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In the late eighteenth century, a movement to transform France's theatre architecture united the nation. Playwrights, philosophers, and powerful agents including King Louis XV rejected the modified structures that had housed the plays of Racine and Molière, and debated which playhouse form should support the future of French stagecraft. In The First Frame, Pannill Camp argues that these reforms helped to lay down the theoretical and practical foundations of modern theatre space. Examining dramatic theory, architecture, and philosophy, Camp explores how architects, dramatists, and spectators began to see theatre and scientific experimentation as parallel enterprises. During this period of modernization, physicists began to cite dramatic theory and adopt theatrical staging techniques, while playwrights sought to reveal observable truths of human nature. Camp goes on to show that these reforms had consequences for the way we understand both modern theatrical aesthetics and the production of scientific knowledge in the present day. pannill camp is Assistant Professor of Drama at Washington University in St. Louis. His research examines points of intersection between theatre history and the history of philosophy, especially in eighteenth-century France. Before joining the faculty of Washington University, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Humanities

The sightlines which architects such as Oppenord and Roubo the Younger drew on their theatre plans demonstrate an attempt to align stage spaces and optical fields. Indeed, the reform-minded architects of the period 1748 to 1784 applied geometrical forms to their plans, and adopted a terminology borrowed from optics, the science of light and vision. In focusing specifically on the theoretical texts and architectural drawings published between 1765 and 1784, we argue that this use of optical space indicates a dislocation between, on the one hand, the spatial representation which the French reformers promoted in their drawings and, on the other, stage perspective, which had, since the previous century, been associated with the influence of the Italian Baroque. In the 1780s, architects gradually abandoned the use of stage perspective, preferring instead a theatrical space modelled after an ostensibly natural optical encounter.The ground-plan of Gilles-Marie Oppenord's proposed, but never realised, 'Théâtre lyrique ou harmonique pour la ville de Paris', drawn in 1734, displays dotted lines that overlay the stage and open out towards the proscenium (see Fig. 1). 1 These lines seem at first glance to serve the same function as those imposed on designs by André-Jacob Roubo fils in 1777 (see Fig. 2). 2 However, in Roubo's case, the lines mark sightlines drawn from the auditorium to the depth of the stage. The difference between Roubo's sightlines and the construction lines that order Oppenord's design rests upon a subtle point: while Oppenord's lines traverse the centre of columns that frame the proscenium arch, Roubo's produce a tangent on the inner edge of each column. The lines in Oppenord's plans, therefore, reveal the geometric rhythm of his design, while Roubo's mark out an architectural convention that emerged in late-eighteenth-century theatre design: the conical formation of spectatorial vision. By the 1780s, French architects and engravers including Roubo, Charles de Wailly, Pierre Patte and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux embellished their stage designs with lines denotative of rayons visuels (lit. visual rays; sightlines) that resembled optical diagrams of the eye.