(♪ TENSE, ATMOSPHERIC MUSIC)
Go. LX cue 19.
Go. Sound cue 5.5 and MIDI.
Go.
LX flies and auto.
Set on stage.
Go.
My name's Dave Tuff. I'm the Stage Supervisor for the Lyttelton Theatre.
I'm the Stage OA for
I'm Yuri Queiroz. I'm a stage technician at the National Theatre.
On
I'm Eddie Hardin. I'm stage crew at the National Theatre.
I'm also the deputy key man.
YURI:
Having that amount of bodies on stage requires a lot of coordination
that we're not running over each other.
We don't only just move the trucks, we also set the scenes.
We do all the props and furniture on them as well, so it's a complicated process.
EDDIE: With the sliders slowly closing,
that gives us something that we can hide behind when we're setting scenes.
You might be looking at Donald on the stage in a blizzard.
Unbeknown to you, as the slider's coming from stage left,
we're trucking along with one of our trucks.
YURI: When they open and close it allows us to set the scenes directly behind them.
It also gives the visual impression of a cinematic world,
tracking and panning through the scenes as they play out.
I'm Bunny Christie. I'm the Set and Costume Designer for
I really like this one! (CHUCKLES)
That was kind of fun to do. Who knew you could get grey balloons?!
People out in the audience probably think
it's all much more computerised and mechanised than it actually is.
A lot of it is brute force and strong guys
and their skill at kind of riding the wagons.
It's really exciting when they get them up to top speed and then stop right on a mark.
EDDIE: I'm generally on the farmhouse.
The farmhouse you'll see more than any other truck.
Mainly the farmhouse is coming on and off, which is probably the fastest moving one.
This show is a little bit different because we're using the side stage,
so we've got the stage left shutter open.
That's where we have the farmhouse coming on and off from.
This is the farmhouse truck.
The play is set in 1969,
but we wanted a feeling that in this farmhouse it's got a '50s feel to it.
It's a mixture of Connecticut farmhouse
and things that they've done to the farmhouse to do a conversion.
It has a very clean, quite a sparse feeling to it.
It's like nothing's out of place.
It's Ingrid's world, where everything is immaculate.
It's quite an austere feel — it's quite stylish, but it's not massively cosy.
You never see any nature, apart from when we're in the blizzard.
The windows have, intentionally, always got a kind of blizzard film on them,
so it feels like there's a kind of blankness outside of all the interiors.
You never see any greenery or nature or trees or sky.
It's got a kind of abstracted...
Although it's quite naturalistic, it's also a slightly abstracted feel to it.
EDDIE: We do quite a lot of stuff behind where you're watching.
We're setting another scene, stripping out an entire truck
and putting different props on it very silently,
which took some rehearsing at the start!
BUNNY: When everything's in,
it's absolutely of chock-a-block, the layers of stuff.
It is like a game of Tetris.
If I make one thing slightly bigger, then I would have to make something smaller.
I always wanted the New York apartment to feel as if Donald had gone to heaven,
so when he steps into that apartment it's full of light and air.
We covered the windows with this kind of gauzy film
so that, again, it's got a kind of blizzardy, snowy feel to it.
For a designer, the lighting's absolutely crucial.
So when I'm designing, I always light my model boxes.
I never work in my model box without having them lit.
I'll always be thinking of where the light source would be.
Some of the world of the theatre is really high-tech now,
but then a lot of it is absolutely human-based, human skill.
And the crew are fantastically important to all of that.
It's really satisfying when a show starts to dance.
Literally, as one thing moves into place the other one's just moved out of place.
An actor steps off the set then it whizzes off into the wings.
They're doing a quick change, run round
and the other thing is just there — as they step onto it, the apertures are opening.
That's just so satisfying for everybody.
It's like an orchestra when everything starts all playing together.
That's the most exciting bit, really, of making a show like this
that's all about scene changes.
DAVE: There's the demand these days from designers
to produce something that no one's ever seen before,
or do something in a different way.
So we're forever pushing the boundaries of what's possible within the space we have,
which is one of the good things about working at the National.
YURI: You feel a pride in your work.
You put a lot of effort into the things we do here at the National.
With every show, every single one that I've worked on since I've been here,
I always find a sense of achievement out of all of them.
You know that you've done something that people have come away from
and enjoyed and they'll talk about for years to come.