The details are the thing

"That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith."
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I've always been intrigued by the term "suspension of disbelief," and think it is particularly useful when thinking about theatre and stagecraft. As theatre artists, we aren't trying to get audiences to believe they are actually in Fantastica or Denmark or East High, yet at the same time profound disbelief would undermine the compact between audience and artist, and could rob the experience of emotional gravity.

What we try to achieve is the suspension of disbelief, that state in which the audience willingly abandons skepticism in order to participate in the story. Often, the key to achieving suspension of disbelief is in the details.

The bit of stagecraft below from our current production of Hamlet is a perfect example. Our adaptation was written by SCT Artistic Associate Rita Giomi for five actors, meaning that only Connor Toms as Hamlet handles a single role. As the other actors handle two or three roles each, none could be spared to act as the corpse of Ophelia in the play's second act. And so this responsibility fell to our props department.

It would have been reasonable to expect a glorified scarecrow, clothes filled with stuffing and wrapped in a shroud. But such a prop wouldn't have the heft, drape or exact shape of an actual corpse, so the talented folks in props built this skeleton to fill out the body shape.







Note in particular the fully articulated spine, which was key to getting our poor, dead Ophelia to sag realistically in her brother's arms. And the exercise of creating the entire skeleton ensured she would have the proper proportions.

Wrapped in her death shroud, this is how the final Ophelia looked:





In this last photo, the Ophelia corpse is shown with Marne Cohen Vance, who filled in as Prop Shop Manager over the winter holidays.

We're quite fond of our fake Ophelia here, and have even christened her with a nickname. One of the above photos contains a huge clue as to what that nickname is - think you can figure it out? The first person to post the correct nickname in the comments section will receive a voucher for a free ticket to Hamlet.