However, in the film, where costume does not always carry such metaphoric significance, the introduction of Ikudayisi is constructed audio-visually in such a way as to draw attention to his clothes. Yemi and his mum are walking down the street when they realize that Ikudayisi has arrived. We see a pavement-level shot of a car door opening in slow motion and then cut to Yemi’s expectant face, before cutting to a close up of a foot encased in an unfashionable sock and sandal emerging from behind the car door. We then see Yemi looking worried at what’s coming next before cutting back to the whole figure of Ikudayisi emerging in slow motion from the car. He is dressed in jeans and a cheap looking fake leather brown jacket, with a gold ring on his finger and a chunky looking watch on his wrist, made noticeable to the audience through the deployment of a cut away from the main action. We cut back to Yemi looking even more alarmed and the Afrobeat music accompanying Ikudayisi’s exit from the car is abruptly brought to a halt as if a needle had been swiftly taken off a vinyl record and the action is brought back to normal speed. In a similar way to the play, the signifying power of clothes is used to mark the brothers’ fundamental cultural difference but in the film the sequence is constructed in such a way to highlight Ikudayisi’s clothing as significant and make the sequence more amusing, aligning the spectator with Yemi’s appalled viewpoint at his brother’s unfashionable clothing and marking Ikudayisi more clearly as the ‘outsider’.
A comparable use of mise en scène to find a way to communicate a key aspect of production design is evidenced by the film adaptation of August Wilson’s play Fences (2016). In a similar strategy to Gone Too Far, the action begins outside of the place where the action in the play starts. The protagonist Troy (Denzel Washington) and his friend Bono (Stephen McKinley Henderson) are shown riding on the back of a garbage truck that trundles its way through the streets of the suburbs of an American town in the 1950s. This brings some movement into the frame (like the bicycle in the previous example) and allows the characters to plausibly move through their social environment, to set their conversations in context. The film then moves to the front-yard of Troy’s house, as per the stage play, as the after-work chat and drinking begins. The film switches between inside and outside the house, as well as the street in front of the house, but most of the significant scenes take place, as in the play, in the yard. This was noted by the critics who generally berated the film for failing to disguise its theatrical origins, with The Guardian noting ‘the aesthetic is still inescapably stagy. Vestiges of greasepaint are everywhere, from the carefully assembled period props to the entrances and exits’ (Shoard 2016: n.pag.). As the reviewer implies, too much careful ‘selection’ in the look of a film can appear to undermine its claims to be set in a ‘real’ environment. In the theatre, ‘effective theatre design is essentially the architectural manifestation of the psychological dynamics which operate in the total experience of theatre’ (Davies 1990: 7) whereas in most realist films, design shouldn’t be too ‘noticeable’ (Ede 2010: 23).
The necessity of the set design to communicate the ‘psychological dynamics’ of the play is fundamental to Wilson’s play Fences. The play was first produced in 1985 at the Yale Repertory Theater, directed by Lloyd Richards and then opened on Broadway at the 46th Street Theater on 26 March 1987. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1988 and has been frequently revived since then, most notably in the United Kingdom in 2012, in a production with Lenny Henry in the central role of Troy Maxson. Set at the end of the 1950s, the play explores how Troy’s life experience is shaped implicitly and explicitly by his conflicted Afro American identity in a pre-Civil Rights movement America. The play is set in the suburbs of Pittsburgh in 1957, in the ramshackle house Troy shares with his wife Rose and son Corey. Events happen off stage that affect the fate of the characters in the drama but are all played out in the same location, the porch and yard of the house. Key in the design, as the title suggests, is the fence that gets slowly built around the house as the action progresses. As the character of Bono says in the play, ‘Some people build fences to keep people out and other people build fences to keep people in’, and the poignancy of the last scene, after Troy has died, is that the fence that Troy never quite gets round to building throughout the play has been finished. Whilst all designs have to include the fence, most have shown a typical American porch and garden in various states of dilapidation, alluding to the Maxson family’s impoverished status. A designer for a production at the Pacific Conservatory Theatre in 2017 mentions trying to incorporate both ‘the gritty truth and poetic blues-scape of the Maxson family household which consists of an ancient two-story brick house in a dirt yard in the hill district of Pittsburgh in 1957’ (PCPA n.d.: n.pag.). The design for the original Washington/Davies stage production in New York in 2010 added a tree at the centre of the backyard because it ‘signified and concretized crucial themes of forgiveness, redemption and renewal that Wilson investigates throughout Fences’ (Wooden 2011: 124). These design ideas emphasize both the pragmatic and the poetic functions of the setting in the theatre: to enable audiences to understand the specifics of place in which the play is set but also the more universal questions about human experience that the play investigates.
The film adaptation was initiated in 1989 with Wilson appointed to write the screenplay for Paramount but the playwright refused to let his screenplay go into production without a black director, writing in 1990 that in cinema, ‘whites have set themselves up as custodians of our experience’ (Shoard 2016: n.pag.). It was stalled for some time until after Wilson’s death when Denzel Washington took on the project as director and lead actor, having previously played the part on Broadway in 2010. Many of the same cast, including Viola Davis as Troy’s wife Rose, made the transition from this production to the film. The design for the film follows the play faithfully in recreating the yard, although it’s a back yard rather than a front porch and yard, and has a tree in the centre that Troy uses to hang his baseball bat on. However, the wooden fence exists with a number of other wire fences, which surround the property and are seen in the background as the main characters talk. This means, as one critic identified, that the building of the fence loses its central symbolic significance. ‘There’s a literal fence at the center of Fences, but it doesn’t resonate onscreen the way it does onstage. It’s not a living metaphor’ (Edelstein 2016: n.pag.). If design then cannot function in the same way as metaphor, how else does Washington invoke the metaphysical significance of Troy’s situation? One scene towards the end of the film is notable in this respect because unlike most of the rest of the film that almost replaces the proscenium arch with the frame of the screen, it breaks this ‘fourth wall’. After settling a fight with his son Corey, Troy grabs the baseball bat and looks wildly around him, shouting, ‘come and get me’, directly to the camera. This has the effect of boxing Troy in, whilst his gaze is directed out beyond the frame, which operates as
not only a gesture towards what is outside the film fiction (we, the viewer, the material act of filming and so on) but also as a potentially rich metaphor for the problems of vision (insight, foresight, other kinds of perceptiveness) that are often the internal currency of movie narratives.
(Brown 2012: xii)
The particular construction of this shot operates as a filmic equivalence to the metaphorical aspects of design and directs our attention towards the broader significance of Troy’s situation. He is physically constricted