In the beginning, scenery was probably altered slightly during the intermissions that separated the plays of a trilogy or a tetralogy or during the night between two festival days. By the latter part of the 5th century, scene changes were accomplished by means of movable painted screens. Several of these screens could be put up behind one another so that, when the first one was removed, the one immediately behind appeared.
Soon after the introduction of the facade, plays were uniformly set before a temple or a palace. To indicate a change of scene, the periaktoi were introduced. These were upright three-sided prisms—each side painted to represent a different locality—set flush with the palace or temple wall on either side of the stage. Several conventions were observed with regard to scenery; one was that if only the right periaktos was turned, it indicated a different locality in the same town. According to another convention, actors entering from the right were understood to be coming from the city or harbour and those from the left to be coming from the country.
The permanent facade was also used to hide the stage properties and the machinery. Evidence for the use of the so-called flying machine, the mēchanē (Latin machina), in the 5th century is given in the comedies of Aristophanes; a character in his play Peace ascends to heaven on a dung beetle and appeals to the scene shifter not to let him fall. The mēchanē consisted of a derrick and a crane. In the time of Euripides it was used conventionally for the epilogue, at which point a god descended from heaven to sort out the complications in the plot, a convention that became known as deus ex machina (“god from a machine”). The lavish use of flying machines is attested by the poet Antiphanes, who wrote that tragic playwrights lifted up a machine as readily as they lifted a finger when they had nothing else to say.
A wheeled platform or wagon, called ekkyklēma, was used to display the results of offstage actions, such as the bodies of murder victims. The ekkyklēma, like the periaktoi, was an expedient for open-air theatre, in which the possibilities for creating realistic illusions were severely limited. A realistic picture of an interior scene under a roof could not be shown, because the roof would block the view of those in the higher tiered seats of the auditorium. So the Greeks, to represent the interior of a palace, for example, wheeled out a throne on a round or square podium. New machines were added in the Hellenistic period, by which time the theatre had almost completely lost its religious basis. Among these new machines was the hemikyklion, a semicircle of canvas depicting a distant city, and a stropheion, a revolving machine, used to show heroes in heaven or battles at sea. Howard Bay Clive Barker George C. Izenour Acoustics
Much recent study has centred on the problem of acoustics in the ancient theatre. The difficulty in achieving audibility to an audience of thousands, disposed around three-fifths to two-thirds of a full circular orchestra in the open air, seems to have been insoluble so long as the performer remained in the orchestra. A more direct path between speaker and audience was therefore essential if the unaided voice was to reach a majority of spectators in the auditorium. Some contend that the acoustical problems were to a degree alleviated when the actor was moved behind and above the orchestra onto the raised platform, with more of the audience thus being placed in direct line of sight and sound with him. By this time, the actors’ masks had reached considerable dimensions, and there are grounds for believing that their mouth orifices were of help in concentrating vocal power—much as cupped hands or a rudimentary megaphone would be.
Increased architectural and engineering sophistication in the Hellenistic Age encouraged further innovations. The theatres of mainland Greece, the Aegean islands, and southern Italy had been constructed in hillsides whenever possible, so that excavation and filling were kept to a minimum; or, lacking a suitable slope, earth was dug out and piled up to form an embankment upon which stone seats were placed. By contrast, the cities of Asia Minor, which flourished during the Hellenistic Age, did not rely on a convenient slope on which to locate their theatres. The principles of arch construction were understood by this time, and theatres were built using vaulting as the structural support for banked seating. Archaeological remains and restoration of theatres at Perga, Side, Miletus, and other sites in what is now Turkey exhibit this type of construction. By a third method, auditoriums were hewed out of rock. Of some six such Greek theatres extant, two excellent examples (both extensively remodeled in Roman times) are the great theatre at Syracuse in Sicily and that at Argos in the Peloponnese. The best preserved of all Greek theatres, also in the Peloponnese and now partially restored, is the magnificent theatre at Epidaurus. This theatre provided seats for some 12,000 people, and its circular orchestra is backed by a stagehouse and surrounded on three sides by a stone, hillside-supported bank of seats. Both chorus and actors performed in the orchestra, but only the actors used the two levels of the stagehouse as well. Theatre construction flourished during the Hellenistic Age as never before in classical times, and no city of any size or reputation was without its theatre. George C. Izenour Developments in ancient Rome
The development of the theatre, following that of dramatic literature, was slower in Rome than in Athens. The essential distinction between Roman and Greek stage performances was that the Roman theatre expressed no deep religious convictions. Despite the fact that the spectacles were technically connected with the festivals in honour of the gods, the Roman audience went to the theatre for entertainment. The circus was the first permanent public building for spectacles, which included chariot races and gladiatorial fights. When Etruscan dancers and musicians were introduced in 364 bc, they performed in either the circus, the forum, or the sanctuaries in front of the temples. The players brought temporary wooden stands for the spectators. These stands developed into the Roman auditorium, built up entirely from the level ground. Stage design
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.