Foote hopped around on a wooden leg made by puppet-makers in Covent Garden: theatre propping up life once again.
In an attempt to approach the matter and its details nearer, the author writes a playlet which takes place in the theatre prop workshop.
Before the 1930s movies needed little more than a theatre prop-and-set man, but now they were acquiring a "reality" of their own that called for a look and a mood.
Cambara is on her way to the Bakaaraha Market, and as she studies YoungThing she wonders whether he is passing himself off as someone he is not, just as she puts on the body tent before she leaves the house as part of her disguise, like a theatre prop.
The stage was part Blade Runner flying car (with Ridley Scott's hazy black-and-sodium orange color scheme echoed throughout the whole show), part Close Encounters of the Third Kind musical spaceship (complete with blinding lights and fat bass synth sounds that might have shattered glass), and part Robert Wilson theatre prop.
The complex could also be used for visual art, sound art and theatre prop storage.
Philomena Lee, the 80-year-old whose life inspired Stephen Frears' drama "Philomena," strolled into the Dolby Theatre, propped up by her daughter Jane Libberton.
(A six-foot-wide aluminum cat-food can hovers overhead, puffing smoke). Von Bonin pairs ready-made and custom-fabricated elements with the ease of a seasoned set designer, evoking boardwalk-restaurant décor, children's-theatre props, and fashion-runway provocations.
Complemented by a BBC TV series, it brings together paintings, manuscripts, costumes, stage and theatre designs, props, posters and musical instruments, drawn from the V&A's archives and collections around the world.
You listen to this tale in a theatre of props, costumes, lights, moving images and assorted still lifes of mysterious significance, passing among them like the audience in a promenade performance.
