Verdi's "MacBeth" in Falkland House

In 2004 we were approached by In-House Opera about designing lighting for a semi-professional production of Verdi's dramatic masterpiece "MacBeth", to be performed in the Crypt of Glamis Castle. Well, this was simply too good to miss, even though the lighting would have to be kept very simple as it would have to be removed during the day for tours of the castle, and also as it would have to be run from a generator.

The months rolled by and nothing more was heard. The idea was left on the back burner.

Then early in 2005, In-House Opera got in touch again, with the news that Glamis Castle was no longer to be the venue, but that they had found a lovely space in Falkland House School, which offered some different challenges.

Located on the Falkland Estate in Fife, the School is a wonderful architectural treasure both inside and out. Although in need of some serious restoration, it still radiates a grandeur of its own.

Our venue was a former dining room, a not-too-large space with magnificent panelling, a beautifully ornate white carved marble fire-mantle and a positively baroque plasterwork ceiling highlighted in gold leaf. The room was about 7m x 15m with connecting doorway to a similar-sized but slighly less ornate space beyond, currently serving as a games room. The plan was to place a raised rostra walkway behind and through the doorway, with treads coming down to main floor level. Total playing space was about 4m x 7m, and we had to accommodate the school's grand piano and a five-piece orchestra within that!

For neatness I didn't want to have a lot of lighting stands in the room, paricularly as the 80-strong audience would have to enter upstage right and cross the stage area to get to and from their seats. So the decision was made to go with a truss-based system on four truss legs for the main rig. A separate truss goalpost on stands would enable us to hang a cyclorama cloth and some backlighting in the 'back room', and a couple of stands in the corners behind the audience would provide limited front of house coverage. The weakest area was the actual passage through the doorway, which was over 1m deep, and with no way of getting any equipment in there. However the cyc did a good job of making the upstage space look larger than it actually was, and colour on the cyc, with a basic red-green-blue mixture from groundrows, became a major element for suggesting mood in the lighting design.

Another problem was the lack of suitable power within the building, requiring that a generator be brought in. This was going to be a sizeable chunk of the budget and in that strange Catch-22 situation, meant that the size of lighting rig might be compromised, which in turn meant that we didn't need such a large generator; and so on. Resolution fortunately came through a contact with Kolfor Plant in Dundee, who very graciously supplied us with a free 100kVA generator for the week. Without this significant piece of sponsorship, it is unlikely that we would have had enough remaining budget to hire all the lighting equipment needed.

With such a small playing area the rig was mostly 575-650W stuff, with some 1kW fresnels for backlight and only two Parcans for centre backlight "punch". Coming as this did the week after the Edinburgh Festival finished, it was a desperate scramble to source all the equipment, but Black Light in Edinburgh came up trumps at literally the last possible minute and managed to pull it all together.

After only two performances, the first with a 2-course dinner served in the interval, it was time to get it all out and loaded back into the van. It's always a little sad when you only have a very few performances, when you consider how much work has gone into getting the show on. But that's the joy and challenge of this sort of theatre.

Thanks to all those who helped out with the show, particularly Susan Fitzpatrick for her ever-calm and proficient technical assistance, and to Neil Mudie and In-House Opera for having both the vision and courage to make it all happen.

pictures from the production desk

...which unfortunately was at the back of the hall!