Customer Reviews

What is Scenography? (Theatre Concepts)

5 star:		(2)
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2 star:		(1)
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An exciting and stimulating book that will make every serious theatre artist think, and think hard. This book will be used as a teaching tool in advanced courses and should be welcomed as a touchstone for discussions amongst serious directors and designers. Maybe it's not at quite the same level as The Dramatic Imagination or The Empty Space, but it's surely in the same category of seminal works that will exert a positive influence for years to come. I can't wait to use its insights and methodologies as I begin the creative process for my next production.

This book is an eye-opener, a brilliant and utterly fresh approach to the art of theatre design. Pamela Howard leads the reader through the revolution in stage visualization that has taken us from decoration and backdrop to the astonishing complexities (and, more important, the visionary minimalism)of theatre at its highest levels of achievement in the 20th century. I can think of no better introduction for a beginning designer to the limitless possibilities of her or his medium. And I believe even the most accomplished experts in the field will find original and provocative challenges to conventional wisdom here. Best of all, the book is written as an intensely-felt personal statement, based on wide world experience of working with the great theatre practitioners of our time. And it's written with a directness and clarity worthy of a great stage design.

I have used the book only for research purposes, and I have to say, its scope is narrow and fails to credit the history of its subject. A book on scenography that contains only a cursory comment on Josef Svoboda seems a bit unsupported to me. As far as a very general look at the ideas of scenography it is mediocre at best. When defining an inherently undefinable term, it seems only appropriate to describe some the individuals which have coined the term, Howard fails to do this, and I feel the book suffers because of it.