Pleasure palaces and hidden gems

Theatre buildings are seriously interesting – as I ought to have appreciated sooner in the course of 25 years writing about theatre and opera. This coffee-table whopper, weighing in at just under a kilo, dazzles: Michael Coveney’s text is even better than Peter Dazeley’s remarkable photographs. And in a luminous foreword, Mark Rylance sets out the not-so-obvious difference between theatre and cinema: ‘In a theatre you need to hear the truth. In a cinema you need to see it.’ Most of the theatre audience can’t see the actor’s eyes, and have to rely on hearing emotion in the voice and, to a lesser extent, detecting emotion in body language. Hence the importance of lighting. In the past, footlights gave the actors some ‘visual dominance, but nothing like the blazing stage we now witness, or darkened auditorium’ in which we sit.

Rylance has a clause in all his contracts insisting that the stage boxes must contain people, and not, as is more usual nowadays, the lighting equipment that disfigures the building’s architectural and decorative features.