The First Frame Summary

Forms change when ideas change. By the end of the late eighteenth century, there was a huge movement to renovate theater architecture in France. Philosophers, politicians, and playwrights, including Louis XV, noted that France needed to discard the past theater structure and had started to debate about which structure of playhouse could appropriately support the new age of French theater. They debated on the different modified theater forms to find the ultimate stage design and structure for France. In The First Frame, Pannill Camp explains that every artistic framework is affected by the thought of that era, arguing that the theater reformation in late eighteenth-century France had alleviated the disconnect between the theory and practice …show more content…
By the end of the eighteenth century, the projection of the human mind became physically possible due to the development of science. The intellectual enlightenment, paralleled with the philosophical enlightenment, affected the design of theater architecture during the Reformation of playhouses. The distance between the stage and the audience started from the endeavor to set a frame for the spectators to appreciate the aesthetic choices of a dramatic piece as art, which now became the most popular framework in contemporary theater: the proscenium stage. Camp’s The First Frame explains that the deliberate visual articulation on stage represented the ideals of the philosophical, scientific, and artistic developments in that period and that this first frame created for French theater became the role model for modern theater architecture. Camp’s attempt to explicate the evolution of the French theatre stage is based on both qualitative and quantitative research on the historical, theoretical, cultural, and scientific background of a specific era, which could be effectively informative for young scholars or undergraduate/graduate students who want to explore the overview of the formation of French theatre in the Enlightenment