Greeks bearing gifts, a visit to the theatre museum.
Last week I referred in passing to my having visited the Theatre Museum, the circumstances that took me there were a little odd;I was sent an unsolicited e-mail asking me if I wanted to tender for a redesign and overhaul of the lighting of parts of the museum. In my industry, the museum is referred to with amused contempt. A branch of the V&A, it has a enormous archive of historical material, but is considered to have a rather lack-lustre and unimaginative exhibition. So, gentle reader, you can imagine that I was curious to see for myself.
The museum lurks underneath the London Transport museum, for whom I used to overhaul equipment many moons ago. To say that I was underwhelmed by the experience would be over-extending my enthusiasm, a theatre museum that was less imaginative and theatrical than weekly rep in Frinton on Sea (immortalised in the phrase; Harwich for the continent, Frinton for the incontinent). I was walking round with a curator (the one who had contacted me), and felt like a hapless royal being asked to judge a comedy vegetable competition. What could I say, the trompe l'oeil was piss-poor, the exhibitions tedious and the whole thing badly and witlessly lit. If I'd paid to get in I'd have wanted my money back.
There is a sub-text here, the redesign is being sponsored and driven by a major british lighting manufacturer, one with whom I grew up, and whose equipment I learned my craft with. Some time ago they made a marketing decision (driven by bean-counters one suspects), which unloaded a whole range of weird and only occasionally functional equipment into the industry, and continue to operate a policy of trying to establish monopolies wherever possible.
As I am not known to be diplomatic when I am presented with a piece of only semi-usable equipment, I didn't think that my potential contribution was likely to received with enthusiasm by the sponsor, so I was extremely circumspect when I put my proposal in, as I had no wish to give them my best ideas for free. Anodyne probably best describes my pitch, I'm a bit depressed, the museum could be so much better, but it is caught in between the rock of being an undervalued and underfunded outcrop of a major institution, and the hard place of being offered a free lunch which will lock them into what I would consider to be a very unhealthy and risky monopoly.
Oh, and much to my surprise, I got an e-mail thanking me for my time, and for my contribution to the design process, I must have said more than I meant to. In case it might be thought that I was being paranoid, I ought to point out that I am semi-sponsored by another lighting company, who have very thoughtfully and for no apparent reason supported a number of my stranger projects, the ones where there really was no money, and they have done this all over the world. I don't carry a torch for them, but I like their products and I appreciate their open-ended generosity. This contrasts ill-favourably with my experience with the british company when I was involved in a multi-million pound refurbishment project.
posted by Lampy @ 8/15/2005 10:25:00 pm
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