A lesson about time management; starting your fit-up half a day early is a beautiful thing. Due to the fact we second year TSMs had finished our rotating flats exercise earlier than expected, the overhead fit-up started at three o’clock. I slowly but surely found my rhythm on the fly floor, and by the time we had hung around half of our softs I felt very confident in my ability to fly, weight, re-weight and take out bars. The electrics team were more than willing to cooperate with our space needs, working in and around us to hang their bars to the point that – by 9:30pm – around 80% of our overhead work was done. Naturally, this was very exciting, and had me reminiscing about the Caesar strike day where it was proved that, with the right amount of drive and enthusiasm, you can achieve a lot in a short period of time. One thing that I did come to realise, however, was that the books I’d read on flying and the people I’d spoken to were correct – being a flyman is a lonely job. From my man-cave at seven metres I watched my H.O.D. and the crew work away, feeling slightly disconnected from the experience. For the 9am sessions, this was great and let me slowly shake off the sleep without being thrown into anything too taxing. Anything later than that, and I put on my DTSM hat once more and mucked in on the ground.
Neat and Tidy Motor Control
The arrival of the set was met with a resounding happy horror. The truck was packed to the rafters, and everything our eyes settled on had steel in it in some way or another. The tip took two hours in total – a fact that was not aided by our ever-helpful production manager driving a sprinter filled with ply into the loading bay, and telling us it had to be unloaded pronto because it needed returned to the garage. Despite this fact however, and with a new personal best for disagreeing with workshop about how to lift something achieved, the set made its way onto the Ath stage. At 9pm, and looking at the fire hazard we had just created, it dawned on some of the mammoth task we were about to embark on. Similar to piecing together a Meccano set – if the pieces needed welded together and lifted by crane. This may be an element to blame for the fact that the pace of the crew slowed down drastically from hereon out. At times, it felt to Dimitri and I that no matter how hard we pushed ourselves physically, the mountain of things needing done just would not decrease in size. This was made worse by the one and a half hour session that had to be dedicated to re-positioning automation points when the garage door moved further onstage – the beams requiring shuffled around from all over the grid and ratchet strapped to the nearest structural thing we could find. It was a rough three days, and the scars and blisters from it are only now starting to fade. However, credit to the persistence of the crew, we managed it. The house was finally up, and all safety lines and motors detached from it. The garage door was rigged to its automation points, and the rake was – pretty much – in. Anything else that needed done could surely be dealt with swiftly and simply with nothing but a rattle gun and blind optimism – right?
Our Lovely Arctic
Oh how naive three weeks ago Jamie was. Dimitri’s patience running about as thin as his forearms, he decided that the TSM team would fit the walk down traps – his reasoning being that if they weren’t in place for the health and safety induction then we may as well not run one. I completely agreed with him, and – with the team – we installed the treads and deck on the DS set with very little hassle. We lifted the large tread set into place with rope, running it through a friction pulley which we’d stropped around a length of truss which spanned the gap on stage level. This helped fight against the piece dropping and let us position it easily before we drilled two bolt holes through it, and the metal infill, and secured them together. The US set started out well also – until we realised that it needed a check out of it to fit because of an overhang in the structural beams of the floor. This would be left for workshop to fix, as we feared any attempt could render the entire operation a failure. Our next issue to resolve was the counterweighting of the windows. The time for interior counterweighting them had passed in the build phase, with our only option now being to attach ring screws to the sliding window panels and run sash up to pulleys, attaching sand bags at the other end. Turns out, windows are a lot heavier than they seem, and each took around 3 or 4kg of weight spread between the two lines before they held themselves properly. What also became apparent at this point was that the windows couldn’t open nearly far enough for the performers to climb out of them. A shame, given the fact that it was the only access and egress method to the two balconies. This was resolved by taking a section of the top timber out by jigsaw, letting the window move out higher than the frame and creating a gap large enough for the performers to fit. It was ugly, but it was necessarily practical. It would later seem that each run of the show would throw up another window that needed to be made practical, to the point where some of our rigging solutions were quite ingenious – fashioning clew plates from sash, and adding pulleys along the live line to page it out of the sightlines of the audience. This work was hot – due to the cramped nature of the structure and the fact that LX took any time they could to work on their rig, as full with tungsten as it could be. It also tested me to trust in my own solutions, making amendments and alterations to the face of the structure in order to bolt through flats for room dividers, and semi-structural timber battens to hang our counterweight pulleys. It was at this point that I felt like a ‘stage guy’ for the first time; and it was not a bad feeling at all.
Everything Raising Into Place
I do not completely share my HODs opinion on the Workshop team, though I do sympathise with it. The evidence spoke for itself, workshop were swamped on this show. Be it the fact white card was late, the fact that Spring Awakening ran over, or the pure fact that they are under-staffed, they were not ready to put that set into that venue. As understanding as we could be about the fact that it was essentially just Matt and Simon that could do the heavy welding and joinery – with a very talented, and truth be told amazingly pleasant, external carpenter brought in solely to build the rake due to its complexity, the amount of things we were waiting to be delivered or were just not built was concerning, and led to the uncomfortable situation of having Adrian complain to us about how his design was being affected. This came to a head over the issue of the fire-escape ladders. From white card through to the final plans, it had been shown that the houses would have two escape ladders near the top to – as Adrian put it – ‘show that they expand wide and tall’. These appeared to have been quickly forgotten about by Workshop to the point where – four days before preview – it was admitted that they would be built ‘if we get on to decoration’. Adrian is blunt at the best of times, but his response to this comment resulted in Dimitri drafting a construction plan for the ladders himself, and sending it to the props department to build with explicit instructions of how it should arrive so it could be hung. Of course, these were not adhered to, and it was a further 45 minutes on stage to build new mounting blocks and fixings before we climbed some ladders and screwed them to the facing of the flats. This was time that should never have been used on something so simple, and was the last straw that broke an already tired and sawdust-covered camel. As Malki noted, there is no easy fix to the workshop crisis short of commanding directors scale down shows or hiring in more people. However, if one of these is not done – and the communication issues that plagued this show and others like it are not fixed – shows will continue to be haphazardly assembled at the last minute. And there is only so many times that can happen successfully before one does not. Rant over, on with the show.
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