Le coup d'œil du spectateur: Spectatorial Function and Stage Space in French Theatre Design, 1760‐1784

Abstract

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.