Light Knights at the Opera
Theatre lighting is a Cinderella of the technical arts, rarely mentioned by reviewers and taken for granted except when blazingly obvious, so to speak, in which case it’s probably no good.
So it’s been a mini-education in itself to serve as a judge for the first ever “Knight of the Illumination” awards, sponsored by the industry suppliers Clay Paky, and convened in the opera, dance, musical and theatre sections by lighting wizard Rick Fisher and London Variety critic David Benedict.
The winners will be announced at a dinner in June which, if it’s half as enjoyable and instructive as the lunch we had in Orso’s, Covent Garden, on Friday to come to our conclusions, will be a date worth keeping. It’s in my diary, anyway.
Over the asparagus, pork, ravioli and raspberries, we batted our nominations about with a surprising amount of overlap and agreement. Nothing occurred to compare with an Evening Standard judging dinner when Bernard Levin threatened first to leave the country and secondly to jump from the upstairs window in the Gay Hussar unless I retracted my opinion of a David Hare play.
We all got along just fine, Rick and David, the quietly authoritative Ash Khandekar of Opera Now, the scrumptious dance diva Louise Levene of the Sunday Telegraph (one of the few critics who makes me laugh out loud for the right reasons), and myself.
Since charged with taking note of the lighting these past twelve months, I’ve sat in theatres large and small wondering how on earth this magic is conjured, marvelling at how rarely these days you see overspill, shadow, patches of glare or dead areas.
On the importance of moody lighting changes in Victorian thrillers, we’ve even had a great joke: the actor Kenneth Cranham was asked how there could possibly be a modern version of Gaslight; “Easy,” he said, “call it Dimmer Switch.”
And of course Cameron Mackintosh apologised at the first night of God of Carnage when the lights went out in a power cut for not having put a few more bob in the meter.
The Carnage actors continued valiantly under working lights, but the effect was of an eerily inappropriate aesthetic supervised by one of Continental maestros, Giorgio Strehler or Patrice Chereau, where everything is etched in a sort of crepuscular silhouette, and not what was intended at all.
I’m all for a nice bit of crepuscular silhouette, within reason, and maybe we don’t get enough of it in our theatre. But the range and talents of our British-based designers are phenomenal and I’m delighted the Clay Paky awards are here to shine a spotlight.
