The most important feature of the Roman theatre as distinct from the Greek theatre was the raised stage. As every seat had to have a view of the stage, the area occupied by the seating (cavea) was limited to a semicircle. As in Greek theatre, the scene building behind the stage, the scaenae frons, was used both as the back scene and as the actors’ dressing room. It was no longer painted in the Greek manner but tended to have architectural decorations combined with luxurious ornamentation. The audience sat on tiers of wooden benches, spectacula, supported by scaffolding. There was no curtain; the back scene, with its three doors, faced the audience.

When the popular comedies or farces of southern Italy were introduced to Rome, they came with their own distinctive type of stage—the phlyakes stage. Comedies in Italy were mimes, usually parodies of well-known tragedies, and the actors were called phlyakes, or jesters. They used temporary stage buildings of three main forms. One was the primitive low stage, a rough platform with a wooden floor on three or four rectangular posts. The second was a stage supported by low posts, covered with drapery or tablets; sometimes steps led up to a platform and a door was indicated. The third type was a higher stage supported by columns, without steps but usually with a back wall. The stages often had a short flight of five to seven steps in the centre, leading to the podium. The forewall, covered with drapery, was often decorated, and the background wall usually had objects hanging from it. The rear wall sometimes had other columns, besides the ones set at the corners, as well as doors and, in several cases, windows to indicate an upper floor. The door was usually behind a heavily decorated porch, with a sloping or gabled roof supported by beams and cross struts. Among the furnishings there were usually trees, altars, chairs, thrones, a dining table, a money chest, and a tripod of Apollo (i.e., an oracular seat). The stage was set up in the marketplace in the smaller towns and in the orchestras of Greek theatres in the larger cities.

Coincident with the development of the phlyakes stages, and under the inspiration of Hellenistic colonists, the Romans began to build stone theatre buildings. Beginning by remodeling Greek and Hellenistic theatres, they eventually succeeded in uniting architecturally their own concept of the auditorium with a single-level, raised stage. This they did by limiting the orchestra to a half circle and joining it to the auditorium, thereby improving on the acoustics of Greek and Hellenistic theatres. They also brought to perfection the principles of barrel and cross vaulting, penetrating the seat bank at regular intervals with vomitoria (exit corridors). The raised stage was at a single, much lower level than in the Hellenistic theatre. It was roofed, and the number of entrances to it was increased to five: three, as before, in the wall at the rear of the stage and one at each side. The Romans’ love of ostentatious architecture led them to adorn the permanent background with profuse sculptures. In some theatres, a drop curtain was used to signal the beginning and end of performance. In some cases, a canvas roof was hoisted onto rope rigging in order to shade the audience from the sunlight.

In Roman theatres the stage alone was used by the actors, who entered the playing space from one of the house doors or the side entrances in the wings. The side entrance on the audience’s right signified the near distance and the one on the audience’s left the farther distance. If a scene took place in a town, for instance, an actor exiting audience right was understood to be going to the forum; if he exited audience left, he might be going to the country or the harbour. Periaktoi at the side entrances indicated the scenery in the immediate neighbourhood. If the play required a character to move from one house to another without bringing him on the stage, which represented the street, the actor was supposed to use the back door and the angiportum (i.e., an imaginary street running behind the houses). Since interior scenes could not be represented easily, all action took place in front of the houses shown in the background. If a banquet was to be depicted, the table and chairs would be brought on stage and removed at the end of the scene. Costumes were formalized, but real spears, torches, chariots, and horses were used.

The orchestra became part of the auditorium in Rome, reserved by law for those of privileged rank, who seated themselves there on a variety of portable chairs and litters. The orchestra was no longer needed as part of the performance area because the chorus had long since ceased to be an integral part of drama. The tragedies of Seneca, in the 1st century ce, included a chorus because they were patterned after Greek models. But they never achieved the popularity of earlier comedies, especially those of Plautus and Terence. These works had at first been performed on temporary wooden stages that had been erected on a convenient hillside and sometimes surrounded by temporary wooden seating.

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Architecture: The Built World

Until the late republic, a puritanical Senate had banned all permanent theatre building within the city of Rome itself as decadent. Thus, theatres there were temporary structures, set up in the Campus Martius for the duration of public games. In 55 bce, however, the triumvir Pompey the Great built Rome’s first permanent stone theatre. Another public stone theatre was built in Rome in 13 bce and was named after Marcellus, son-in-law of the emperor Augustus. Both were used for the scaenae ludi (“scenic games”), which were part of religious festivities or celebrations of victory in war and which were paid for by triumphant generals and emperors. During the period of the Roman Empire, civic pride demanded that all important cities have theatres, amphitheatres, and, in many instances, a small, permanently roofed theatre (theatrum tectum, an odeum, or music hall) as well. In fact, it is from outlying cities of the empire such as Arausio (Orange), Thamagadi (Timgad), Leptis Magna, Sabratha, and Aspendus that archaeological evidence provides most of the firsthand knowledge of Roman theatre building. The best preserved Roman theatre, dating from about 170 ce, is at Aspendus in modern Turkey.

Vitruvius’ treatise on architecture

Literature is another source for knowledge of Roman theatre. De architectura libri decem (“Ten Books on Architecture”), by the Roman architect Vitruvius (1st century bce), devotes three books to Greek and Roman theatre design and construction. The author gives general rules for siting an open-air theatre and for designing the stage, orchestra, and auditorium. These rules are based on principles of Euclidian geometry in matters of layout and proportion. His dicta on the provision of good sight lines from auditorium to stage are generally sound. Apart from that, however, his treatise is not very helpful. He mentions changeable scenery but is vague about what was involved. Vitruvius’ notion of acoustics, which he claims is based on theory as well as practice, appears to be vaguely associated with Greek ideas of musical theory but has since been proved to have no scientific or mathematical basis. Indeed, his views on this important matter were to cause problems for almost 2,000 years.

The odeum

Vitruvius has nothing to say about the roofed odeum (or odeon, “singing place”), which, according to some authorities, represents the high point of theatre building in the ancient world. Theatre history has, unfortunately, largely overlooked these buildings. Excavation work has revealed more than 30 of them, in a wide range of building materials. Odea were apparently first built in Athens under Pericles (5th century bce). They continued to be built throughout the Hellenistic Age and also in the Roman Empire up to the time of Emperor Severus Alexander (3rd century ce). They range in size from one with a seating capacity of 300–400 to one of 1,200–1,400. Experts disagree as to their specific purpose and use but claim they exhibited a refinement of detail and architectural sophistication found in no other Greco-Roman buildings devoted to the performing arts. They are most often found in Greek cities dating from Hellenistic times, on the grounds of private villas built by Roman emperors from Augustus to Hadrian, and in major cities of the empire, usually dedicated to the emperors. One of the most imposing, which also boasts the greatest span for a wooden trussed roof in the ancient world, was the Odeon of Agrippa, named after the emperor Augustus’ civil administrator. This Roman building in the Athenian agora, dating from about 15 bce, is beautifully detailed, with an open southern exposure and a truncated curvilinear bank of seating. It achieves an atmosphere of great dignity and repose, despite the vast size of the room. In the last years of the Roman Empire the odeum was, it is claimed, the only remaining home of the performing arts, because by this time open-air theatres had long been given over to sensational and crude popular entertainments.

Greek and Roman theatre building influenced virtually all later theatre design in the Western world, the theatres of the Spanish Golden Age, the English Elizabethan period, and the 20th-century avant-garde, with its experiments in primitive theatre-in-the-round techniques, being exceptions to this pattern. The architectural writings of Vitruvius became the model for the theatre building of the later Renaissance and early Baroque periods.