STAGE MANAGEMENT

This 14 page Guide has two chapters.

(Set Design)

Not too long ago, a school in an LEA not far from mine did a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. They had something that many schools don't have - a cyclorama; that is, a very large sheet of white fabric which fills the entire back of the stage, from side to side and top to bottom. It's an expensive item - which is why most schools don't have one - but it is very useful. By the careful use of lighting it can be turned any colour you like, or a mixture of colours if that's what you want; or, again by careful lighting, it can be brilliant white, or black, or any shade of grey in between; or it can be used as a projection screen for film, slides or gobo effects.

The Director of Dream, however, had decided that it should be painted to represent the forest in which most of the play takes place. What an horrendous idea! For future use as a cyc they will have to paint it white again, which will make it stiff and difficult to manipulate, or they will have to try to clean the paint off. Both of these are dodgy operations which could lead to having the scrap the whole thing.

What was wrong with taking the cyc down and painting the back wall? or putting up flats and painting them? or leaving the cyc white and using gobos and/or various shades of green and yellow colour filters to give the same impression? Why risk damaging or destroying an expensive piece of gear?

I don't know. But what I do know is this: it shows a lack of understanding on the part of the director or stage manager or whoever of the possibilities of set creation. And I use that word "creation" advisedly: I puposely avoided using "building" because that is too suggestive of the wood, canvas and paint school of thought.

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What I am really trying to say is this: don't have preconceptions. I called this chapter "Set and Staging" deliberately, for the two are inextricably interlinked: your approach to set design must be determined by the way in which the play is to be staged, the kind of space in which you are working, the stage itself.

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We've already mentioned the box set, and this means exactly what it says, a set which is really a box with one wall removed. Three or more walls are built on the stage and butt against the inside of the pros arch to enclose the acting area totally. We imagine a ceiling above it all (although that isn't always true: sometimes there is an actual ceiling, although there is usually space left between it and the pros arch for a lighting bar or two).

These walls are built from flats, and this is what people usually think about when they mention scenery. A flat is a frame of, usually, two by one inch timber covered with tightly stretched canvas which can be painted to represent whatever you want. Flats built for a specific theatre are slightly higher than the height of the pros arch and are often made in three foot widths, although this can vary from theatre to theatre. Schools sometimes make their flats from hardboard rather than canvas because, although initially more expensive, they can take much more wear and tear as kids generally handle them more roughly than adults.

(Stage Management)

In the professional theatre the Stage Manager is the person in charge of the running of the show on the night: he is in total control once the run starts. In the amateur theatre (and, usually, school theatre too) he builds the set and looks after props. So be warned: if you are approached by an amateur company (or the director of a school play) to stage manage one of their plays, what they really want is a stage carpenter and set painter, who also dabbles in a bit of set design.

This is a shame, because there are a great many people who have the organisational skills and the unflappability to be a good stage manager but who couldn't saw a piece of wood in a straight line to save their lives! It is equally true that of those who have the joinery or painting skills some could not organise their way out of a paper bag!

It's time, I believe, that both amateurs and schools took a leaf out of the professionals' book and instituted a proper system of stage management. I try to do it in a kind of arsy-versy way with my system of having an assistant director. She - for some reason it usually is she - tends to carry out most of the functions of the professional stage manager: the title of stage manager, however, goes to the person who either builds and paints, or co-ordinates the building and painting of, the set. An assistant stage manager usually looks after the props (as they do in the professional theatre).

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And what about that other problem which often (but not by me!) gets landed on the Stage Manager - make-up? Quite frankly, this is often the weakest point of many a school production: brick red complexions (Leichner five and nine strike again!), carmine lips, blue eyeshadow, the red dot in the corner of the eye, lake liner for shadows and (for the girls - usually, but I have seen it put on boys too!) carmine for blusher. And you end up with a cast that looks like a bunch of pierrots with high blood pressure! You would think that this pre-War (or is it pre-Great War?) approach to make-up would have vanished by now, but it hasn't. For Smike, when I had no time even to think about make-up, I was delighted to accept the help of a number of fifth form girls who assured me they had done make-up before, and what we got was this traditional make-up! Clearly they had been taught by someone who had been taught by someone who had been taught by someone who had learned their make-up at least fifty years before!

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What I have tried to show is that the Stage Manager is not the technician, the builder of sets and the painter of scenery, that the amateur theatre has cast him as. He is one of the most important characters in any theatre company, second only to the Director.

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