♪♪ Piaton: Theater as we know it in the West today, originated in Greece.

It developed at the heart of ancient cities at the same time as the notion of democracy was born.

Theaters were open to all citizens who watched the performances in the open air.

♪♪ By the Middle Ages, theater no longer had a specific permanent location.

It was only with the arrival of Shakespeare, figurehead of the English Renaissance, that theater became important in Europe again.

♪♪ The Globe Theatre in London enjoyed immense popularity and welcomed all social classes.

In the late 19th century, a German composer wanted to revolutionize the performing arts.

Richard Wagner built an opera house to carry out his utopia of an all-embracing art form.

Through their architecture, both these places reveal the worldview of those who created them.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Waves crashing ] ♪♪ ♪♪ Greek theater was born during antiquity.

One of Europe's first theaters is located in Delphi, among the foothills of Mount Parnassus.

♪♪ Delphi is above all known for its Temple of Apollo, which housed antiquity's most famous oracle.

Greeks made the trip to Delphi for over a thousand years to find out the future.

♪♪ In this sanctuary there is also a stadium and a theater.

♪♪ Moretti: [ Speaking in French ] ♪♪ Piaton: The artistic competitions were initially composed of songs, dances, and instrumental music.

Over time, they merged into acting.

These major competitions called for specially designated spaces for spectators and artists.

And so the first theaters were built initially of wood and subsequently of stone in city centers.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Diamantakou: [ Speaking in Greek ] ♪♪ Piaton: Greek citizens were not only members of the audience, they could also act on stage, sing in the choir, and become financiers or organizers.

They therefore became an integral part of theater performances, the most famous of which took place in Athens at the foot of the Acropolis.

♪♪ [ Speaking in Greek ] [ Speaking in Greek ] [ Speaking in Greek ] ♪♪ ♪♪ Piaton: Although in Greece the theater was a respected part of civil life, actors in London during the Renaissance were wanderers and considered to be vagabonds.

However, when the first permanent theaters were established from the end of the 16th century onwards, they enjoyed popular success like no other form of theater since ancient Greece.

♪♪ None of these theaters have survived to this day.

Only a recent reproduction of the former Globe Theatre of Shakespeare's troupe bears witness to the particular atmosphere that reigned in such places.

♪♪ ♪♪ Tosh: One of the things that's really obvious in a theater like the Globe is that it's both a very democratic space.

There's a big yard where hundreds of audience members can stand, having not paid very much.

They pay £5 today.

They paid a penny in Shakespeare's day.

But it's also a theater that allows a kind of stratification of that audience as well.

So the richer patrons would have sat in the galleries above the stage in what's known as the gentlemen's boxes, having paid six times or more the amount of money that someone in the yard would have spent.

And from our point of view, this isn't a great view.

We're sitting towards the edge of the stage.

We're getting a kind of a rather blocked view from a modern perspective.

The key thing about sitting here as an Elizabethan audience member is that you're on view and you can be seen.

You become part of the world of the play.

[ Indistinct chatter ] Drouet: [ Speaking in French ] Piaton: Every day, up to 3,000 spectators flock to this circular theater.

Munro: We don't know exactly what they were modeled on, but there are similarities with Roman amphitheaters.

And when people talked about these playhouses, they sometimes use the term "amphitheater" to describe them.

On the other hand, there are also similarities with the bear baiting pits, which were also circular, which are directing spectators' attention into the kind of central area of the space.

And there are also maybe connections with other kinds of round structures.

So things like anatomy theaters, which also existed across Europe at this time.

♪♪ Tosh: So Shakespeare's Globe has no roof.

It can't have a roof because it needs to be daylit.

It would be impossible -- It would have been impossible for Shakespeare and his contemporaries to light a space this big with candles.

Which means, of course, that it's open to the weather.

We know from other theater records that these theaters kept going through the winter.

They were still putting on plays in January and February when it, you know, it is not the best time to be in London.

As far as we know, audiences just dealt with it.

♪♪ ♪♪ Piaton: Even though all levels of society were mixed in theaters, this still did not mean theaters were tolerated in the city center.

Drouet: [ Speaking in French ] ♪♪ Piaton: To attend a performance at the Globe Theatre, Londoners had to cross the Thames and travel to the suburb of Bankside.

♪♪ Munro: Bankside, in Shakespeare's day, was in some respects quite different from what we find today.

Then, as now, it was an entertainment district.

But in Shakespeare's day it would have been a lot more controversial, a lot more seedy, a lot more dangerous, in some respects.

A typical day on Bankside in the Elizabethan or Jacobean period probably would have involved eating, drinking, going to a playhouse, maybe seeing a bear baited, maybe going to a brothel, if you were that way inclined.

[ Speaking in French ] ♪♪ [ Seagulls calling ] ♪♪ ♪♪ Piaton: Two centuries later, the composer Richard Wagner wanted to revolutionize the world through the performing arts.

In the late 19th century, he decided to build in Bayreuth the Festival Theatre dedicated to his own monumental works, the most famous of which is the tetralogy.

Still today, every summer, a faithful audience makes the trip to this hill in the Bavarian countryside to pay homage to Wagner.

Kiesel: [ Speaking in German ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Piaton: Wagner was revolutionary on more than one level.

Inside the theater, he refused all form of hierarchy for the audience and set its architecture to serve his artistic vision.

Muller: [ Speaking in German ] ♪♪ ♪♪ Kosky: The number of features about the theater that are quite unique.

Firstly, the zuschauerraum, the auditorium, is never brightly lit, so it's always the feeling of twilight in there.

It's always this dammerung feeling that, you know, everything happens in a haze in the auditorium.

I've never been in a theater before where you walk in, you go, "Why aren't the lights on?"

And I say, "Can we turn the lights on?"

And everyone says, "They're on."

That's as bright as you're going to get here.

It's got a very strange feeling even before anything's begun.

The second thing, which is pure sadism, is Wagner's idea of these chairs, that it had to have a very functional quality, and the people had to not be comfortable and had to sit through his five, six, seven hours.

Absolutely like in church, that it wasn't a place to relax.

It wasn't a place to indulge.

It was a place in true German Protestant tradition where you were there to learn.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Piaton: Whereas Wagner created his theater far from the city, in Greece, the location of the Theatre of Delphi at the very heart of the city, reveals the close relationship that existed in ancient Greece between plays and society.

Its architecture reflects the need to cater for the largest audience possible.

♪♪ Moretti: [ Speaking in French ] ♪♪ ♪♪ Piaton: In the center is the orchestra, a circular space that housed the choir.

Composed of Greek citizens, it was a key feature of Greek theater.

♪♪ Diamantakou: [ Speaking in Greek ] ♪♪ ♪♪ Moretti: [ Speaking in French ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Piaton: In ancient Greek theater, actors were in a position of humility, with all eyes fixed on them.

Loulis: [ Speaking in Greek ] [ Speaking in Greek continues ] [ Speaking in Greek ] ♪♪ ♪♪ Piaton: In London, it's the proximity between the stage and the audience that makes the Globe Theatre so different.

With the audience standing up in the pit, the actors find themselves face to face with their audience.

Man: Where is my wife?

Man #2: [ Speaking indistinctly ] Are you my wife?

Gaumond: It's a place where you can't hide anywhere because you're in the middle of everybody.

You know, it's not complete full circle.

It's not completely in the round.

But you're pretty much -- You feel like you are in the round.

♪♪ Onitiri: The challenge, then, for the actor is actually to relax and to trust and to let the space do what the space does best.

It's a really spiritual space.

And I think if you give in to it as an actor and you give in to that side of you, almost anything is possible.

He hear a play... Defferary: In this theater, historically, in Shakespeare's time, people weren't interested in facing the stage in the way that modern audiences are.

We're used to television and cinema and proscenium arch theater or our mobile phones.

Renaissance audiences didn't mind whether they were facing or whether they were around the side.

The physical action keeps moving all the time, so that's the challenge, is to keep it moving and not to make that too busy.

That that movement is part of the story, is linked to what those characters want.

So you believe that they're moving for a reason rather than they're just moving because they need to, technically.

Sweetheart!

Hey, hey, where's the roof?

Audience: [ Laughs ] There's no roof.

Piaton: Shakespeare was an actor himself.

He based his writing and staging of plays on his own stage experience.

That's not how you do Shakespeare!

Woman: I know my remedy.

Munro: He's somebody who's fascinated by theater.

There are moments in a number of Shakespeare's plays where he seems to capitalize on the configuration of the playhouse and the specifics of the architecture.

This splendid new playhouse that Shakespeare has, this new toy that he has to play with, and a famous example is something like the balcony scene in "Romeo and Juliet", where Juliet is placed above, Romeo is placed below.

And there's all sorts of implicit hierarchies in the way that that space is arranged there with the woman above, with the man below saying things potentially about her role within that relationship, her agency, her ability to control her own fate in those moments.

♪♪ Tosh: Shakespeare was writing for a theater that was producing a different play virtually every day.

The plays themselves had to be very fleet and very fast.

There wasn't time to produce a set.

He didn't write with the assumption that a stage crew would produce the world on the stage.

His actors did that.

Shakespeare's actors produced the world with their words.

So if it's night time, someone comes on and talks about the stars.

If a scene is set in the forest, someone comes on and talks about the trees.

And part of Shakespeare's genius is being able to integrate that kind of scene setting seamlessly with the world of the play and with the character speaking.

So you never feel, with Shakespeare, even though in fact, actually, it's quite clunky.

You never feel that you're being spoon fed a sense of location.

It always just becomes an integral part of the art that he's producing.

♪♪ ♪♪ Munro: There were a number of things that attracted people to the playhouses in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, and part of it was to do with the sheer sensory experience, I think, of being in this either quite small space or quite large space, but watching spectacular things happening on stage.

Tosh: And that could be amazing costumes.

It could be wonderful poetic exchanges, but it could also be special effects.

[ Explosion ] It could be explosions, it could be smoke, it could be lightning, it could be thunder.

Thunder was a sound effect.

And that was produced, we think, either by drums, by drumming backstage, or by rolling a metal ball like a cannonball over wooden boards in the roof space, which produces a rumble.

[ Rumbling ] Lightning, we think, was produced using what we would consider fireworks.

And they didn't necessarily explode with a great flash of light, but they exploded with a noise and with smoke.

[ Fireworks popping ] So we think at the start of Shakespeare's play "Macbeth", the witches emerge onto a stage that had just been riddled with little firecrackers from these fireworks, and the stage would then be covered with a kind of a pall of smoke, very bad smelling smoke as well, because, of course, gunpowder smells of sulfur.

So the world of Macbeth, which is a very sinister and -- and kind of magical world begins with this, again, multi-sensory experience of something hellish.

♪♪ Piaton: At the Globe Theatre, Shakespeare plunged the audience into a fantasy world by calling upon their imagination.

♪♪ At the Bayreuth Festival Palace, Wagner was not satisfied with evoking associations.

He provided a deeply moving experience for the audience, thanks to impressive machinery.

♪♪ Muller: [ Speaking in German ] ♪♪ ♪♪ Piaton: Above the stage, Wagner had vast sets appear and disappear.

Warriors could fly up into the sky, and the stage could fill with water for boats to sail on it.

Like a veritable film director ahead of his time, Wagner had a penchant for special effects.

Music acted as their soundtrack.

♪♪ ♪♪ Muller: [ Speaking in German ] Piaton: As the orchestra pit is covered, the sound of the orchestra is first directed towards the stage before ricocheting to the audience.

The unique sound created by this acoustic system made Bayreuth world famous.

But the configuration also represented a veritable challenge for the conductors who, from the bottom of their pit, never heard the same sound as the audience.

To remedy the situation, an assistant in the theater supports them during rehearsal.

[ Speaking in German ] [ Singing in foreign language ] Jordan: [ Speaking in German ] [ Instruments playing ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Piaton: In order to transport the audience emotionally, instead of encouraging them to listen rationally, Wagner played on the effect of dampened sound coming from the closed pit.

[ Speaking in German ] [ Singing in foreign language ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Piaton: Wagner was fascinated by ancient Greece.

For him, as for the authors of the ancient tragedies, theater must broach all aspects of human existence, taking its source from the great myths.

♪♪ Moretti: [ Speaking in French ] ♪♪ ♪♪ Diamantakou: [ Speaking in Greek ] ♪♪ ♪♪ Demont: [ Speaking in French ] Piaton: To delight the audience and win prizes during competitions, the authors of the Greek tragedies developed a veritable art of storytelling -- dramaturgy.

The rules of writing they followed made their works timeless, even though they were not written intentionally to last.

Moretti: [ Speaking in French ] ♪♪ Koniordou: [ Speaking in Greek ] [ Speaking in Greek ] ♪♪ ♪♪ Piaton: In London during the Renaissance, the Globe Theatre became a favorite place of entertainment.

In Shakespeare's plays, the audience could laugh and cry about their own lives.

♪♪ [ Speaking in French ] [ In English ] To be or not to be, that is the question.

[ Speaking in French continues ] [ In English ] All the world is a stage.

[ Speaking in French continues ] [ Speaking in French ] Piaton: Shakespeare has lost nothing of its topicality.

He remains the most produced playwright on stages all over the world.

[ Speaking in French ] Braunschweig: [ Speaking in French ] ♪♪ Braunschweig: [ Speaking in French ] [ Applauding ] [ Indistinct chatter ] Piaton: The universal dimension in Shakespeare's plays contributed to the tremendous success of the Globe Theatre in London.

However, the political climate was not supportive of it.

[ Speaking in French ] ♪♪ Tosh: Theater had always been quite well protected by certainly the royal court and by the aristocracy.

And as that political balance shifted, theater suffered because it lost its protectors.

In 1642, parliament calls a halt to theater performances, initially as an act of public safety because there's chaos on the streets of London.

But parliament is also strongly dominated by... by strongly Protestant, Puritan political voices who disapprove of theater on moral grounds.

And so from 1642, all the theaters like the Globe and like the indoor theaters in London as well, were closed and didn't reopen for 18 years.

And that 18-year period was long enough, really, for theater going habits to change and for certain people to forget about going to the theater.

And when theater re-emerges in London, gets re-established in 1660, it gets re-established on a different model, and the theater for which Shakespeare had written fades out of view.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Piaton: More than 100 years after his death, Wagner continues to attract crowds to Bayreuth.

The Festival Theatre is always packed and it can sometimes take years to get a ticket.

Kosky: The theater is not just a theater.

It was built by Wagner as an attempt, in a way, to find a utopian form of theater.

This idea of space, sound, memory, history, movement, all the forms coming together, his version of ancient Greek theater, but with him as the god.

So there's no Dionysus and Apollo here.

The god is Wagner.

So you have a temple for people to worship him.

♪♪ Piaton: Since World War II, Bayreuth has become indissociable from the reverence the Nazis had for Wagner's work.

During the era of Hitler, the Festival Theatre became a hotspot for the elite of the Third Reich.

Friedrich: [ Speaking in German ] [ Singing in foreign language ] ♪♪ [ Speaking in German continues ] [ Indistinct chatter ] ♪♪ ♪♪ The [speaking German] from this house is so strong, not just in Wagner's time, but also in the 20th century, that you have a lot of baggage on your shoulders.

You're not coming into just a wonderful theater to create an interesting production coming to Bayreuth.

So the first reaction is, how do I get over this horror?

And the way that I get over this horror is I said on one hand, you know, one, you have the garlic against Nosferatu, in the other hand -- on the other hand, I have my, uh, Star of David in the other hand, my Magen David on the other hand, and I say, "No, you can't get to me, Wagner."

And that's proved successful.

Are there better opera houses with better acoustics?

Yes.

Are there more beautiful theaters?

Yes.

Is there a theater that has this quality and this strange weirdness?

No.

There's no other theater in the world that is so closely associated with a political era or political chapter that people still feel when they come and sit there now.

♪♪ Piaton: Throughout history, the architecture of theaters has recounted the worldview of those who built them.

♪♪ Ancient Greek theater was, above all, a laboratory of ideas.

Citizens' heavy involvement on the stage contributed to the founding of democracy.

♪♪ Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London embodied the hierarchical structure of English society during the Renaissance.

The plays shown here challenged the morals of the era, playing skillfully with the codes of representation.

♪♪ The architecture of Wagner's Opera House reveals the revolutionary spirit of its creator.

The Festival Theatre, built to satisfy Wagner's ambition for an all-embracing art form, fascinates people today as much as it divides opinion.

♪♪ From the stone theater to the visionary opera house, each form of architecture reflects the challenges of its era.

Over the centuries, the stages of these theaters have become places of reflection par excellence on the human condition.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪