Thursday saw the get in for Sins of the Father. Initially it looked like we were going to only get an hour and a half in the theatre because it was booked for rehearsals for the house’s producing company but, luckily, things had got a little mixed up somewhere along the line.
We arrived at the venue at 6pm and found it already open. Inside there were two people and a very friendly dog. One of the people, their lighting man, was up a ladder trying his best to cover up the set which had been built on stage with their black drapes – we had been promised a black box, so he was aiming for that with mixed success.
Ben and I had travelled to Hebden Bridge together on the train from his house where we’d had a chat about the play and my ideas for lighting it. We were shortly joined by Nick, a friend who Ben had met at university, and who in the past had done the lighting for the company. I wasn’t sure exactly how things were going to work with the two of us – I knew he would be around Thursday and for the show on Friday but not for the show on Sunday, and I wasn’t sure exactly how far his experience and knowledge stretched – so I thought best to play it by ear. I’d already come up with some ideas from seeing the previous day’s rehearsal and had a list of what I wanted in order of preference depending on what was available at the venue.
After a quick chat with the people there we were shown around the box and told how to switch the kit on. I asked a few questions about what we could do and the capabilities of the venue, and then we set to rigging and focussing. At first we planned only to use the bars at the side of the auditorium to light down stage and the bars on stage to light up stage simply because of the time and effort of getting to the two front of house bars, but this plan changed after we noticed one of the luminaries FOH did not have a safety chain and we had no choice but to get a ladder up to it anyway!
We spent about three and a half hours rigging, with me taking charge, until we thought we had something reasonable to work with (at which point I also felt a bit aware of the fact the theatre tech was also still there, and we were eating up his evening!). I took a few notes of the sockets we had plugged in to, the type of control board we were going to be working with, and took a quick look at the patch in the gallery and we left. The plan was to work out a reasonable patch and get hold of an offline editor for the desk so I could programme it the next day during rehearsals. Unfortunately things weren’t quite as straight forward as I had hoped…
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