This book has argued the place of the venue as an active participant in the creative process of making performance. It has achieved this by reinvigorating selected lost venues and activating them with the help of performers and researchers. The use of visualisation as a methodology in performance research has strengthened our ability to explore lost venues and to explain their significance, as well as allowing us to chart the flows of theatre through time. While our emphasis has been on theatre history, focusing on venues can have an impact on performance-making and analysis now. This brief conclusion reviews the centrality of the venue as an object of study and then offers some considerations for using visualisation in theatre research.

This book has argued the place of the venue as an active participant in the creative process of making performance. It has achieved this by reinvigorating selected lost venues and activating them with the help of performers and researchers.

Chapter 2 addresses Komediehuset in Bergen, Norway in its 1850–1909 iteration. Built by an amateur dramatic society in 1800 and destroyed by a 1944 British bombing raid, it has a twofold historical importance: it housed the first professional Norwegian theatre company and it is where the young Henrik Ibsen learned his craft. We consider the theatre’s high point as a social space for audiences and artists to create a national identity for the emerging state of Norway. This chapter focuses on set design, specifically in Olaf Liljekrans, an early play by Ibsen. Via performance labs in conjunction with artists, actors, and a designer, we analyse how Ibsen used space and movement to elucidate the discourses within his plays. In the famous social dramas written after he left Norway, Ibsen perfected this technique of writing meanings into bodies and imaginary stage spaces. The chapter illustrates Komediehuset’s role in the birth of Norwegian nationalism on stage and the beginnings of modern drama.

Chapter 5, on the showroom at the Stardust Hotel in Las Vegas (1958–2006), investigates the international production of theatrical revue for a tourist audience. It exemplifies the modernist design of twentieth-century theatre architecture, with an aesthetic of curved planes and smooth surfaces designed to facilitate the flow of people through performance and level the encounter between artists and spectators. We focus on the initial 1958–9 design, which accommodated the latest stage technologies, including a swimming pool, an ice rink, a waterfall, and a firework show. The Stardust became the venue for the Lido de Paris, the long-running revue, which played in various editions until 1991. Since the showroom was demolished within the Stardust in 2007, our reconstruction illustrates how theatre venues were shaped by the capitalist development of international tourism. Virtual praxis in the model embodies insight into the design of the Stardust showroom as a tourist attraction and the choreography that made a gendered spectacle of international relations.

Visualising Lost Theatres studies venues that have been ‘lost’, whether through demolition or substantial remodelling. Once a theatre building is lost, its theatrical, social, and cultural worlds fade. Some fragments may remain, but their capacity to tell the story of a venue’s role in performance is limited. In researching this book, we learned how venues are living systems rather than passive containers of performance, and that their contribution to the creation of live performance has been underestimated. We studied how the contours of theatre venues cultivated social cohesion within them and forged connections with the cultural and political worlds beyond. To recover what is lost when a venue is no longer in existence, we turned to three-dimensional (3D) visualisation technology to recreate the venue in virtual form, so that we can reactivate dynamic facets of its performance space. This volume thus explores the creative interactions that exist between architecture, artists, and audiences.

Chapter 1 examines London’s Rose Theatre (1587–1603), which contributed significantly to the development of western theatre. We explore Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus in the intimacy of the Rose against his large-scale imagined worlds. The Rose was located very near the Globe Theatre, best known for William Shakespeare’s plays. The virtual-reality model of the Rose highlights physical proximity as a key factor in this intimate amphitheatre. The chapter takes readers through blocking and how a virtual model can determine possibilities for movement and action on this stage, against both a physical and metaphysical attention to subjectivity, as audience members were shifting from the end of the medieval era into the early modern era. In this polygonal cauldron-like venue, Doctor Faustus rehearses the profound shifts of subjectivity from God-centred to human-centred. The performance laboratory research conducted in the virtual amphitheatre demonstrates a convergence of multiple theatrical forms, philosophical ideas, and audiences.

Chapter 3 investigates colonial actors’ performances on the 1841 opening night of the Queen’s Theatre, Adelaide. The Queen’s is the oldest extant theatre on mainland Australia. Its establishment reflected the South Australian colony fashioning itself as a colony of free settlers. We delve into the performance possibilities in this imported, Regency-style venue which opened with Othello, performed when race relations were particularly volatile. While we do not lose sight of the staging of the black body, we focus on corporeality in the shape of the audience. We reconstruct a culture of spectatorship across the auditorium by producing responses of the distinctive 1841 audience of Adelaide. The aim was to make in the Queen’s, and the rest of Adelaide, a better version of Britain, against the suppression of indigenous peoples, a matter that took on an even more macabre setting after the theatre’s closure, when it became the court that adjudicated on frontier politics. The performance laboratory for this chapter worked in conjunction with artists, actors, and a set designer to model an Othello for 1841 to consider audience responses to it at a time when race relations were topical.

Chapter 4 explores the travelling form of Cantonese opera in the Guangdong region of south China in the nineteenth century. We address the genre’s wide geopolitical context by combining it with the popular form as toured on the Australian goldfields in Victoria in circus-style tents in the 1850s to 1870s to entertain miners who hoped to make a fortune and return to China. The virtual reconstruction of a tent theatre set up for the opening of a joss house (or temple) in Victoria suggests a consistency from the Pearl River Delta to the goldfields. We examine the sophisticated techniques used by this sojourner company to minimise the disruptions that a touring schedule with multiple and dissimilar sites of performance creates. Carrying a portable stage/backstage platform, and orientating the audience–performer relationship, the company created a spatial layering of two geographies to support its sacred and secular repertoire.