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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 November 2020
Over the last years, the National Theatre, London (NT) has presented props and costumes in its restaurant, the Green Room, and in its bar, the Propstore, thereby shedding a different light on theatre objects. It also widely advertises the option of hiring costumes and props from its Hire department. These practices challenge theatre studies to reconsider the usage of theatre objects and their manifold stage lives not only as stories of (in)animation, but as what I call potentials of reusage. Presenting theatre objects in unusual locations like a restaurant emphasizes that these objects are built or manipulated in theatre workshops, thereby shedding light on the craftsmanship that is foundational to every production. The labour of the workshops, as well as different backstage operations, has been ignored by theatre historiography. Analysing the NT's different staging of props invites us to look into the hidden histories of theatre materiality.
1 In using the term ‘theatre-goer’ I want to bring attention to the broader experience of theatre and to question the sole focus on the performance or the play. Already in 1993, Carlson made a plea for broadening theatre studies’ perspective to the ‘theatre experience’; see Carlson, Marvin, Places of Performance: The Semiotics of Theatre Architecture (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 2Google Scholar.
2 National Theatre flyer, Hires Department, 2017.
3 Ibid.
4 Jay Rayner, ‘The Green Room: Restaurant Review’, The Guardian, 18 January 2015, at www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jan/18/green-room-restaurant-review-jay-rayner, accessed 22 April 2018.
5 Margolies, Eleanor, Props (London and New York: Palgrave, 2016), p. 21Google Scholar.
6 Rayner, Alice, Ghosts: Death's Double and the Performance of Theatre (Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), p. 76Google Scholar.
7 Aoife Monks accounts for the afterlife of a costume, stating, ‘Costumes, then, have a peculiar half-life once a performance has ended.’ Aoife Monks, The Actor in Costume (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 142.
8 Rayner, Ghosts, p. 75.
9 Sofer, Andrew, The Stage Life of Props (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2003), p. 11CrossRefGoogle Scholar, original emphasis.
10 Monks, Aoife, ‘Human Remains: Acting, Objects, and Belief in Performance’, Theatre Journal, 64, 3 (October 2012), pp. 355–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here p. 365.
11 In German the prop and costume shops together are called Fundus; see Förster, Sascha, ‘Repertoire/Fundus: Die Wechselwirkungen von Requisiten und Erinnerungen im Gegenwartstheater’, in Göttler, Christine, Schneemann, Peter J., Borkopp-Restle, Birgitt, Gramaccini, Norberto, Marx, Peter W. and Nicolai, Bernd, eds., Reading Room: Re-Lektüren des Innenraums (Berlin and Boston, MA: De Gruyter, 2019), pp. 209–16Google Scholar.
12 Royal Shakespeare Company, at www.rsc.org.uk/costume-hire, accessed 23 April 2018.
13 Birmingham Rep, at www.birmingham-rep.co.uk/our-place/prop-and-costume-hire.html, accessed 23 April 2018.
14 The National Theatre also promotes the labour of its workshops in its popular backstage tours and in the Sherling Backstage Walkway, which was established in 2014.
15 I visited the NT Hire department in July 2015. The department is located in Lambeth, about three and a half kilometres away from the NT's South Bank home.
16 Time Out, http://now-here-this.timeout.com/2013/05/03/propstore, accessed 28 July 2015.
17 The NT also introduced a merchandizing range called ‘Props’ that features graphic illustrations of peculiar props from past productions.
18 The notion of recycling in theatre is taken from Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2003), pp. 165–73. Monks, ‘Human Remains’, p. 358, uses Arjun Appadurai's term ‘regimes of value’ to describe a case in which someone won a skull in a raffle by a theatre and then gave it to the Victoria & Albert Museum's theatre collection.
19 Taylor, Diana, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 19–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
20 Margolies, Props, p. 23.