 (Spring 1982), 279–81.Google Scholar

13 Limelight plots for Becket. Louis XI. The Bells and The Merchant of Venice in the Bodleian Library. Oxford.

14 Tree's Hamlet prompt-book, quoled in Rees, p. 203. Fitzgerald also refers to mauve in The World behind the Scenes, p. 12.

15 Booth, Michael R., ed. Victorian Theatrical Trades (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1981), p. 45Google Scholar; “Theatrical Mechanism,” Scientific American Supplement (22 May, 1886), 8648; Rees, p. 193.Google Scholar