In Why is the waiting room for talk-show guests called the “green room”?, Cecil says
and then
“Bright stage lights” in 1701? Not bloody likely. Candles and oil lamps, only.
What Cecil’s column implies, but does not explicitly state, is that “nobody really knows for sure.” As an actor myself, who has spent a substantial fraction of my life in various greenrooms (which are, I should note, almost never actually green), I can confirm that it’s a topic of idle discussion and speculation in the community but that nobody has a concrete answer.
I would agree that we’ll never likely know, but I’m somewhat surprised no one has mentioned what is (to me) the most obvious explanation: “Green” = “Ready to go”. Of course, I don’t know if this slangy usage of “green” predates stoplights, but they had to have chosen that color for a reason, eh?
Having spent most of my adolescence involved with the theatre, this has come up before. We were always told that it was to prepare the actors’ eyes for the lights.
Cecil implies that green wasn’t used for “go” until sometime around 1914. See this column: Who decided red means “stop” and green means “go”?
I have a definitive answer but cannot give any cite as I heard it explained several decades ago during some actor’s interview on some tv show, maybe Johhny Carson.
It referred to the process of turning down interviewees/applicants for theatrical productions/jobs by sending them to the door labeled “Green Room”. When they went thru the door, they found themselves in the big green outdoors.
Eve, or other Cafe Society posters?
Each individual candle may not be very bright, but when you have several chandeliers each with dozens to hundreds of candles, the lumens add up pretty quickly.
It’s not that this sounds implausible, but how is it connected to the current meaning of ‘green room’ meaning a backstage ready-room?
For those interested, the Stage Lighting Museum has a Web site describing (duh) stage lighting throughout history. Probably the most relevant section would be the one on the 17th century.
The art of stage lighting was, despite being limited to flame-only technology, relatively advanced by 1700. It seems believable that a combination of many (many) lamps and candles, with reflectors and other “enhancers”, designed specifically to provide illumination on the actors faces, might have been a bit dazzling to those on stage. Whether a green-colored room would help prepare the eyes, I don’t know, but I’m dubious. Still, even if it isn’t true there are many human customs and practices that are based on a superstitious belief rather than empirical fact.
I think Cecil was right on with this one. It is my understanding from studying color theory that green is the least taxing of the colors on our ocular nerves (yellow is the most taxing). I was always told that this is why the green room is (customarily) painted green, or at least traditionally called such, to give the cast’s eyes a break.
That may be the reason. It helps that there were only two legitimate theaters in London at the critical time, which means that only one green-painted actors’ lounge would be half of them. But to anyone who knows about stagecraft of the period, “bright stage lights” is just plain funny.
If that’s the case, then maybe it’s just a simple case of luck?
Perhaps green paint just happened to be left over from painting a forest scene, and the theatre manager decided to save some cash by using the extra paint to give the actors’ waiting room a quick sprucing up.
Theatres were (and are) extremely superstitious places - if the performance by the company the first time theu used the green room was spectacular, it wouldn’t take much for them to associate their success with the new colour scheme.
Once a tradition like that becomes established (cf. referring to Macbeth as “the scottish play”) it’s hard to shift.
All idle specualtion on my part, but my point is that there may not be any specific wider significance in the use of “green” but coincidence, superstition and tradition have made it part of theatre’s firmament.
Not quite. At the ‘critical time’ there were indeed just two legitimate theatre companies in London. But there were three public theatres - the Theatre Royal (Drury Lane), Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Dorset Gardens.
True, at the exact moment the term is first recorded (1701), Dorset Gardens was probably no longer being used for staging plays, but it still existed, it was used that year as the venue for the competition for a musical setting of Congreve’s The Judgment of Paris and plays had been performed there in the very recent past.
Mind you, Cibber, who first mentions a ‘Green-Room’, was very much a Theatre Royal man.
Whenever I see reference to that, the only thing I can think of is the two actors in Black Adder doing their little chant and tweaking each others’ noses.
RR
It is a strong superstition. I’m not superstitious, myself, but have fallen into the habit of observing the “Scottish play” rule because many of my friends are professional actors and jump out of their skins if you break it.
The opera world’s equivalent, by the way, is Verdi’s La Forza del Destino. I once knew a man who burned several thousand dollars’ worth of sets and costumes that had been used for that opera, rather than use them again. (The superstition in this case has a plausible reason; the first scene involves a pistol being thrown to the floor, going off by accident, and killing someone. Have you any idea how many horrible ways that can go wrong in performance?)