Stage directions

Stage left and stage right are named from the position of somebody standing on the stage facing the audience. Stage left is therefore the audience’s right, and stage right is the audience’s left. The audience’s own orientation is called house left and house right, and the vocabulary only works if you say which one you mean.

Upstage and downstage are the other axis, and the names are a survival from when stages were raked — built on a slope rising towards the back. Upstage is away from the audience, downstage is towards them. A presenter asked to move downstage is being asked to come forward.

The reason this is worth a planner knowing is that the words appear on every drawing and in every call. A sign that says stage left goes on the audience’s right. A speaker told to enter from stage right enters from the side the room sees as the left. Getting it backwards in a rehearsal note produces an entrance from the wrong wing in front of a full room.

The safe habit when talking to people who do not use the terms daily is to say both: stage left, which is your right as you look at it. It takes two extra seconds and removes the single most common misunderstanding between a production crew and a client.

Corporate event production — owned inventory, our own crew, and a site survey before anything is specified.

• Proscenium The frame a stage is viewed through — a wall with an opening in it, which decides what the audience can see and gives everything else somewhere to hide.
• Thrust stage A stage that extends into the audience with seating on three sides — intimate, and a complete rewrite of where lighting, loudspeakers and cameras can go.
• Sightlines What each seat can actually see — the thing that decides stage height, screen height and where a camera platform may stand, and the thing a flat floor ruins.