A REVOLVING STAGE.

For some years past the public has been demanding more and more realistic representations of plays. Managers have found great difficulty in satisfying this demand, owing to the time required to set elaborate scenery. The public will not stand long waits, which are often sufficient to cause the failure of a play or opera. These delays are bad enough between the acts, but in plays or operas which necessitate changes of scene during the acts, the waits become well nigh unbearable; and many of the works of Schiller, Goethe, and Shakespeare become well nigh monstrosities, as many of them are divided into interminable acts and scenes. This difficulty has been sometimes avoided by the use of an [elevating stage] such as we have just described, or by the so-called “Shakespeare stage,” in which the front part of the stage remains unchanged, while on the raised rear stage different scenes succeed one another. This is regarded as eminently unsatisfactory. Baron von Perfall, manager of the Munich Theater, published a book setting forth his ideas in regard to the thorough transformation of the stage as it then existed. The manager of the royal stage in Munich made a practical and successful test of the invention of Herr Lautenschlager, the mechanical director of the Royal Theater of Bavaria. The revolving stage was used in a representation of Mozart’s “Don Juan.” When the nature of the invention first became known, many people associated it with a device used on Japanese stages, which consists of a revolving platform in the center of the stage, a similar device being employed in America and England for displaying “living pictures;” but this arrangement has only a superficial resemblance to the revolving stage we are considering. The arrangement used at the Court Theater at Munich is essentially as follows:

CHANGE FROM THE THIRD TO THE FOURTH SCENE
OF THE FIRST ACT OF “DON JUAN.”

[Enlarged illustration] (300 kB)

On the ordinary stage floor is placed a revolving disk, or platform, which raises the floor slightly. This circular platform is fifty-two feet five inches in diameter, and presents not quite a quarter of a circle to the proscenium opening, which is thirty-two feet nine inches wide. It turns on rollers that run on a circular track; the revolving mechanism is driven by electricity. If a scene is set on the quarter circle presented to the audience—perhaps a closed room of considerable depth—something similar can be arranged on the opposite side of the platform which opens to the rear of the stage, as well as on the other quarters, so that four different scenes are set on the stage at the same time. For a play of four acts, requiring a different setting for each act, all four scenes can be prepared beforehand, and at the end of the first act the stage is turned a quarter of a circle (which requires about ten or eleven seconds), and the scene desired for the next act is presented to the audience; and so on at the end of each act. In case three changes were required in one act, after the portion of the stage occupied by the first scene had been turned away from the audience, it would be cleared and set for the first scene of the next act. The scenes need not be limited to representations of closed rooms; any desired scene can be set on the turning stage, and, if necessary, the whole stage can be used the same as any ordinary stage. Difficulties will occur only when two scenes requiring great depth—for instance, two landscapes with distant views—follow one another. But Herr Lautenschlager has shown that even these difficulties can be overcome by setting the scene along the radius of the circular stage so that the portion used decreases considerably toward the rear, and in this way he gains the entire depth of the stage for another scene. Much more of the artistic element enters into the setting of a stage of this kind than of a stage that is set on straight lines.

The reader will understand the above after an examination of the accompanying [plans], which show the stage set for the third and fourth scenes of the first act of “Don Juan.” The third scene shows Don Juan’s garden, in which the peasants invited to the fête gather and the maskers meet. This is changed to the hall in which the first act closes. As shown by the plan, considerable depth was required for this scene. Our large [illustration] shows how this change is accomplished, or how it would appear if darkness did not prevail when the stage was being turned. Before the garden had completely disappeared, a portion of the hall would be visible, with all the life and motion, the dancers, and the gaily dressed crowd of guests.