Sardou's pieces, the manuscript of which I once had occasion to
study, the chairs stand at the beginning of the first act in very
different positions from those in which they are required to be at the
end of the act; and the manuscript contained full directions indicating
just when and exactly how one or another of the characters should seem
accidentally to push a chair into the needed position.

Since modern science has revealed the influence of environment on
character, and since modern fiction, following the example set by
Balzac, has brought out the significance of the background before which
an individual lives, moves and has his being, the stage-manager has a
more difficult duty than ever before. He has to see to it that the
scenery and all the fittings of the set are congruous, and that they are
significant, not merely of the place itself, but of the people also. The
late John Clayton showed me the model for the scene of the first act of
'Margery's Lovers,' remarking with a smile of satisfaction that, when
the curtain should go up, and before a word had been uttered, everybody
in the house would know that the story was laid in Southern France. When
the late James A. Herne brought out a play in which husband and wife
took opposite sides on the slavery question, the curiously stiff and
old-fashioned furniture used in the first act seemed to strike the
key-note of the drama; the spectators could not but feel that those who
lived amid such surroundings were precisely the persons who would behave
in that way.

The stage-manager is encouraged to try for these pictorial effects,
because the stage is now withdrawn behind a picture-frame in which the
curtain rises and falls. It is no longer thrust out into the midst of
the spectators, as it was in Shakspere's time; nor does it now project
beyond the line of the curtain, curving out alongside the stage-boxes,
as it did until the third quarter of the nineteenth century. It is now
separated from the audience by the straight row of footlights, within
the lower border of the frame; and the electric light which reaches
every corner of the stage, has put it into the power of the
stage-manager to modify his illumination at will, and to be confident
that no gesture will be lost no matter how he may arrange his groups
against his background. He can darken the whole stage, slowly or
suddenly, as he sees fit. Much of the intense effect attained by Sir
Henry Irving in the trial-scene