The Forgotten Prop

Still ploughing my way through the allocated reading list for ‘Doers and/or of Doings’. Yesterday’s article to be subjected to three hours scrutiny over the course of a particularly dull gallery shift was the preface to a book called ‘The Stage Life of Props’ by Andrew Sofer. I thought that his was an interesting piece to blindly post to me. I can only assume that it arrived as the result of a comment I made in an early meeting about some wayward desire to get into scenography and set design at some point in a rather distant future.

So what was there to say about the article? No doubt this preface was designed to pique my interest into reading the whole book. If so it failed in its task but not for lack of interesting content, but rather for lack of relevance to me… in any way. That having been said, there were, in this introduction alone, some rather interesting comments. Props (along with sets and mechanical effects) within the theatre are rarely written about critically. The article states, ‘Most books that mention stage properties in their title are manuals aimed at aspiring stage designer or technical director.’ ‘And?’ I hear you cry? Well what this effectively means is that scenography is not getting the critical analysis it deserves, the type of analysis we associate with the arts. The props, the set, the effects, these are seen a sensationalist mechanisms which create the spectacle. However these mechanisms are of central importance to the experience itself. What is not said directly through spoken word can be hinted at more subtly through a symbolic use of set and prop.

The book (I understand from the preface) analyses the existence and use of these mechanisms not as passive emblems but active events. The article describes this as, ‘a mechanism of appropriation to address a wider semiotic crisis within the theatre and often culture.’ From the simplest to the most complicated of sets, these miscellaneous items create an atmosphere, set the scene and say the unsaid before a word has been uttered. The power of the prop should not be undermined.