Category: 1st Year

After arriving in Edinburgh, and following a nights sleep in a very comfortable guest house bed, we arrived at the Festival Theatre, which was to be our home for the next week. Having had the time between Glasgow and Edinburgh split up by the rig for the Introduction to Collaborative Practice module, it was nice to reestablish myself with the show, something which did not take long after stepping onto the identically reassembled set. Babette set us an orienteering task upon our arrival to see if the signs she had erected were easy enough to understand and navigate the building with and, following this, we set about repairing loose or broken safety tape on handrails and stairs and marking out a cast walkway so as to ensure they didn’t walk onto – and break – Sound’s fibre optic cable. What became apparent, through this, was that – though the stage was a lot bigger – it didn’t feel as such, just feeling like an extension of void space onto the show we had produced in Glasgow. Maybe that was why I felt settled in so quickly – and felt a little underwhelmed.  Apart from a few minor re-blocking points, the two Sound-focused runs went smoothly, our only issues resulting from a broken wine glass which was dealt with quickly and safely. The show then opened in Edinburgh, and ran, just as it had in the Ath, with few issues. Except one.

We all knew the table was going to break – it was just a question of when. During the Glasgow run it had become apparent that a coffee table which a performer throws their entire weight onto during a scene was not meant to handle such force  – IKEA furniture made of 1mm box steel rarely is. Following the Saturday matinee performance which had rendered the table at a forty-five-degree angle, I tried to reinforce the item as best I could, putting in more screws and ties in an attempt to strengthen any assembly join that could come loose. This proved effective, as it was the welded joints, in fact, that buckled during the evening’s performance, resulting in the table collapsing on stage during Act One. Though this was then dealt with, I proceeded to analyse what had gone wrong with the table and whether the actor in question was hurt, alongside Babette, whilst Rosie and Rachel began devising ideas of how to best deal with having one less furniture item in Act Two. This is something I really respected them for as, whilst I was immediately focused on what had gone wrong, they chose to focus on how to continue the show – an arguably more important decision. The show continued without further incident.

The Edinburgh strike ended up being a lot more slick than the Glasgow one, with cage and case packed and locked within forty-five minutes of curtain call. Following a debrief, of sorts, in the Stage Management room, I proceeded to execute the responsibilities I had undertaken in Glasgow, first stripping AV and camera cables, then moving onto flooring with the extra members of the TSM crew who had been brought in to help. As a result of everyone’s determination – and a sheer need to get to bed – the show was down and packed by 3am. This was an incredibly rewarding experience, as to do a strike like this to industry standards get you into a work ethic which a twelve-hour strike doesn’t – something I found very beneficial. It also let me learn from the EFT venues crew, drawing on their experience to teach me better ways of doing things like hauling in bars or lifting flats from irons and strops.

So, covered in steel dust and with some of the worse hard hat hair of my life, I left EFT and Chess, after a show which had taught me so much – not only about practice and technique, but also about myself and what kind of practitioner I should aspire to be.

Tech week hit harder than it should have and left scars that will last a while. Prior to the first session, Babette once again outlined her expectations for us, introducing us into a process that I personally had had no experience of at this scale. These calming words proved to have little reflection on what actually happened, however, as the scale of the production, and the snail’s pace at which we were piecing it through, led to tensions running abnormally high and people becoming more stressed than they likely should have been for the environment they were in. For crew who have watched a show once and are still in the process of writing and learning their own track, I felt very stressed and out my comfort zone as, those who I had looked to for answers previously, became unavailable, leaving me without a point of reference for tasks like resets – about which I had no clue as I had never seen parts of the performance. It also proved infuriating to be scorned for not executing tasks or actions which I thought I had been doing, such as making myself visible during holds and assisting the cast with changes. Reflecting on these now, I understand my shortfallings on these but, in the new situation as it was, I felt some responses – from other team members particularly – should have been more restrained in their tone.

But tech went as fast as it had arrived and I could feel myself beginning to feel more comfortable with the running of the show and executing the cues on my running list. Though a note for the future: BNC cable was invented by Satan. Do not use if it could be avoided.

As we actually got into performances, the team settled into a rhythm – setting aside the need to complete all of our jobs as soon as possible by running about the stage frantically – to learning to work over and around one another, realising the importance of one another, and anticipating how you could assist someone else without doing their cues for them. By building the show into muscle memory it becomes easier and more pleasurable to run, and took the stress out of the experience.

The Glasgow strike went as well as it could have done. I had dry-packed all of our props into the cage and flight case when we first loaded into the Ath, compiling packing lists and images which we could then utilise for the transfer. With these as a basis, our pack was completed within two hours of the show coming down, allowing us the opportunity to jump on to and assist other departments with their strike on the Sunday. I ended up assisting AV programmer Fraser with his strike, which I found to be an invaluable experience, as he spent time explaining how everything was rigged and connected in a way I could understand. This gave me an insight into a side of electrics I had no prior knowledge or experience of and, by examining things like that in a production context, it gave me the opportunity to further my understanding. Twelve hours and four cups of coffee later, the show was in two Arctic lorries, prepped to meet the Stage Techs, Lighting and Sound teams at the Festival Theatre on Monday. Thought this allocation was a Stage Management one, I will hold out that the strikes – both in Glasgow and Edinburgh – were some of the high points of this show allocation.

Communication is important – especially within a team. No example proves this statement better than the breakdown in communication between the team in the office sourcing with ever approaching shipping dates and the member of the team in rehearsals putting off the question of how many of each item we had to order off for as long as he could. I wasn’t in the room, I can’t pass judgement over why the communication wasn’t there. But coupled with rehearsal notes that left more questions than they answered in regards to ever more extravagant new props, this has taught me, more clearly than anything else, that any talk is better than no talk at all – and that even saying ‘I don’t know yet’ is preferable to feeling like your questions are being ignored. Also, vowels are important. Spending an hour on Amazon and almost £30 of your budged on a spelling error – buying capes instead of caps – is just embarrassing. Although this did manage to crack our stony, stressed exteriors into exhausted tears of laughter.

So, as the props list kept getting bigger and the budget shrank – on an Excel spreadsheet that I am very proud to have formatted – I turned my attention to paper props, using graphics from Kenneth to create a stack of Visa documents, cue cards and newspapers. The last of these was a labour of love as the newsprint we had ordered would jam the printer in every way that we put it in, resulting in me having to split the graphics in photoshop, run them through onto four individual printable sheets then glue and seal them together with sticky backed plastic. In the end, however, I don’t think I have ever been as proud of any prop I have ever made. And, I can honestly say, the appreciation this allocation has given me for the power of a hot glue gun is amazing.

Three props proved to be of notable difficulty to source for this show. Andrew was set on having a turntable-like device for one of the chess boards so it could rotate by itself during Anatoly’s first song. Our first instinct was to search for a lazy-susan-like product so the performer could easily rotate the board. Once it came out that the product was to be mechanised this proved infeasible as battery operated models ran into the hundreds of pounds. Then, by a stroke of genius from one of the other ASMs, we found a battery powered jewellery display stand which rotated. This proved enough to achieve the desired effect, resulting in a very happy director. This was also the first example of how there will always be a solution to a problem, and you cannot afford to disappoint your director by not finding it.

The second of these issues presented themselves in the forms of confetti cannons. Andrew had previously used them on Legally Blonde and swore blind they wold be somewhere within the building. However, despite lots of searching and even more emailing, they could not be found. Following this realisation, I called Blacklight and JustFX in order to get a quote to buy new, reloadable cannons and capsules to last us the run. Seeing as JustFX’s quote ended up totalling 60p shy of our entire Stage Management budget, this option also proved a no-go. Eventually, Babette managed to negotiate Andrew down to only one cannon, shot onto the stage, thus eliminating half of the overall cost of supplying two units and any clean up charge resulting from them being fired by cast in the aisles. This taught me that, occasionally, compromise is your best – and only – way out of a situation. Though you may not wholly like or agree with the result you end up with, it’s better to have two contented artistic parties than someone who feels angered by not being able to get what they want.

This was also nearly the case with pompoms – an item I didn’t expect to be as expensive as they turned out to be. To fit Kenneth’s design brief we needed full poms – not a couple of streamers dangling from a handle – in bright neon colours. The only issue with this was they’d blow our budget to try and buy. A solid day was spent trying to find an affordable option, but none arose that would ship in time. Just as we were reaching break-down stage, however, costume decided that they would be happy to spend some of their surplus on buying them for us, meaning money was less of an issue. This resulted in us getting exactly the poms we wanted without a dent in our budget sheet.

The rest of this week was spent propping, either from our own props store, from the internet, or setting up props visits to stores throughout Glasgow. The main issues that became immediately apparent to us was the wealth of 80s technology required for the show, and the fact that Andrew wanted to fill every ensemble scene with as many items as he could – be them notepads, microphones, or lanyards. These difficulties made themselves present from our first visit to the RCS props store, along with the realisation that – due to many pieces being unavailable – most of our props list would have to be sourced elsewhere. However, a set of rehearsal props managed to be cobbled together and we put them into rehearsals. Propping in Glasgow is hard. My first responsibility was to phone up company props stores over the city to see if we could arrange visits and borrows – thus limiting the amount of our reasonable, yet tight, budget that we would have to spend on new items. The first problem that arose, however, are that there are very few stores in Glasgow, and – of those – even fewer open to the idea of people borrowing from them. *cough* Scottish Opera *cough*. Despite this, meetings were arranged with Titan Props, as well as with the National Theatre of Scotland and the Tron theatre to go and browse. Thankfully Kenneth’s props references had been thorough enough to a point where I could send the stores an idea of what we were looking for prior to our arrival, saving time and effort on the part of both parties and limiting mindless browsing. This was especially evident with Titan, the manager of which ushered us directly to what she thought we’d need as soon as we stepped through the gap where the door should probably have been.

Titan Props appeared, certainly to me, a Godsend. The cave of memorabilia and items identical to our reference images let to us all leaving on a high – filled with the pride and knowledge that basically everything we needed, they had. However, we still had two more stores to look over so concealed our adoration until we found out what else we could get for free. This proved to be a good idea, as when Titan finally sent us their costings it became swiftly evident that we would be hiring little, if any, from them, lest we break the bank.

NTS was our next stop, this time with Kenneth in tow. This proved very useful as he was able to give us immediate answers to proposed items rather than having us wait for him to reply to an email. Emma, who showed us around, was very useful in pointing us in the right direction to what she believed could be useful to us. However, she did explain that NTS tend to quarantine props from previous productions, resulting in a store that I think, proved smaller than we had expected – or hoped – it would be. However, we did end up sourcing a couple of suitcases and chairs from there later on which was very useful.

Lastly, came Tron. We were not expecting to find very many items from here as – Babette explained – they tend to buy in pieces based on what show they’re doing for the length of that run. However, the woman who showed us around was a former production student so understood exactly he position we were in and so was able to talk us through suggestions for things like pick-ups and returns of larger items. Having someone like this made the experience so much easier and really showed the benefits of links like this. Tron also had a box filled with retro tech and broken cans sets and belt packs which was promptly raided and shoved into a bag with a borrow sheet. Overall, the stores were an invaluable resource for use as a team, and made the part of the process which I was looking forward to the least, vaguely pleasant.