ABSTRACT
The irony and sarcasm here are all too apparent: four critics were not amused (and they were not alone). Malcolm Pride’s designs drew attention to his own clever ingenuity at the expense of actors and play (it is surprising how much space in these reviews is devoted to comment on the settings; it was rare in the 1950s for design to elicit much descriptive and critical observation). Looking over the photographs of Devine’s production for the Memorial Theatre,1 one can see immediately what was wrong: the stage in every setting is crammed with fussy detail. Pride deployed throughout a forestage from which two steps took actors up to the main stage beyond a proscenium arch. For the mountebank scene (2.2), for example, Pride created a central image of architectural pieces in the main space which focused to left-of-centre on the doorway to Corvino’s house with (to its right and therefore almost centre stage) an oriel window overhanging the piazza at which Celia would appear. To the rear of this and to the right three steps led up to what one was to suppose was a quayside with a cut-out of a gondola, beyond which was a backdrop painted with a kind of overlay of appropriate Venetian palaces. To the right of this and parallel with Corvino’s mansion was an arched entrance to a grand building with columned supports topped by miniature versions of the lions of St Mark’s (see Plate 2, p.76). Though Venetian elements are apparent to the searching eye, the overall effect lacks any sense of specific place and atmosphere because the assemblage of pieces is jumbled and devoid of visual rhythm. This is a preposterously fantasticated Venice from which it would be easy for an audience to sustain an amused distance; it is not a setting which Jonson’s play can readily inhabit.
