In an industrial unit in bleakest in Woolwich, the ceiling strung with hoops and loops and ropes and climbing gear, with Kensington Gardens’ Peter Pan rehearsing next door, we made a start on The Wicked Lady. Three intrepid actors were put through their paces by our aerial choreographer – warm up, conditioning, silk work, bungee combat, more conditioning. The actors’ stamina and determination was impressive, leaving me full of optimism for the work we’ll be able to achieve. We’re only on the foothills, but after two years’ of preparation we’ve at last embarked on the journey up the mountain.
[ add comment ] ( 2 views )
Peter Morgan is the New Vic’s Deputy Chief Electrician. Here he outlines the difficulty of making it snow indoors.
One of my favourite things about working in a producing theatre is the chance to build and come up with ideas for strange and wonderful contraptions. Over my years working in the New Vic’s technical department we’ve been asked to make numerous inventions and devices and I’ve loved being challenged to make something happen in new and imaginative ways. For example, in On Golden Pond we created several devices that kept a flow of photos falling from above the stage. In The Wizard of Oz we constructed a flying whirlwind effect, which spun a number of models around, at speed, yet still appeared and disappeared from the grid above. And for Arabian Nights we used fibre optic wires to create a fountain, which came up from underneath the trap and changed colours. But recently we’ve been asked to take another look at one of the first inventions I made for the New Vic and improve upon it.
The sun’s been shining a lot recently and most people are thinking about summer, but myself and my colleagues have kept ourselves tucked away up stairs where’s there’s no daylight, thinking of winter and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. With our Christmas production generally the biggest of the year, we have quite a number of tricks and effects that we need to create. So we have to start working on these now to ensure those magical moments in the show will not only look amazing, but work every time, for all of the 80 (or more) shows that we’ll be performing.
The challenge we are given is to create a gentle snowing effect that will cover the large circumference of our stage. We start by going back to my original machine (dubbed the snow-o-matic 2000) which I made a number of years back for A Christmas Carol. Conventional snow machines are liquid based, and can blow out quite a large quantity of snow, however they can be messy, costly, but most of all, they are very noisy and would ruin the moment. The snow we actually use is very thin, very small and plastic (imagine a plastic carrier bag from a supermarket, chopped up into millimetre sized pieces). The trick is to create a device to drop this snow, constantly, at the right speed, and over a large enough area. The original machine, although reliable, only covered a small area, and so a new machine was required! But first let me explain how the original worked.
A small motor, which has 4 curved paddles attached to it, is housed inside a tall rectangular box, with a hole at the bottom. The box is filled with snow, and as the paddles turn, it pushes the snow out of the hole.
We explored many modifications to the original design - a much longer, lighter version, using only two paddles; back to
four paddles on the longer design; slopes and funnels to keep the weight of the snow off the paddles; shortening the length of the paddles; creating a slight corkscrew effect on the paddles. But the snow kept clumping together, the motor struggled; the snow either stayed out of the reach of the paddles or, instead of a gentle snow fall, it came down in a snow storm.
And so after days of reshaping cardboard and re-sticking things down with tape, new boxes to house the motor, as well as different materials for the paddles, we decided it would be better to build the new machines, based on the original design, the snow-o-matic 2000 – with one slight modification. We’re developing a ‘spreader’ to put underneath the box, to increase the size of the snow fall effect, which we’ll continue to work on and develop over the coming months. We need to make another 10 or more between now and Christmas, so there will be plenty of chances to try out new things.
[ add comment ] ( 2 views )
The first night of A Taste of Honey. It’s an endlessly surprising show. There are dirty dishes in the kitchen sink, it’s true, but there’s also a pianist squeezed in between the cooker and the drainer. Jo and Helen’s flat is a shabby mess, but fairground lights play around it – they’re as interested in seeking pleasure and enjoyment as they are in where the next meal’s coming from. And, when temperatures rise, aubergines quite literally fly. It has all the pathos, all the grit and detail you’d hope for from a production of this well known fifties masterpiece, but it also has all the joie de vivre that we manage to find despite our surroundings. And some tremendous performances, too.
[ add comment ] ( 1 view )
One of the first theatre festivals I went to was organised by the National Student Drama Festival, where it was inspiring to see the work being created by other students across the country, and to hear what they had to say about the work I was doing. There were workshops given by industry professionals, a daily newspaper complete with student critics and other events, amongst them, most memorably, my first encounter with Forum Theatre. More of a demonstration than a production, it was created by two nurses who worked in the mental health sector and showed us how they use theatre to engage patients with real-life situations, exploring alternative outcomes and giving their patients the opportunity to experience first-hand but in a safe context new solutions to old problems.
The application of theatre in social and educational contexts became a very real interest for me from that moment. The performers had talked about learning their process from Augusto Boal, and so, being the kind of person whose first port of call is always a book, I immediately turned to his seminal The Theatre of the Oppressed, which outlined what Boal termed forum theatre and discussed its uses in the context of oppressive regimes in Brazil and Argentina. The idea that theatre could change the world had always excited me, but to be honest I’d doubted whether this wasn’t just naivety on my part. Here, though, from the frontline, was the evidence that it could and did. Another of his books, Games For Actors and Non-Actors, saw me through many a workshop both with performers but more often with students or members of community theatre groups.
So I was saddened to hear of Boal’s death at the weekend. Not least because every day at the New Vic I see his work put into action in ways that are immediately effective. New Vic Borderlines’ approach is very much based on his work, using his techniques of forum theatre and image theatre to involve the participants in Borderlines programmes as ‘spect-actors’, staging situations from their own experience and exploring ways to effect change. It’s life-changing, but also life-affirming work, and owes so much to one of the century’s greatest theatre practitioners who has inspired theatre makers all over the world.
[ add comment ] ( 1 view )
It is a hive of creativity in the New Vic this week. Up in the lighting box the technical team are experimenting with snow, months ahead on their preparation for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. They want to create a snow curtain, which is no mean feat in the round, and are making and road testing prototype snow machines. In the Stephen Joseph Room our next production, A Taste of Honey, is taking shape, with a cast who are finding lots of brightness and lightness in what’s usually considered a kitchen sink drama. In the workshop the carpenters have created the staging which is now being fitted with hundreds of coloured light bulbs to create the effect of a funfair, and the scenic artists are making spangly paving stones. The main space is being shared between Honeymoon Suite, which has just received a clutch of excellent reviews puffing us all up with pride, and a Borderlines conference for hundreds of young delegates who are considering the caring professions as possible careers. In the Youth Room we’ve had Tale Trail sessions with pre-school children and youth theatre sessions; more youth theatre sessions have been taking place in our brand new building on the other side of the car park. In the design room mock-ups of mythical creatures litter the desks. The designers of Dumb Show and The Wicked Lady have brought in their early ideas. The casting team are busy on both these shows and even looking ahead into the autumn to our yet-to-be-announced season. As ever, the restaurant’s been busy all week.
I’ve been especially aware of all this because I’ve taken a few tours round the building this week, peeping into the evocative space backstage and into storerooms bristling with chairs or lined with ranks of costumes waiting patiently to be picked up or inhabited by an actor. We’ve stood in the centre of the stage and looked into the auditorium; we’ve stood in the auditorium and looked down on the stage. Taking people round this beautiful building, and describing how it came to be here in North Staffordshire, has been, as ever, a delight and a revelation – for me as much as for them. A new pair of eyes always brings a new perspective.
[ add comment ] ( 5 views )
Calendar
