man of the technical staff an opportunity of racking their brains as to how, under the circumstances, and with the somewhat sorry properties at their disposal, they can make the specified transformation in the short space of time required of them. The scenic designer, therefore, reads the play without paying much attention to the beauty of the words: his main concern is where the doors are to be, and of what kind they must be, and what inconvenient furniture the dramatist has asked for: and eventually, after taking council with the producer, he arranges everything differently. The astonished dramatist then declares that that is exactly how he had meant everything to be. For one of the many peculiar things about the theatre is that things generally turn out differently from what is expected; when the scenery arrives on the stage, the scenic designer is surprised to discover that the properties are always much too big, or much too broad, much too short, much too small, in fact, always different from what he has imagined they would be like;
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