Scene Descriptions from Play excerpts
Play Title / Set DescriptionThe Seagull – Anton Chekhov / Act 3
The dining room in Sorin’s house. Doors to right and left. A sideboard. A cupboard with medicines. A table in the middle of the room. A trunk and cardboard boxes, preparations for departure are in evidence. TRIGORIN is having lunch. MASHA is standing by the table.
The Importance of Being Earnest – Oscar Wilde / Act 2 Garden at the Manor House. A flight of grey stone steps leads up to the house. The garden, an old-fashioned one, full of roses. Time of year, July. Basket chairs, and a table covered with books, are set under a large yew-tree. MISS PRISM discovered seated at the table. CECILY is at the back watering flowers
Endgame – Samuel Beckett / Setting Bare interior. Left and right back, high up, two small windows, curtains drawn. Front right, a door. Hanging near door, its face to wall, a picture. Front left, touching each other, covered with an old sheet, two ash bins. Centre, in an armchair on castors, covered with an old sheet, HAMM. Motionless by the door, his eyes fixed on HAMM, CLOV. Very red face. Brief tableau.
Box The Pony – Scott Rankin and Leah Purcell / Setting At stage right there is a blue boxing mat with a heavy punching bag hanging above it. Upstage, a pile of cow hides in various patterns and colours are draped on top of one another over an unseen stand. To stage left are three green garbage bags with some of the contents exposed, including trophies, photos and clothes.
The Removalists – David Williamson / Act 1 The play opens in a small inner suburban police station built fairly recently but already having an air of decrepit inefficiency. SERGEANT DAN SIMMONDS, fat and fiftyish, lounges at a battered old desk from which he surveys CONSTABLE NEVILLE ROSS as if he were auditioning him for a crucial role in some play. ROSS is twenty. There is a long pause.
The Bald Soprano – Eugene Ionesco / Setting A middle-class English interior, with English armchairs. An English evening. Mr Smith, an Englishman, seated in his English armchair and wearing English slippers, is smoking his English pipe and reading an English newspaper, near an English fire. He is wearing English spectacles, and a small grey English moustache. Beside him, in another English armchair, Mrs Smith, an Englishwoman, is darning some English socks. A long moment of English silence. The English clock strikes 17 English strokes.
The Chapel Perilous- Dorothy Hewett / Setting A permanent set. Upstage against the cyclorama is the outline of a school chapel with a stained glass window discovered later to contain a figure of SALLY BANNER. Three shallow steps lead to the chapel and the tower is accessible. In front of the chapel are three rostrums and an altar on a platform. Large masks of the HEADMISTRESS, the CANON and SISTER ROSA remain constant throughout the play, standing on the three rostrums and large enough to hide an actor behind each. Three loud-speakers are placed prominently. The three masked figures play the roles of judges of the action against the landscape of the profane chapel. Sometimes they play themselves, sometimes they step from behind the masks into the body of the play and become other characters.