Tableau Vivant - On Stage

On Stage

Before radio, film and television, tableaux vivants were popular forms of entertainment. Before the age of color reproduction of images, the tableau vivant (often abbreviated to tableau) was sometimes used to recreate paintings "on stage", based on an etching or sketch of a painting. This could be done as an amateur venture in a drawing room, or as a more professionally produced series of tableaux presented on a theatre stage, one following another, usually to tell a story without requiring all the usual trappings of a "live" theatre performance. They thus 'educated' their audience to understand the form taken by later Victorian and Edwardian era magic lantern shows, and perhaps also sequential narrative comic strips (which first appeared in modern form in the late 1890s).

These tableaux vivants were often performed as the basis for school nativity plays in England during the Victorian period; the custom is still practiced at Loughborough High School (believed to be one of England's oldest grammar schools for girls). Ten tableaux are performed each year at the school carol service, including the depiction of an all-grey engraving (in which the subjects are painted completely grey).

Theatrical censorship in Britain and the US forbade actresses to move when nude or semi-nude on stage, so tableaux vivant had a place in risqué entertainment for many years although in the early 1900s, German dancer Olga Desmond appeared in Schönheitsabende ("Evenings of Beauty") in which she posed nude in "living pictures", imitating classical works of art.

In the nineteenth century they took such titles as "Nymphs Bathing" and "Diana the Huntress" and were to be found at such places as the "Hall of Rome" in Great Windmill Street, London. Other venues were the "Coal Hole" in the Strand and the "Cyder Cellar" in Maiden Lane. After 1900, nude and semi-nude tableaux vivant also became a frequent feature of variety shows in the U.S.: first on Broadway in New York, then elsewhere in the country. The Ziegfeld Follies featured tableaux vivant from 1917. The Windmill Theatre in London (1932–1964) featured nude tableaux vivant on stage; it was the first, and for many years the only venue for them in 20th century London.

Tableaux vivant were often included in fairground sideshows (as seen in the film A Taste of Honey). Such shows had largely died out by the 1970s.