Shakespeare Love's Labour's Lost - The Use Of Thrust Space
Shakespeare - Love's Labour's Lost - The Use Of Thrust Space
When you ask a person to describe the layout of a theatre to you, most people show you that the stage goes on one end of the building, and the audience goes on the other, facing the stage. Most theater-goers are probably not aware that the space they watch the majority of plays in is not the only way that an audience can be engaged with the actors on the stage. In Shakespeare’s Love's Labour's Lost directed by Mark Harrison a “thrust” stage is used to being the audience closer to the action of the play. The thrust space has the audience arced around the stage, almost completely covering the front, and two sides of the stage. Only backstage is reserved for the actors, everywhere else the audience is able to peer down on the action unfolding below them. The theatrical space definitely has an impact on how a certain play must be presented to an audience. It is very apparent after watching Love's Labour's Lost that the director had to stage the action of the play to involve everyone in the audience, and not just the people directly in front of the stage.
Normal blocks guidelines tell directors, and thus actors, to always keep the back away from the audience. They need to face the audience at all time, but how is this going to happen on a stage where 3 sides of your body are always exposed to the audience? Mark Harrison’s answer comes in the form of movement. In the opening scene of Love’s Labour’s Lost the actors are constantly circling the stage, so everyone gets a good view of very aspect of each character. At fisrt this kind of blocking may seem un-natural, because the characters seem to move for no apparent reason, but after careful examination, the circle-blocking is actually a very effective method of staging. Harrison planned out the first scene’s movements well, always changing the direction a character would face during appropriate beats. The characters would not circle about the stage randomly, but instead that would move opposing each other, as in an argument. The movements actually helped drive the play along and give meaning to an otherwise cluttered script, that without proper blocking nearly impossible to interpret.
The first act concludes with all three male characters spying on one another, each realizing that...