Technical Overview of the Production
The script has very few notes on exactly how the play should be staged, and thus the production team have almost literally a blank canvas. This page shows some of the choices the Players made.
Overall picture of the stage and associated areas, on the left is the beach scene,
and to the right of the procenium arch is the slide projection area. On stage can
be see the two periaktoi downstage, the combination sofa / bed is mid stage and at the rear is the
is the table on a rostrum, the stairs can be seen outlined in white. The picture was
taken from the very back wall of the auditorium, which is not a place people viewed
the production from, but the camera lens could not go any wider so a more representative
shot could not be taken
The Periaktoi
A pair of
periaktoi
were used SL and SR, providing the background for a number of the episodes.
Originally there were planned to be two periaktoi per side, but one proved to be
adequate in size.
The scenes depicted were
SR (Left) Periaktos |
SL (Right) Periaktos |
Home | Home
Office | Stadium
Bar | Restaurant
Some of the faces had other elements that were interchangable, for example
the office was dressed as either Diana's office or the lawyer's office. In addition
differing tables, chairs and stools were used to differentiate the scenes in front of
the periaktoi.
The Sofa/Bed
The central pieces of furniture were a sofa and a bed, but it was unclear how these
could be accomodated. Constantly shoving the two on and off stage was not appealing
and would disrupt the flow of the play. Creating a double-ended struture seemed to
have promise, with the back of the bed and the sofa being common, and revolving the
entire structure around a pivot.
However the final idea was a convertable. The back of the sofa could slide from the
sofa position to form a headboard. This worked well enough that the actors could
(after a couple of practice goes) reliably transform the sofa to bed as required.
As bed
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As sofa
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The Signs
All the signs were to be projected, however it was not clear exactly where they should
be projected to. The best place appeared to be above the table, but it seemed technically
quite hard, because of lens focal length considerations and fan noise, and keeping contrast up
with light bounce from the stage lighting. Eventually the
easy option was selected, which was the wall adjacent to the procenium arch. There was
a bit of keystone distortion, but this was considered acceptable.
The slide that would be projected in competition with stage action were all on a
clear background, giving the greatest visual change, whereas the slides projected
around blackouts were generally on dark or coloured backgrounds.
The slides were projected using a Kodak Ektapro projector, controlled the using RS232
interface on the back using the P-Com protocol, see below for details of the control
mechanism.
The slides were made by creating a page using Visio that had all the slide outlines
and text. This was printed to a sheet of OHP film using a colour inkjet printer. The
slides were cut out from the sheet, and mounted in Gepe model 7001 glassless slide
mounts.
The slides can be downloaded in the original Visio format
slides.vsd
(right click, select save as in most browsers).
Control
All lighting control, sound effects, music, and slide projector syncronisation was
acheived using
PCStage.
The slides projector was interfaced as outlined here
(link to follow).
There were, in total, something like 180 called cues, so quite busy for a play!
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