VI FALLING SCENERY

In the great mass of scenery in a theatre and its many appliances, some of considerable weight, resting overhead there are certain elements of danger to those on the stage. Things have to be shifted so often and so hastily that there is always room for accident, no matter what care may be exercised. For instance, in Abbey’s theatre in New York—afterwards “The Knickerbocker”—on the first night of Irving’s playing Macbeth, one of the limelight men, who was perched on a high platform behind the proscenium O.P., fell on the stage together with the heavy gas cylinder beside him. The play was then over and Irving was making a speech in front of the curtain. Happily the cylinder did not explode. The man did not seem at the moment to be much injured, but he died on his way to hospital. Had any one been waiting underneath in the wing, as is nearly always the case all through a play, that falling weight must have brought certain death.

I have myself seen Irving lifted from the stage by the Act drop catching his clothing. I have seen him thrown into the “cut” in the stage with the possibility of a fall to the mezzanine floor below. On another occasion something went wrong with the bracing up of the framed cloths and the whole scene fell about the stage. This happened between the acts whilst Irving was showing the stage to some American friends. Happily no one was hurt. Such accidents, veritable bolts from the blue, are, however, both disconcerting and alarming. During Faust the great platforms which made the sloping stage on which some hundreds of people danced wildly at the Witches’ Sabbath on the Brocken had to be suspended over the acting portion of the stage. The slightest thing going wrong would have meant death to all underneath. In such cases there must always be great apprehension.