painted flats

A flat is a flat canvas panel stretched on a frame, usually 2 x 4's. Before sets began to be constructed like actual buildings, etc., stage scenery was mostly painted on these flats. By utilizing perspective the scene-painter created the illusion of depth and three dimensional setting with just paint on the flat canvas. This was done in "straight" (ha) theater, too. Until the turn of the 20th century, that's pretty much what all stage settings were, with furniture placed downstage in front of paintings of street scenes, rooms, etc. When electric lighting came into general theatrical use toward the end of the 19th century, lighting designers could do a lot and stage design changed. Google Adolph Appia and Charles Gordon Craig for more on this. They were the ground-breaking lighting designers who revolutionized stage design, and those developments doomed the old-fashioned painted flats, like the ones in this production of "Tosca", a copy of the original 1932 production that opened the War memorial Opera House. It took decades for their revolutionary work to become the norm, though. Painted flats were cheap, and could be painted over for the next production, or sometimes re-used for a street scene in a different opera.