14 - A material world: costume, properties and scenic effects

Summary

In a reading of scripts, costume and properties may be barely noticed, emerging sharply into view only when critical attention attributes to them a particular significance. In this chapter, I want to emphasize the material nature of classical theatre and to indicate the diversity of their use as essential components of all ancient performances.

One approach to the ancient dramatic texts that survive is to consider them as language intended to be delivered by performers. Another is to treat classical stage practice through the surviving remains of its theatre structures. But in both cases, the transient and the perishable are missing. The transient is everything that belongs to a culture of live performance, from established conventions of artistic expression through to idiosyncratic nuances and specific blunders in the work of performers; the perishable is, in many respects, the subject of this chapter.

Decay affects far more than the pigment applied to stone temples, or the pillage of precious objects. Even metals only survive either in bits (e.g. the clamps that hold stone blocks together) or by chance, when bronze statues that were part of a ship's cargo are discovered more or less intact in the sea. Armour may be found, as may some personal and more domestic items, often in burials. Glass and ceramics are fragile but durable, and complete items do survive. But timber and wood, bone, fabrics of all kinds, ropes and binding materials, basketwork, leather for work (buckets, harnesses) or dress (belts, jerkins, boots and sandals) will be found rarely, almost always in fragments.