What does it take to create a giant chandelier on stage, decked out with more than 100 perfectly balanced, flickering candles? What about a disco floor that dazzles the audience in a play’s final moments but is hidden from view until then? On the eve of the 50th Olivier awards, we meet the artists, apprentices, engineers and designers behind some of London’s most memorable theatrical moments this year.
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Mirrored chandelier
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Aidan Turner, Lucia Chocarro and Monica Barbaro in Les Liaisons Dangereuses at the National Theatre, London
The mirrored chandelier that dangles ominously over Marianne Elliott’s production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses is a true spectacle, even at a tech rehearsal. At nearly five metres wide, it’s more than a third of the width of the National Theatre’s vast Lyttelton stage. Suspended from the rafters, it holds 144 electric candles (each covered in melted wax for extra authenticity) and required roughly 40 of the National’s most skilled craftspeople to bring it to life.
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Janet Williamson, senior construction draughtsperson, National Theatre “The three of us who engineer in here all have construction backgrounds. We come with the knowledge of how things go together, just because we’ve made them at some point. The tricky part is putting your design down on paper so everyone else understands. All those details that you’re dialled in on when you’re working on screen, no one else knows those nuances. Everything has to be so precise. If it’s a millimetre out, you’d notice.”
“We’ve never done anything like that before,” says Kate John, head of production workshops. “How on earth do we achieve that in terms of engineering?”
For Janet Williamson, the senior construction draughtsperson working on the chandelier, or “death star”, it all began with the presentation of designer Rosanna Vize’s white card model of the set. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the chandelier stood out straight away. “It was clearly going to be a considerable technical challenge.” So Williamson got together with her colleagues in the National’s drawing room and began to brainstorm.
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(Top) Scenic artists Danielle Barr, Alice Colli, Emma Maundrell and Maya Kazmarski; (bottom left) construction supervisor Sam Stacey
A few key issues quickly emerged: “The chandelier needed to pull apart into manageable pieces so it could go into storage and be worked on easily. It needed to split into parts so that it could be stack-built, and it also needed access for the lighting team to come in and attach all the lighting features.” Williamson drew inspiration from a couple of unlikely sources while working on the design on her computer. First, Terry’s Chocolate Orange: “A lot of people were thinking the chandelier needed to be sliced upwards. But that didn’t feel right to me. I decided it needed to be in segments, like a Chocolate Orange.” Each segment on its own might not feel structurally sound, but fit them together and the construction locks itself tightly shut.
And for a design of this size, Williamson looked to the biggest dome she could find, perched atop Florence’s largest cathedral: “The Duomo was also made of segments, so I knew I was on the right line and it was a sound construction method.”
For Williamson, the joy of her work is in its novelty: “Everything we create is a prototype that has never been done before.” The job keeps her guessing and, particularly in the case of the chandelier, just a little bit anxious. Holding her breath. Trusting in her work and her colleagues. But always asking the questions “Have I covered everything? Have I got it right?”
Les Liaisons Dangereuses is at the National Theatre, London, to 6 June.
Romeo & Juliet
Multipurpose bed
Hildegard Bechtler and I meet up amid the idyllic calm of Highgate’s Waterlow Park in north London but the acclaimed designer’s mind is still racing from rehearsals the night before. Director Robert Icke and the creative team have just started previews of their take on Romeo & Juliet, featuring Sadie Sink and Noah Jupe. The contract was only signed in November, so the timeframe for “planning and dreaming”, as Bechtler puts it, has been tight.
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Hildegard Bechtler, designer “Romeo & Juliet was all very last minute. The director, Rob Icke, and I were on Broadway with Oedipus and this came up. I had no time to think. My great concern was that we had too little time. The pressure really does build. The contract was signed late last year and we had to have the design conceived before Christmas. You can only do it that quickly with a director you’ve worked with for a long time – there’s a shorthand.”
Work had to be focused, thinking streamlined. It didn’t take long, however, for all discussions around the design to focus on just one object: a bed. Initially there were going to be a lot of chairs. Then Bechtler’s design edged towards a bed decked with flowers. Perhaps two beds: an ornate tomb and a marriage bed. But gradually, over time, the design was distilled into something quite stark and striking: “We simplified and simplified as rehearsals went on, but the bed, without a doubt, stayed.”
The bed began to take on multiple functions. It serves as Juliet’s bed, but also becomes a cold and marble-like tomb. As rehearsals unfolded, the idea was floated that the bed could remain on stage for other scenes, lending them surprising texture and resonance. Fight scenes play out round the bed, instilling them with a powerful energy. Iconic moments take on a dreamlike quality and the balcony scenes see Romeo enter from below the stage, with Juliet perched on her bed above.
Initially, Bechtler was determined the bed would disappear beneath the Harold Pinter theatre stage, but the idea proved prohibitively expensive. Instead, it glides up and down the space, controlled by a giant winch concealed in the basement.
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(Clockwise from top left) Scenic artist Kerry Jarrett paints the set floor; engineer Tom Breen welds the truck that will form the base for the bed; the bed moves on tracks to assist its comings and goings during the performance; assistant stage manager Ben Dootson prepares a secret compartment inside the bed
The bed also needed to be in keeping with the pared-back set and its “hard walls and hard environment”. Bechtler initially considered using lots of lace bedding. Flickering candles. Perhaps even an altar. But eventually, the bed was stripped back to its essentials. “Without certain details, the bed can become as abstract as the walls. A stage within a stage. But add just one wrong thing and all of that goes.”
The bed should also add a little light and shade to Shakespeare’s tragedy, which Bechtler believes can become a bit too foreboding: “We didn’t want to make our Romeo & Juliet all darkness. I think the power of sexual attraction is all bound up in the bed. It’s something they’re prepared to die for.”
Romeo & Juliet is at the Harold Pinter theatre, London, to 20 June.
John Proctor Is the Villain
Concealed dancefloor
Good cop, bad cop. The witch and the problem solver. This is how long-term collaborators and scenographers Christine Jones and Brett J Banakis describe themselves when we meet during tech rehearsals at the Royal Court theatre. It took all their imagination and combined technical expertise, as well as input from emerging designer Teresa L Williams, to create the concealed disco floor that lights up in the final seconds of Kimberly Belflower’s play. A memorable moment of release, accompanied by some wild dancing, it became a hot talking point during last year’s acclaimed Broadway run.
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Christine Jones and Brett J Banakis, scenographers “We prefer to call ourselves scenographers rather than designers. We’re still set designers but we like to think of our role akin to a choreographer or a cinematographer. Part of what a scenographer is doing is figuring out how a piece moves through time; how it changes and interacts with the audience and actors. There’s something much more active about the term. The idea of a set sounds so lifeless but scenography captures the temporal quality of the work.”
Initially, the disco floor wasn’t going to be a floor at all. Belflower’s script, which is a riff on Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, only hints at the need for a change to the set in the final scene; something that allows the teenage girls to release everything that has been building up inside them. There was talk among the creative team of revealing a moon or some trees; maybe the walls would fall away or nature would start creeping into the girls’ classroom. Eventually, Jones and Banakis went back to the text to find their answers. Jones explains: “I believe very strongly that embedded in the text are secret clues, like spells.” In this case, Jones and Banakis looked into the lyrics of the song that would play in the final scene – Lorde’s Green Light – and found the answer to their staging problems in one prescient line: “Did it frighten you when we danced on the light-up floor?”
A light-up floor it would be. But how to create a disco floor that blazes fiercely in the last 90 seconds of the show but remains hidden until then? The answer, says Banakis, is lots of stickers: “We developed this vinyl sticker that goes over the stage and the [110] LED tiles below. It looks like an old linoleum floor for the whole show. It’s a true deus ex machina. The disco floor has been hiding there all along.”
The exact nature of those stickers had to be painstakingly tweaked and tested. Too opaque and they wouldn’t let enough light through. Too translucent and they’d give the game away too soon. It should make for a stunning final moment, says Jones: “Rather than the environment around them changing, it felt more true to the spirit of the play to have the ferocity of what is happening inside these girls change the world around them.” Banakis finishes Jones’s thought: “You can see their power unfurl – and to have all that enhanced by a coup of design is just so satisfying.”
John Proctor Is the Villain is at the Royal Court theatre, London, to 25 April.
The Authenticator
Dilapidated mansion
I meet scenic art supervisor Cass Kirchner in the heart of the National, surrounded by the buzz and bustle of the cavernous workshops backstage. Today, most of the activity is focused on creating an enormous dilapidated mansion – the centrepiece of designer Jon Bausor’s darkly atmospheric set for Winsome Pinnock’s new play, The Authenticator. Crumbling brick walls made from carved polystyrene stand aloft, half-finished but strikingly lifelike. Aged wooden beams lie scattered across the floor, and a fading fireplace is being made to look even smokier still.
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Charles Court, scenic artist, who is retiring after working at the National for 23 years “Every show is a different challenge. I could be working on a cloth. Old buildings. Bricks. For Frankenstein, the whole auditorium had to be bandaged. We had these hanging cloths and put huge swathes of linen all the way up the walls. Years ago, we did Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days. That was a big old landscape with Fiona Shaw stuck in a huge mound. There was a lot of polystyrene. That’s something I won’t miss. You end up wearing it. Farewell to polystyrene. Good riddance!”
When Bausor presented his white model to the creative team, Kirchner was initially struck by the sheer size of the thing. The mansion is 9.9m wide, only 26mm narrower than the Dorfman’s stage. The design was also going to have to be highly adaptable, with the house gradually emerging as a central character in the production, rigged with theatrical surprises and darkly buried secrets that slowly find their way into the open as the play unfolds.
The creaking mansion needed to house six traps in the floor – from which various props emerge – as well as a concealed wall, complete with a secret shelf and swinging bookcase. Strict attention to detail is required on a design such as this, says Kirchner, but also real engagement with the story: “You’re considering the play as you go along. As you’re painting and working on it, you’re thinking about why that area of the wall might be more worn down, why there’s a drip here or a tear there. You’re trying to create an atmosphere and bring the past to life.”
Bausor explained his vision to Kirchner when presenting the early model: “He wanted the mansion to look ghostly. The bricks are smoky from past fires. The dust from the chimney still lingers.” It’s quite something to see those carefully carved-out bricks, beams and stone floors up close, and get a feel for the exacting care and craft that has gone into creating all these intricate elements, which most of the audience will, inevitably, only ever glimpse from a distance. For the past few weeks, scenic artist apprentices Lily Cleaver and Jade Boycott have been working hard on just one aspect of the mansion: the ageing wooden beams. Boycott describes their approach: “We’ve basically been whittling down compacted cardboard and gouging holes. Making the beams look as dead as we can. It’s been a lot of trial and error.”
They actually aged the beams a little too convincingly at first, Cleaver says with a chuckle: “We made them too dead. Our supervisor said they need to be dead but there also needs to be a bit of life to them.”
The Authenticator is at the National Theatre, London, to 9 May.