Academie Fine Arts Vienna
"A Role for the Audience"
by Otmar Lahodynsky
for Profil magazine Vienna 29 August 1978
Written by Otmar Lahodynsky Translation as below,
In a three dimensional Total Theatre a Stage Designer proposes to wrench the audience out off their seats.
Opposing Dunsinane Castle whose looming walls are formed from weathered railway sleepers, the war machine slowly and threateningly creeps its way towards it.
I will not be afraid of death and bane boasted the king murderer and throne Usurper, Macbeth a little before, till Birnan Wood comes to Dunsinane!
However, the three witches prophesy is fulfilled: the army of the avenger and Scottish Prince Malcolm advances upon the railway sleeper fortress comouflaged with forest foliage.
The living Birnam Wood – the avenging host – is played by the theatre audience seated on the moveable platform together with a siege tower that simultaneously illuminates the stage and creeps towards the usurper’s castle. The safe and soothing boundary between stage and audience is ruptured. “If you don’t like it,” the 30 year-old stage designer David Aitken, advises the rattled audience on the rolling war machine, “try jumping off!"
by Otmar Lahodynsky
for Profil magazine Vienna 29 August 1978
Written by Otmar Lahodynsky Translation as below,
In a three dimensional Total Theatre a Stage Designer proposes to wrench the audience out off their seats.
Opposing Dunsinane Castle whose looming walls are formed from weathered railway sleepers, the war machine slowly and threateningly creeps its way towards it.
I will not be afraid of death and bane boasted the king murderer and throne Usurper, Macbeth a little before, till Birnan Wood comes to Dunsinane!
However, the three witches prophesy is fulfilled: the army of the avenger and Scottish Prince Malcolm advances upon the railway sleeper fortress comouflaged with forest foliage.
The living Birnam Wood – the avenging host – is played by the theatre audience seated on the moveable platform together with a siege tower that simultaneously illuminates the stage and creeps towards the usurper’s castle. The safe and soothing boundary between stage and audience is ruptured. “If you don’t like it,” the 30 year-old stage designer David Aitken, advises the rattled audience on the rolling war machine, “try jumping off!"
The flood lighting tower is relocated into the mobile audience platform, the stairway is raised and the siege begins.
His unconventional and imaginative stage concept for Shakespeare’s bloodthirsty tragedy, “Macbeth”, which earned the Australian-born and Vienna emigrant Aitken, his Diplom from the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, was also awarded the 10,000-Schilling Professor’s Prize in the early summer. Whether his bold concept will ever make it to traditional theatre remains dubious. It has been years since a serious director from within the German-speaking theatre scene has taken on Shakespeare’s bloody show of force.
Several directors who no longer wish to recognise the sacred boundary between stage and audience have already prevented their audience from sinking reverently into their comfy seats. In Germany, Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius was one of the first set designers to experiment with moving galleries. And again in Berlin, with the set designers for Peter Stein’s “Schaubühne am Halleschen Ufer”. Two years ago, at the “Memory” Shakespeare Collage, Karl Emst Herrmann allowed the audience to walk around between multiple stage sets during the performance, and shortly thereafter (in a production of Shakespeare’s “As you like it”) even sent them through long corridors, meaning theatre-goers no longer had any need to sit still: there weren’t any seats to begin with.
More recently at the Vienna Festival, the audience once again became part of the local theatre scene when German theatre star Claus Peymann, in his staging of “Faust” – for example in the Walpurgnis Night scene, simply sent the audience, along with the actors, out into the street.
For stage designer Aitken, who previously worked in Australian television and designed a two-storey set in Vienna for the Nestroy street theatre event the previous year, “Macbeth” was the most suitable drama for his “three-dimensional total theatre”. He used the three-part Shakespeare stage and expanded it around the gallery level, which had actually already been used for Shakespeare plays on several previous occasions. Through the selection of materials – for instance the cheap railway sleepers – Aitken believes he can also avoid high equipment costs. And his greatest gag – the moving audience platform – he believes to be just as feasible: in modern theatres such as the “Theater im Künstlerhaus”, for which Aitken designed the “Macbeth” staging, which for the time being only exists in model form, the public gallery could be made mobile with only minor modifications.
Several directors who no longer wish to recognise the sacred boundary between stage and audience have already prevented their audience from sinking reverently into their comfy seats. In Germany, Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius was one of the first set designers to experiment with moving galleries. And again in Berlin, with the set designers for Peter Stein’s “Schaubühne am Halleschen Ufer”. Two years ago, at the “Memory” Shakespeare Collage, Karl Emst Herrmann allowed the audience to walk around between multiple stage sets during the performance, and shortly thereafter (in a production of Shakespeare’s “As you like it”) even sent them through long corridors, meaning theatre-goers no longer had any need to sit still: there weren’t any seats to begin with.
More recently at the Vienna Festival, the audience once again became part of the local theatre scene when German theatre star Claus Peymann, in his staging of “Faust” – for example in the Walpurgnis Night scene, simply sent the audience, along with the actors, out into the street.
For stage designer Aitken, who previously worked in Australian television and designed a two-storey set in Vienna for the Nestroy street theatre event the previous year, “Macbeth” was the most suitable drama for his “three-dimensional total theatre”. He used the three-part Shakespeare stage and expanded it around the gallery level, which had actually already been used for Shakespeare plays on several previous occasions. Through the selection of materials – for instance the cheap railway sleepers – Aitken believes he can also avoid high equipment costs. And his greatest gag – the moving audience platform – he believes to be just as feasible: in modern theatres such as the “Theater im Künstlerhaus”, for which Aitken designed the “Macbeth” staging, which for the time being only exists in model form, the public gallery could be made mobile with only minor modifications.