Lighting & Theatre

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 […]

You have to be really good, sometimes, to make bad. Take words on the page.  It’s hard enough writing ‘natural’ dialogue.  ‘Natural’ dialogue, on the page, sounds utterly unnatural.  It’s very kinda yeah um so… […]