The difficulty in defining epic arises in part through constant and cavalier application of the term without giving due consideration to form or content. The difficulty in defining lyric arises more from our theoretical clumsiness at grasping this highly elastic and slippery genre. But the difficulty in defining drama arises not from a lack of thought or theoretical dexterity. The problem with defining drama is that there is almost an infinity of things that seem to deserve or at least desire and aspire to the name drama. This problem is in turn compounded by the innumerable theories about what drama is or is not and what it should or should not do. The category of “performance” and “performance studies” is only the latest attempt to circumscribe this ever-expanding theatrical and theoretical universe. Even just limiting ourselves to Hegel's and Wagner's theories of drama still presents us with a daunting task. To make this task more manageable, my solution throughout these final four chapters will be to concentrate on just a few of the most important convergences and divergences between Wagner's and Hegel's dramatic theories. These areas include the use of drama as a civic institution, the roles that tragedy and comedy play within this civic context, and the evolution and eventual de-evolution of drama out of and back into its epic and lyric components.

It is through Wagner's dual perspective on the past and the future that we recognize how his utopian philosophy was firmly rooted, as Mann reminds us, in the mythological. This kind of progressive backward glance is the essence of Wagner's political aestheticization of the Greeks. To requote Deathridge: the Greeks were, for Wagner, “the pristine source of a lost culture – an ideal of fundamental origins projected onto the utopian future of a society encumbered by alienated living and a lack of spiritual freedom.” But in Siegfried and in his discussions of lyric in general and Greek lyric in particular, Wagner is more interested in a utopian future than a mythological past. He tends to regard lyric as a stop along the way to poetry's highest evolutionary goal, drama, particularly drama in the form of tragedy. His description of lyric and drama in “The Art-Work of the Future” is emblematic of this visionary perspective. Lyric is seen as “primal,” while drama is lyric's “later, more conscious, loftiest completion.” This forward-looking tendency is further strengthened by the historical fact that Wagner wrote the libretto for his lyric opera, Siegfried (originally Der junge Siegfried), after he wrote Götterdämmerung (originally Siegfrieds Tod). In writing Siegfried, therefore, Wagner already knew the dramatic finish to his lyric hero's life and so, to some extent, his vision of Siegfried's future dramatic actions determine Wagner's representation of Siegfried's lyrical past.

The previous chapter attempts to determine the nature of scenography and define its territory. In this chapter, emphasis is given to the means by which such definitions have been achieved. What were the influences and who created or promoted them to determine the concept and practice of scenography? It will not be too surprising to know that influences have come from people who represent a number of disparate sources which occupy some common and related ground. Between them they span a range of perspectives and include: artists, designers, directors, writers and performers. These individuals were and are pioneers in their thinking and vision of and for the theatre. Few of them have referred to their thinking in terms of scenography. It is the accumulative contributions of their work that enable such a concept as scenography to be recognised as relevant to the production of theatre today. Each of these pioneers concentrates on points of focus that are distinctive and relevant to the conceptual and practical development of scenography. As might be imagined, there is considerable overlapping of concern between their preoccupations.

Adolphe Appia (1862–1928)

Pioneers of theatre are often labelled as such because their inspiration, thinking and achievement often occur as a result of dissatisfaction with existing theatrical conditions. In the case of Adolphe Appia his frustration lay with the convention of elaborately detailed sets, created from a combination of painted flats, borders and backdrops that fringed the stage and purported to create the illusion of a real place and, in fact, did nothing of the kind.

The relationship between text and image in performance has been central to scenographic practice in the twentieth century. Although several pioneers actively resisted the play text as the leading component, others, such as Appia, Neher, Mielziner and Svoboda, explored ways in which scenography and text could be interdependent. This chapter sets out some of the ways in which this interdependence can be conceptualised. It is important to draw upon wider historical and contemporary examples to identify key conceptual frames which chart connections between play text and scenographic image in order to put some of the pioneering work into context.

Mielziner's collaborative work with playwrights Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams involved close working relationships in which practical staging solutions and evocative scenographic environments emerged from the themes and images of the play text in such a way as to allow the words to resonate and take on additional layers of meaning. However, collaboration between designer and playwright does not always lead to aesthetic fusion; it may lead to a different kind of interaction. For instance, Caspar Neher worked closely with Brecht as the play text and scenography developed simultaneously. However, Neher's scenography developed in parallel with the text and was designed to comment on it. Text and scenography were required to share the political purpose of Brecht's productions and yet develop distinct and independent means of fusing their contribution.

So far, this book has focused on the creation of scenography and key issues of its production. This has necessarily involved consideration of scenographic practitioners and the role of scenography in relation to processes of performance and their realisation in production. The following chapters consider ways in which scenography might be discussed from critical and academic viewpoints as central components to the experience of viewing or witnessing performance.

It is important to identify relevant approaches to the analysis of theatre performance in order to determine how they might assist specifically in the analysis of scenography. The dominant influence in this respect has been ‘semiotics’ and theories of the ‘sign’ as means of communication. Although there have been objections to the structuralist nature of semiotics and several post-structural and post-semiotic departures, semiotics has had a widespread influence on the way the performance event is conceptualised and analysed. Bearing this in mind, it is important to examine concepts and approaches which have had particular impact on the way scenography can be considered as an object of study. Elaine Aston and George Savona state that the ‘visual dimension of theatre is in general accorded a somewhat surprisingly low priority in critical and theoretical discussion’. Their work on ‘reading’ the stage image goes some way towards addressing this concern by providing a semiotic account of the creation and analysis of scenography. Their work will be considered in further detail at a later stage.