intermission

An intermission (American English) or interval (British English) is a recess between parts of a performance or production, such as for a theatrical play, opera, concert, or film screening. It should not be confused with an entr'acte (French: "between acts"), which, in the 18th century, was a sung, danced, spoken, or musical performance that occurs between any two acts, that is unrelated to the main performance, and that thus in the world of opera and musical theatre became an orchestral performance that spans an intermission and leads, without a break, into the next act.^[1]

Marmontel and and Diderot both viewed the interval as a period in which the action did not in fact stop, but continued off-stage. "The interval is a rest for the spectators; not for the action.", wrote Marmontel in 1763. "The characters are deemed to continue acting during the interval from one act to another." However, intervals are more than just dramatic pauses that are parts of the shape of a dramatic structure. They also exist for more mundane reasons, such as that it is hard for audience members to concentrate for more than two hours at a stretch, and actors and performers (for live action performances at any rate) need to rest.^[2][3] They afford opportunity for scene and costume changes.^[4] And of course performance venues take advantage of them to sell food and drink.^[4]

Psychologically, intervals cause audiences to return to reality, and are a period during which they can engage critical faculties that they have suspended during the performance itself.^[2][4]

Plays

The term "Broadway Bladder" names "the alleged need of a Broadway audience to urinate every 75 minutes".^[5] Broadway Bladder, and other considerations (such as how much revenue a theatre would lose at its bar if there were no interval), govern the placement of intervals within performances, and their existence in performances, such as plays, that were not written/created with intervals in mind.^[5]

Case study: the plays of William Shakespeare

The plays of William Shakespeare were originally intended for theatre performance without intervals. The placement of intervals within those plays in modern performances is thus a matter for the play's director.^[6] Reviewer Peter Holland analysed the placement of intervals in 1997:

• Of The Winter's Tale he noted that there was "as natural a break as anyone could wish for" before the speech of Time as Chorus, and that he had never seen a production that placed an interval other than at that point.^[5]
• Trevor Nunn's Measure for Measure in 1991 he gave as an example of intervals placed in the middle of a scene. It stopped halfway through act 3 scene 1, moving some of the lines from later in the scene to before the interval.^[5]
• Performances of King Lear, he observed, often place the interval "disproportionately late", after the blinding of Gloucester.^[5]
• The 1991 RSC production of Julius Caesar directed by Stephen Pimlott he pointed out as noteworthy for its extraordinary interval length. Pimlott had placed the interval after act 4 scene 1, after the action leaves Rome. This allowed the striking of the scenery. But it took sometimes as much as forty minutes for stage crew to remove the scenery, which comprised a "massive set of columns and a doorway" designed by Tobias Hoheisel, a period that was longer than the remaining length of the performance, some thirty-five minutes.^[7]

Many modern productions of Shakespeare plays have thus eschewed the introduction of an interval, choosing instead to perform them all of the way through non-stop, as originally intended. Such productions include Peter Hall's 1988 The Tempest; the 1987, 1995, and 2001 RSC productions of Julius Caesar; the 1988 (RSC), 1992 (RNT), 1999–2000 (RSC), and 2001 (Globe) productions of Macbeth; and the 2001 PRC production of All's Well That Ends Well.^[6]

Kabuki

The intermissions in Kabuki theatre can last up to an hour. Because this often results in people returning to their seats several minutes after the performance has resumed, playwrights generally take to writing "filler" scenes for the starts of acts, containing characters and dialogue that are not important to the overall story.^[8]

Films

Intermissions in early films had a practical purpose: they were needed to facilitate the changing of reels.^[9] When Les Amours de la reine Élisabeth (Queen Elizabeth), starring Sarah Bernhardt, opened on July 12, 1912, in the Lyceum Theatre in New York City, the four reel film was shown in four acts, with an intermission between each reel change.^[10]

The technology improved, but as movies became progressively longer, the intermission fulfilled other needs. It gave the audience a breather, and provided the theatre management an opportunity to entice patrons to its profitable concession stand. A 1957 animated musical snipe suggested, before the main feature in theatres and during intermission at drive-ins, "let's all go to the lobby to get ourselves a treat".

The intermission has been phased out, the victim of the demand to pack in more screenings and also because in multiplexes, the break gave patrons a better opportunity to sneak away to watch other pictures.^[11] The last major mainstream film to feature one was 1982's Gandhi.^[11]

Other notable films with intermissions include:

• The Birth of a Nation (1915)
• Gone with the Wind (1939)
• Fantasia (1940)
• Ben-Hur (1959)
• Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

References

Sources

See also

• Film presentation