Premature Old Age

It’s the end of a 70+ hour week, and I am become a little old lady.

There is no part of my body that doesn’t hurt.  From the soles of my blistered feet to the top of my aching head from banging on the low bars that hang above the lighting bridges, I hurt in every possible way.  My shuffle home from the theatre where I’ve been working these last few days earns me looks of surprise and alarm; some think I’m a little old lady dressed up in a young lady’s clothes – others probably just assume that I’m drunk.  The vast majority of my body, looks something like this…

… which while an unusual choice of image to post on a blog, I hope captures the general aura of domestic abuse that surrounds my present employment.

Make no mistake – the show we’ve been rigging is going to be amazing – but where at the start of the week people would walk into the venue and cry out ‘it’s a monster!’ in merry irony, after 4 days of getting out the last show and 4 days of rigging the next, now the cry has nothing about it that isn’t seriously meant.  Every time you think you might be getting close, you realise you’ve barely scratched the tip of the ice berg.  Huge slabs of set are put in, and then huge slabs of set promptly vanish again and you go ‘my god!  That thing was just for a scene?’  The goods lift doors open, and close, and open again and every time some new giant creation is chucked out to sit in the rear stage with a cry of ‘build me’ and half a mile of cabling running through it.  The show is such a monster that 3 of our 5 lighting bridges (big, sturdy platforms hanging above auditorium and stage, usually used for lighting equipment) have had to be entirely cleared down because… and this is a bad sign… the scenery being hung off it is so extraordinarily heavy that not a single kilo of extra weight is now permitted in the roof.  Every footstep on the walkway, every extra cable run and half-eaten sandwich must be accounted for as machinery and man alike groan under the weight of stuff being rigged.

For my part, the week has been a blur of cable in and cable out, of scrollers and moving lights and scaffolding and truss and dimmer numbers.  But for all that, its had a few highlights.  My Production Electrician will have an excellent career ahead of him as a monk should he ever leave lighting, and his sacred mantra of ‘it can work, it shall work, it will work, it is working’ has become something of a devotional prayer as the week has struggled on.  To the gentleman by the ground floor lift who offered to help me carry scaff bars up to the theatre despite the probability of damaging a very nice coat in the process – thank you for a flash of chivalry in a dark night, and sorry I wasn’t more enthusiastic, you caught me wondering why I didn’t chose lion taming, black ops or mountaineering as a gentle career alternative.  To the lad I spent half an hour with hanging out over a perch, scroller in hand, we have learnt our lesson well.  There is no such thing as universal cock-up in theatre, each new disastrous development is unique unto itself, and cannot be predicted or explained.  To the man who showed me the secret, secret store in an unlikely place – how cool is that? – and to the video engineer who began a conversation with ‘so you must be the novelist’ while hoiking out a 10 kW projector – you did actually make my day and remain, to my knowledge, the only person in the theatre who understands the full quality of my cackling.  Hope your afternoon spent with spanners wasn’t too traumatic.