by Eric Goudie

Created on: January 26, 2009

Environmental theatre means many things to many people. It can mean theatre about the environment (or any environment), or it can mean a theatrical experience brought on merely through the exposure of an audience to a given set of environmental conditions. Or environmental theatre can be described as existing alongside other "theatres," if you take a pluralistic view of performance, where the environmental elements (ie the set, the lighting, the sound, the props and costumes) all work together to establish an experiential backdrop against which the actors perform.

Personally, I'd like to open up the idea of environment in theatre to something more wholistic: the concrete things, like the set and props, the abstract things like lighting and sound, and the human things like actors and audiences (not to mention the whole host of people who may never appear onstage but are essential to the execution of the performance nonetheless), all working together to create a universe in which the play is not merely seen or heard, but experienced. To do so assumes that the performance begins with the patron's decision to purchase a ticket, and ends not when the final bow has been taken, but rather at a moment of the patron's choosing: when they walk out of the theatre, when they mention it over coffee the next day, or when their last memory of a particular performance fades from their memory.

Sadly, such a comprehensive view of the theatrical experience is outside of much contemporary theatre design, the creative freedom of most directors and the fiscal realities of most companies. Few would dare suggest dressing the usherettes as Playboy Bunnies for a production of "Harvey" (a play about a six-foot-tall rabbit) or inviting the entire audience to come up onstage to see a well-preserved priests' heart sitting in an aquarium (though I actually directed a show where the playwright insisted on it - a surprisingly large number of audience members obliged).

Historically though, at least in terms of theatre design, there's been no shortage of attention paid to the power of environmental theatre. The designers of the Italian Rennaissance employed enormous theatres, incredulous budgets and remarkable feats of engineering to create breath-taking special effects (often with little regard for the safety of actors or audiences). The ancient Roman Coliseum was designed to be flooded in minutes for staging re-enactments of naval battles, only to be followed by the Gladiators later the same

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