Years ago, I took a playwrighting course from a Vancouver writer named Tom Cone. Tom’s methodology was simple and uncomfortably rigorous. As a pre-course exercise, every participant submitted five pages of dialogue for a mini-play with three characters—and then we spent eight sessions reading each other’s work out loud, and our homework was always the same: re-write, with the same three characters and the same situation, but “raise the stakes” and “go deeper” and “find the dramatic moment.” It was a discipline I’ve never forgotten.

On the final night of the course, he took us into the empty theatre, and we sat scattered across its steeply raked two hundred seats in the dim. The stage was dark. “The true playwright,” Tom told us, “gets goosebumps, just looking at the empty stage.” And that’s exactly what I was feeling: goosebumps.

All these imaginary creatures, calling, waiting to be drawn into existence; all these stories, asking—demanding—to be told.

I wrote a prize-winning play the following year, and then the circumstances of my life changed and I mostly lost touch with theatre. But the goosebumps remain, and again and again over the years, I ask the question, Why? What is the stage? What is the secret of its power?

**

During the pandemic, I’ve been streaming a lot of opera. That’s a late discovery for me. I didn’t grow up with it, and I’ve rarely been to an actual performance. There’s no shortage of aficionados who like to assure me that streaming is definitely substandard, and certainly no substitute for the “real” thing. 

OK, OK—but I don’t care. I like streaming opera. 

I’m blown away by its beauty—by this amazing art form that combines everything—music, voice, gesture, dance, visual art, costume, performance, all in a single show, on this thing we call a “stage”. And I’m actually learning something, little by little, over the weeks and months of my new obsession.

**

I’d heard about Glyndebourne before. 

It’s a small opera house on a country estate south of London. Ticket holders dress up in evening clothes in broad daylight and get hamper lunches from Fortum’s and motor into the green wilds of East Sussex; and during a two- hour interval, they go out into the gardens for a picnic lunch. Very English; very upper class. Certainly not for me.

But now, thanks to streaming, I have discovered the reality. It’s a beautiful chamber theatre, wood panelled and shaped like the inside of a drum, with a small pit and two rows of balconies and boxes—along with a perfect version of an eighteenth century proscenium stage. 

And what a stage. 

Glyndebourne productions are brilliantly innovative, fresh and witty and full of complex ironies, and that stage, which seems in its bones utterly conventional and so, so tiny, can do—well, anything—and be—well, anywhere. So here we see the power of the stage in its most classical mode, the mode closest to what an eighteenth century audience would have experienced. 

Check out the brief video at the top of this post, from the Glyndebourne production of Handel’s Giulio Cesare—the story of the Roman emperor’s conquest of Egypt, and his affair with Cleopatra.

Glyndebourne turns the conquering Romans into Imperial British soldiers, and pushes the libretto into comedy. The effect is rich on every level: the amazing music (Handel is at his best in opera); the authority of Caesar (Sarah Connolly, in a trouser role); a defiant counter-dance with a weak and duplicitous Pharaoh; the wonderfully ritualistic and bizarre costumes and trappings of the Egyptian court; and a key feature of the Baroque, which is usually missing from Handel: dance. 

All are framed by the classical symmetry of that stage, which opens at the back to an infinite sky and the ever-moving darkness of the restless sea. 

This production recreates a simple yet sophisticated species of eighteenth century stage machinery: the continual, glittering motion of the sea. I’ve always wondered about the effect of that particular machine. It’s a just series of logs, each painted and deeply grooved in a spiral pattern. They are laid side by side and each log moves in a contrary direction to its neighbor. The effect is dazzling. 

Here’s another little video, with the beautiful and very sexy Danielle de Niese as Cleopatra, a wonderfully comic dance sequence that combines front-facing Baroque movement with a witty take on the hieroglyphic, angular gesture we associate with ancient Egypt—and once again, that bare, perfect stage, and the glittering, restless sea. And, it goes without saying, Handel’s sublime music.

And here is the finale, both so contemporary and so Baroque—in which villains and heroes all line up in a perfect late Victorian garden party, including the shifty, bloody Pharaoh (who has been gleefully assassinated in the course of the play) and his white-clad agent of evil (also risen from a well-deserved death)—along with that British stand-by, the drinks cart. And again, it’s framed by that perfect proscenium and behind, the ever-moving, infinite sea.

**

In its bright, witty comedy, Guilo Cesare seems distant from my goosebump experience in that empty theatre years ago. It’s not. Stages take many forms, but they all play on the same pair of fundamentals: the relationship between the potential and the actual, the dream and the manifestation: the dark unknown, unborn in the womb of time—and the bright light of revelation. And there’s a third element: the “us”. We, the spectators, who stand or sit in a different but related darkness, we, the apparently unseen participants, who lend our minds and hearts to a fictional reality being played for us, on that stage.

It’s a metaphor for our transitory existence, the place where we “see” and “experience” the roundedness of life, the brief dance of time, which is really only a game, a show, before hosts of spectators in their vast, quiet, eternal rows, the living dead. The artificiality of this framed platform is part of its power. It is created by us in imitation of what we imagine the creator-God to be and do: our attempt to imitate eternity with an image of time. 

That’s its secret.