# How a play is produced/The Stage Inspector

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​The Stage Inspector
HE is also known as the foreman of the technical staff, and ruler over the carpenters’ shop, painting-room, and store-rooms. It is to him that the scenic designer hands his suggestions, saying: “And now, my good man, manage that somehow with your cloth and laths.”
It is easy to give instructions; you can paint anything on paper, but to make it stand up and hold together in practice is quite another thing. For this reason the foreman always says: “Lord love us, that won’t do at all!” and “Lord love us, when have we got time for it?” Finally, it is demonstrated that it will do somehow after all, and is even nearly ready; how this is attained, I do not ​know; but in a theatre you are always handling sheer impossibilities.
Scenery consists: (1) of various movable articles of furniture, such as stairs, steps, pedestals, and tables, folding scaffolding, and similar woodwork known also as plastic scenery; (2) of prospects and horizons, which are the large painted sheets which hang at the back; (3) of flats, which are frame-like decorations screwed to the floor; (4) of borders and drops and arches, which again are painted cloths, hanging on so-called battens; (5) of draperies; (6) of various coverings, which merely mask gaps in the wings. This is all, and from such weak materials and rags have to be conjured up earth and sky, castles in the air, etc., etc. And when at the dress rehearsal all this is standing on the stage, suspended, screwed to the ground, supported by brackets, and still smelling of wood and glue, the foreman is radiant with glory. He does not see the actors, nor know what is being said on the stage, but he feels to the depths of his soul ​all these flats, drops, and steps and prosspects. “There’s a scene for you!” he says, with pardonable pride.
And if you, patron of first nights, are grumbling that the interval is lasting a deuce ​of a time, you should just have a look at the foreman’s battlefield. The curtain has hardly reached the ground when twenty pairs of hands seize the flats and practicables and begin “taking to bits.”
The prospects are hauled up, the property man throws his things into a basket, the upholsterer rolls up his carpet, raising clouds of dust, the furniture men remove tables and chairs, the trap-door sinks with a groan beneath one’s feet, and look out! A new prospect comes sailing down on to people’s heads from the flies. And here are the new walls already, the upholsterer hammers on hangings, the electricians drag cables about the stage, the property man rolls on with a new basket of things and the furniture men with new tables and cupboards. “Look sharp there!”—“Get out of the way with that, man!”—“Look out!”—“My God!”—“Mind your head!”—“Out of the way with them steps!”—“Hold this, Franta!”—“What on earth are you doing, man?”—“Screw it on, then!”—“Out of the way!”​—“Where’s this supposed to go?”—“It’s falling!”—“Silly fathead!”—“But I told you yesterday! . . .”—“Good God, buck up about it!”—“Where are you screwing ​that?”—Crash! now it has really fallen down, but by a miracle no one is killed. “Mind the trap!”—“Look out!!”—“Look out!!!”—“Go away!”—“Clear that away!”—“It’s blooming well bust!”—“Steps here!”—“It won’t hold, I tell you!”—“Take it down again!”—“Who the hell’s pinched my hammer?”—“We must saw a bit off here!”—Ting! the stage-manager rings once for the curtain. “Christopher, that’s all wrong!”—“We must put a bracket here!”—“Leave it there!”—“Take it away!”—The actors are already on the stage. “Where’s that sewing of mine?”—“Those doors won’t shut!”—“But that chair was standing somewhere else!”—“Give me that paper, quick!”—“I shall never be able to finish my part to-day!”—“Lord, where did I put that shawl?”—“I don’t know a word!”—Ting! the curtain rises slowly and irrevocably. Lord of Hosts, if only things last till the end of the act!