In what may well prove to be his last West End role, Laurence Olivier appears as a Time Lord, trapped in a kind of goldfish bowl, suspended high above the stage of the Dominion Theatre in London. At least it looks and sounds like Olivier. It has his voice, his lips and beneath those bushy eyebrows, now white, his penetrating gaze. But the head is about twenty times its natural size, and disembodied--a feat which even this master of disguise has never before accomplished.
It is, of course, a hologram, a three-dimensional laser photograph. It's a sobering thought for those who love the theater that the greatest actor of our age should end his stage career as a lighting effect in Time, a space-rock musical where the rights and wrongs of the cosmos are deafeningly explained, funk-style, for audiences reared not on Shakespeare, but on Star Trek.
But that's show business--or rather that illustrates what's recently been happening in show business, where the sets have been getting bigger, the scripts smaller, and the actors risk being upstaged by the stage itself.
Memorable Feature
The most memorable feature of a recent David Essex musical, Mutiny, based on Mutiny on the Bounty, was the sight of a sailing ship, a three-masted schooner, as it rose from what seemed to be a bare stage, then twisted and rocked in a storm, and finally split apart to reveal the decks and the cabins below. The stars, Frank Finlay and Essex himself, who would never have let themselves be outshone by their fellow actors or drowned by the orchestra, were cheerfully prepared to battle against a distracting background of billowing sails, grinding lanyards, and perilous spars, until their voices grew hoarse with the effort.
"It was one of those musicals," remarked the critic Michael Billington, "where you come out humming the sets." There have been several musicals like that in London and New York recently. We have seen panoramic views of eighteenth-century France, with prison ships and underground sewers, in Les Miserables; while the cavernous recesses of a nineteenth-century opera house are so hauntingly evoked in The Phantom of the Opera that the actual theater where this new Andrew Lloyd-Webber musical is playing, Her Majesty's, seems small and mean in comparison.
Nor are sets decently confined, as they used to be, to the actual stages. They have taken over entire theaters. For the railroad musical Starlight Express, the designer John Napier constructed a horseshoe ramp around the auditorium, head high to the spectators, along which the dancers race on roller skates with death-defying abandon. At the London premier of Cats, the audience in the first few rows of the stalls were startled to find that they were on a carousel, which whizzed around the central stage in darkness, as the cats' eyes lit up about them.
If such fairground tricks seem out of place in serious theater, it is worth remembering that the august Royal Shakespeare Company, with other leading European repertory companies, were pioneers in what is sometimes called "environmental theater," that is, one where the audience and actors alike are plunged into an environment that represents the play's historical and geographical setting. For Nicholas Nickleby, the RSC constructed an
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