Lighting & Theatre

There’s a bit of an ongoing barny about how many deeply successful (mostly male) actors in Britain right now are posh.  A mull….  It’s an argument not without a grain of truth to it.  A […]

She writes plays. I start with this statement, because usually I praise books and occasionally films, but remember how I also do a lot of theatre?  I’ve now lit a fair amount of work by […]

Recently I did 5 days of tech.  They went like this: Day 1.  Sunday.  Arrive 9 a.m. at the venue, meet the crew, trot through any final, obscure details on the lighting plan, then commence […]

We did a couple of techie-orientated lectures on stage fighting, back at Ra-de-da, while the actors did their stage combat training.  In tech the arrival of the fight choreographer was always a Big Deal, as […]

(Subtitle: I do not think this word means what you think it means….) Collaboration!  If you could please imagine proclaiming it with brass fanfare behind… … coll-ab-or-ation!! It is the battle cry of theatre.  What […]

Aaaah propping.  I’m not the world’s greatest prop-hunter – not gonna lie.  It involves people skills, and negotiation and imaginative use of solid objects and, frankly, these are not things that come as naturally to […]

This is continuing my theme of hopeful-advice for anyone dabbling in community theatre.  For the pre-amble, please see this post. Today, let’s talk about the Deputy Stage Manager, or DSM. In professional theatre, the DSM […]

This will be the first of a series of posts, giving some thin semblance of technical advice for anyone dabbling in community theatre. I love going to the theatre.  I love brilliant plays beautifully put […]

Theatre’s subjective.  You liked Death of a Salesman; she likes interpretive dance.  A lighting designer’s job is to create something that ideally pleases my sense of artistic excellent, the director’s desire for the actors to […]

I love George Orwell.  I say that – I don’t know a huge amount about him as a human being, because I’m always a bit scared of finding out too much about your heroes just […]

I’m lighting a play at the moment!  Actually, I’ve been working on it for a while, but tomorrow we go into fit-up for it at Trafalgar Studios and I’ve printed off the plans and the […]

I will never be asked to give a graduation speech at my old colleges.  I’m not academic enough for LSE, nor actory enough for RADA, and thus the distilled wisdom of the last few years […]