Without lighting, all other elements of theater become moot. Theater lighting, in addition to simply illuminating a scene and making it visible to the audience, also sets mood and directs the audience's focus. A skillful lighting designer uses warm colors of lighting to create coziness and shades of green to show an evil or sinister scene.
In classical Athens and Rome, from 472 BCE to the fall of Rome in about 450 CE, actors performed plays outdoors, all day long in large festivals. Lit by sunlight, the performances ended when the sun set. Open air theaters such as Theatre Dionysus in Athens held large numbers of patrons and natural light illuminated the view. In Rome, gladiator events replaced tragedies and comedies in the open air theaters, but they were still lit by natural sunlight.
In the Italian Renaissance, from about 1430 to 1680, visual spectacle in the theater became increasingly more important. The great halls housing productions often contained elaborate sets, curtains and special effects that used mechanical pulleys and stage hands to impress and inspire the audience. In these great halls, light from candles and oil lamps engineered into metal cans, could be focused for effect onto the stage. Upper-class citizens typically attended these plays.
Open air theater still took place for the middle and lower classes. Lit by the sun on the street, traveling players performed improvisational theater called "Commedia Dell'Arte" based on a set number of stock characters and plots.
In England during the Renaissance, Shakespeare and the Globe Theater presented plays to wide audiences. Groundlings, poor people named after their seating location in the open air theater, occupied seats without good views. Elite members of society took seats of prestige in the theater and saw plays during daylight hours. Because artificial lighting was minimal, some of Shakespeare's lines refer to going to "hear" a play, and plays that happen at nighttime refer to the moon and lanterns in a joking manner. In "A Midsummer Night's Dream," for instance, the "mechanicals," while rehearsing their play, discuss the difficulty of a moonlit scene and how they will bring the moon into the chamber where the play will be held.
Throughout Europe and the United States, theater gained popularity in the 19th century. A more realistic and easily understandable acting style drew the emerging middle class to the stage. New York established itself as the American capitol of theater performance. Candles and gas lamps lit theaters and stages during the evening performances. Musical theater and burlesque brought immigrants not fluent in English out for entertainment, and the Industrial revolution broadened the ability of technicians to produce special effects. Mirrors, ropes, lenses and other tools helped focus light and give special effects.
The invention of incandescent lighting in 1879 revolutionized theater lighting. The first electric lighting in a theater was installed in London's Savoy Theater in 1881, and by the 1890s, most theaters used electric lights. Today, lighting designers utilize electric theater lamps with movable lenses and other accessories to achieve nearly any look on stage, to either complement or change a scene and to produce dramatic visual effects.