Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” set design

It’s been said previously that Ibsen’s set directives at the beginning of A Doll’s House simply don’t work. Just to prove them wrong (or possibly right!), I decided to block up a set from his directives, which, in the translation used by Project Gutenberg, reads as follows:

A room furnished comfortably and tastefully, but not extravagantly. At the back, a door to the right leads to the entrance-hall, another to the left leads to Helmer’s study. Between the doors stands a piano. In the middle of the left-hand wall is a door, and beyond it a window. Near the window are a round table, arm-chairs and a small sofa. In the right-hand wall, at the farther end, another door; and on the same side, nearer the footlights, a stove, two easy chairs and a rocking-chair; between the stove and the door, a small table. Engravings on the walls; a cabinet with china and other small objects; a small book-case with well-bound books. The floors are carpeted, and a fire burns in the stove.

From this, my sketch (which would probably work in most performance spaces, assuming they’re not too unusual — in which case, you should be used to having to butcher directives in order to get a working set!):

Of course, I’m completely unfamiliar with the design conventions of the period (speaking generally, not of stage and set construction), so chances are furniture details are incorrect, as (most likely) is the style of the stove (stage left) and various other elements in the room. Notably, this block and sketch have been worked from a translation of the original text, so some elements may be different or incorrect due to misunderstanding after translation: The McLeish translation (arguably far less eloquent and watered down!) dictates a number of things different — the most significant being the description of “a small table” (as above) instead as “a side-table”.

I’d chosen to ignore the directive to place that furniture behind the stove, simply because it was simpler not to, and I’d forgotten about the bookcase (besides, there aren’t any compelling reasons to follow this directive, if I were to follow the Gutenberg or Archer version only — “a small table” may be placed anywhere, however the McLeish translation states “a side-table”, which requires a wall…).

For the record, I’m perfectly well aware I can’t sketch, so don’t bother reminding me! Having said that, there seems to be a distinct lack of set designs around that adhere to Ibsen’s directives, so perhaps this may be useful to someone. Oh, and this is just about proving a point, anyway. ;)

Cruel telephony

In a cruel twist of fate (or at least Orange’s network rollout and upgrade roadmap policy), reception in what used to be blackspots around my house has improved dramatically in the last 48 hours.

I’d been waiting to see whether this could last before posting, and now, as it seems that it has, I do so. Those who follow my life as published in this space will be aware of the plans to vacate the current place of residence to move elsewhere: naturally, as this has been confirmed, mobile coverage here improves!

There isn’t really all that much more to say, other than that my bedroom used to be a no-go area for making phone calls on my mobile, but now works fine… I hope the coverage wherever we move to is as good!

A word to the wise

“A word to the wise”

*stares distastefully at the state of United States “anti-terrorism” policy*

Dead puppies

This morning, when someone was unable to stop laughing:

Think about dead puppies!

– Lucy

This, of course, only further pushed people into hysterics.

Later today, when someone else was unable to stop laughing:

Think about dead puppies! … Works every time!

– Lucy

The first instance included a few more words, which made the second far more amusing than perhaps it should have been. Guess you had to be there?

Dalegroup.net random images

I just noticed what is (to me) a new feature over at the Dalegroup.net root website, which loads a random image for each request. It’s quite stylish; my personal favorite image is number 6, because dead trees are cool! Erm… yes.

What, you want details? The contrast between the tree and the sky is great, as is the degree of change in lighting (specifically shadow) evident on the tree itself. Perspective is a bit wonky, but as always, it’s a subjective thing! That, and the crop probably enhances any perspective evident in the original (which I have seen, but don’t recall all that well).

I’m tempted to steal this idea, although I have no idea how best to apply it here. Whenever I get around to working up a new style for this website (I’ve got a sketch, but no time to implement), we’ll see how best to plagiarise that concept — which is of course featured on other websites in turn, perhaps most notably Photo Matt.

One thing I’ll bear in mind, and would perhaps recommend Michael looks at, is keeping the filesize of the images right down, to the extent that load times aren’t consequential to any users — this is far more important when displaying images as CSS backgrounds, because there aren’t any placeholder graphics displayed in user agents by default, so users won’t wait for them to load! Another suggestion more immediately applicable and concrete is that instead of generating a new stylesheet from PHP, thus completely killing browser caching (half of the advantage of CSS), you have a single CSS file and use inline styles, or the style attribute with a specific tag, to specify your custom backgrounds.

Aside from that, it’s snazzy!