I’m a poor sleeper at the best of times, and being in rehearsal only makes the problem worse. Coming home tired means I don’t process the headful of discoveries and ideas and lists of things to remember until I wake up at 4am, when my head’s clear and I’ve had enough sleep to be able to think. After an hour or so of considering and compartmentalising I’ve tidied up the brainful and am ready to go to sleep – only to be confronted by another problem: excitement. I’m raring to go and ready for the next day, but have the tiresome problem of getting enough sleep to contend with.
The Wicked Lady has added yet another dimension to my sleeping issues. When I actually do nod off, I find myself involved in car chases and gun fights, sneaking through hotel corridors in the dead of night on espionage missions. It’s an adrenaline fuelled experience but an exhausting one! All the fault, no doubt, of the chases and gun fights we’re staging during rehearsals, though these are set in the eighteenth century whereas my action-packed dreams have a more modern setting. No doubt our wicked lady Barbara, were she alive to day would be seeking her thrills in a James Bond lifestyle like the one I’m living at night.
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Our first aerial session in the space. It was thrilling to see the red silks rising up with two people wrapped up in them; to see our prototype saddle, back from the metalworkers and the leatherworkers, hoisted high into the air with a fearless actor riding it. There were gasps from those watching, and I hope the audience will feel a similar shiver of fear and excitement. I must admit I spent the entire session with my heart in my mouth. The last production Bryony and I did involved pretty constant fear for me, with its thirty metres of flaming ropes surrounding the audience and a horse galloping on at the end to have burning torches waved in its face. Only when the actors took their final bows could I breathe. I have a feeling this show’s going to be in the same mould.
photo by Andrew Billington
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Rehearsals for The Wicked Lady began today. Actors are cast one by one, so the read through that’s customarily held on the first day of rehearsals is often the first time I’ll have heard and seen them all together. I always approach this event with trepidation, worried that I’ll have cast lots of actors who have a similar ‘look’ that will gel into a mush on stage; or that two people will have the same vocal qualities making their speaking voices indistinguishable from each other to the audience behind them. To my relief this team goes together well, and they bonded quickly too, creating a real atmosphere of warmth in the room.
photo by Andrew Billington
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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.
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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.
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