ACTORS weren't always able to growl while the world around them was being destroyed by little green men from Mars.

They sometimes wore masks to portray the characters they represented. That was much easier than acting out their roles.

I'm talking about the days well before William Shakespeare was a gleam in somebody's eye.

Well before Shakespeare came on the scene that word, scene, was spelt by ancient Greeks as skene.

It was a place out the back where the actors could have a rest, rehearse their lines or even change masks.

This was the original scene, only it was spelt skene.

The actors didn't have drama school to go to. No, they put on masks.

They also didn't have CinemaScope in those days. The actors put on masks and then they would go out the back to change. Eventually, the chorus chipped in. This was about the sixth century.

Until that time the actors would walk onto a stage, with the audience out the front, and would say their lines and breathe a sign of relief if all went well. Then they would, presumably, go home to the missus and a hot dinner.

The stage was called a proskenion, but this column isn't about the proskenion.

The skene was a temporary structure, often like a tent. Sometimes the actors would go into the skene and make noises and the audience would have to decide what was going on inside the skene based on the noises that they were hearing. Talk about making life difficult.

Over the years the skene underwent changes and became a more important aspect of stage plays.

Eventually the spelling was changed to scene - something like a stage setting - and producers of plays began to show us what they thought Mars was like.

My big dictionary suggests the first use of the word scene in print came in 1612. The dictionary described it as "the stage of a Greek or Roman theatre, including the platform on which the actors stood, and the structure which formed the background”. It also described a scene as "the stage or theatre taken as standing for either the dramatic art or the histrionic profession”. Histrionic incidentally applies to any melodramatic behaviour designed to attract attention. I presume it could also apply to bad acting.

Another definition is material apparatus designed to give "the illusion of a real view of the locale...” Note the word illusion.

A scene was a representation of the place in which the play was supposed to occur.

Shakespeare had a go at it. In Richard 111 he talks about a "scene of rude impatience”.

As the years wore on, producers and whoever was associated with the plays tried to make their scenes more dramatic, so the audience could undertake the atmosphere.

Owen Barfield, writing in History in English Words, calls a face as scenery, but he does say it is a curious custom.

Samuel Johnson in his 1755 dictionary describes scenick as "dramatick, theatrical”.

John Ayto says skene in Greek originally meant tent.