Shaw is only following current practice here, in providing a scene-setting tableau vivant.
The piece opens with a direct reference to Turkish culture, in a scene-setting tableau in which a man wrapped in a white bath towel comically cries: "He is me!
Oversize ornamental plates leave too little room for anything else, and although salt, pepper and steak sauce are already present, a gratuitous chemistry-set tableau of gray, pink and black specialty salts arrives with the steaks.
Bernhard Willhelm deserves a spanking after the mess he made by setting up a tableau presentation at the Palais de la Bourse, right in the middle of a busy trade show.
His scheme involved setting up a tableau in your bedroom so it looks "as if" the wife is just getting buggered by a handyman before her husband walks in.
You set up a tableau with conditions for collisions of ideas and let the thing run.
We sat in the camp's smoky cafe, which overlooks a Bank of Amman branch set in a tableau of muddy depression near the Egyptian border.
It's sort of in the Kill Bill style, where each fight is a dramatic tableau set in a picturesque location – a rainy street, a factory, a forest glen – that quickly fills with bloody corpses and snapped limbs.
This is but the first of several coup de théâtre including a "helicopter" flying over the audience, aswirl in smoke and spotlights, a buoy bobbing across the stage, and a tragicomic sitting-room tableau set in a submerged room of cockeyed Caligari-esque angles.
The whole tableau, set against an artfully styled modern backdrop, could have been a scene in a romantic comedy — the one about an It girl who ditches her Manhattan bachelorette pad for a wholesome family life in Brooklyn, all without ever losing her passion, her friends or her panache.
Grilled chicken wings and restorative gin and tonics in hand, we watched a giant blood-orange sun set behind a tableau of wading elephants.
