Making the Scene: A History of Stage Design and Technology in Europe and the United States

The last English-language book attempting a Greeks-to-the-present survey was Allardyce Nicoll's The Development of the Theatre in 1956, although there have been important contributions over the years by Denis Bablet, David Wiles, George Izenour and Christopher Baugh, as well as an increasing number of publications dealing with the more conceptual aspects of space, visuality, phenomenology and reception. Making the Scene, on the other hand, is a coffee-table-size book that surveys European and US/American theatre design and technology from ancient Greece to the present. McKinney and Butterworth, focusing largely on the contemporary, divide their book into three sections: 'Elements' tackles a definition of scenography with one of the most cogent examinations of that topic I have encountered.