Bring on the revolving stages, writes PETER CRAWLEY

These days you really have to go out of your way to turn someone’s head. Jaded audiences, once awed by new technology, are now so numbly familiar with the cutting edge that it goes blunt in no time.

Multimedia? Meh. Motion- triggered live-looping digital soundscapes? Yawn. Broadband- connected hologram understudies? How quaint. But show people one particular device and you will still hear audible coos of appreciation: everybody loves a revolving stage.

That’s no mean feat for an invention that predates electricity, the steam engine and the radical suggestion that the earth travels around the sun. But the revolving stage is something of a conundrum: a 500-year-old novelty.

Leonardo da Vinci doesn’t get

a credit in the Gate’s new production of Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing, which contains one of the most elaborately symbolic uses of a contraption that da Vinci was tinkering with back in 1490. In a play about false appearances, concealed musical tastes and faithless partners, infidelity is like a turntable: it just goes round and round.

Still, for all the rotation, there’s nothing revolutionary about its use. Here it allows mainly for quick scene changes, which is pretty much what Japanese kabuki theatre has used it for since 1648. By the end of the 19th century, modernist European theatre (particularly in Germany) decided the stage was for turning. It’s such an antiquated gimmick, in fact, that you might assume that all conceivable problems have been overcome. You’d be wrong.

Most histories of revolving stages begin with an illustration of a skull and crossbones. In its first year, in 1904, the London Coliseum witnessed a calamity involving its revolving stage, six live horses, several crushed footlights and one dead jockey. (The next day they put up a safety rope. Shows must go on, I suppose.) But they’ve been fine since then, right? Well, actually, now that you mention it, no.

During the much-hyped West End Lord of the Rings show in 2007, one misfortunate Hobbit found his cloak caught in revolving set and his leg mangled by the machinery. (The show did not go on.) That’s one reason why the Royal National Theatre, whose “drum revolve” is one of the most elaborate revolving stages ever made, once considered pouring concrete over the device to bury the problems forever. Well, they didn’t, and it took an astounding adaptation of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials to fully justify its existence.

That’s why the revolving stage still makes people sit up and take notice: when most theatres see it as old solution to a problem nobody had, or a new problem that nobody needs, it will always be a rarity.

It looks great in the Gate, but you can bet that some fingernails are being chewed to the quick backstage. After one swivel on opening night, there came an ominous thunk from behind the set.

“What was that?” someone asked me. “A vicious circle,” was my guess.