Berto_Tony_201307_PhD .pdf - University of Guelph

89
is oriented around an evening of leisure, centred on a comfortable viewing of entertainment.
Accordingly, the company requires a steady income in order to maintain the space and its
degree of refinement. Such an income of course relies, in part, on the theatre’s ability to sell
seats. The area’s impression as an upscale venue, with its reliance on well-heeled patrons,
suggests that businesses there take few risks in terms of the fare they offer.
Stage
The design of Granville Island stage allows the audience to be able to distance itself
from an intimate encounter with the play and its themes. Several features of the play’s
production in this space contribute to this distancing. A proscenium arch gives a fourth wall
view to the stage. This traditional use of staging separates performance space from audience
space, and in His Greatness’s performance actors do not break through the fourth wall. Ric
Knowles writes about this construction:
The 'picture frame' or proscenium stage (as progenitor of the cinematic and
television screen) is the closest thing that theatre has to an audience-stage
relationship that contemporary English language theatrical cultures considers
to be normal . . . [it] make[s] manifest a particular monarchical, hierarchical
social structure, in which, when it emerged in the seventeenth century the
best seat in the house, the one from which the depth perspective was perfect .
. . was that of the king, prince or duke. (Knowles, Reading 63)
While Knowles notes this understanding has changed over the years, he writes that the
structure still can inscribe "economic rather than hereditary stratifications . . . reflected in
graduated ticket prices" and other means (64). Whether the Arts Club theatre space would
necessarily cause an audience to receive the play passively, and perhaps be insulated from