Theatre Museum Covent Garden
Thursday 23rd February 2006
We went to the Theatre Museum at Covent Garden. First we went to a workshop about Theatre make up. The lady demonstrated on a young girl and made her up to age her. When she had finished, the girl look quite similar to her mum. She also put different wigs on her to make her look like an old crone, and one which made her look like an 18th century lady.
Then we had a tour of the Museum with an actor who gave us a talk about the history of theatre and acting. We learnt that women were not allowed to act and originally men had to play all the women's parts. We were all very surprised to learn that all the villains come onto the stage from "Stage Left" signifying that they are bad people. In some plays, the left denotes hell.. We learnt that the good ones come on from stage right which signifies heaven. We also learnt why actors always say "break a leg" to each other. This comes from the days when some of them used to come up from under the stage through a trap door. The trap doors had a habit of suddenly snapping back and breaking their legs. To ward off that happening, the actors all started saying break a leg to each other to try and bring some good luck.
