ABSTRACT
I do not like visual spectacles that are too perfect as they are like an insult to man’s fantasy, imagination, and creative genius. When the stage offers you all of the most minute, moving, and delightful details that you can think of, how can you feel exalted, interested, entertained, moved? I am convinced that when ancient theatre presented the audience with a permanent and extensive set—one made up of four columns, three doors—the audience’s enjoyment must have been extraordinary because the quickness of their imagination, excited by the drama, created the rest of the scene in a flash. So, when Shakespeare was staged in the seventeenth-century England with a rough apparatus of a few lights and a few canvases, the spectators could understand the idea of a fantastical setting like that of King Lear or The Tempest or A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Today, even with a thousand games of electrical lighting, a thousand combinations of coloured glass and a thousand complicated mechanisms, it would no longer be possible to achieve that enviable result.
