Way out West (incorporating Way up North)

that ol' man river...(a tale of woe)

This has been a funny old tour, a mixture of nostalgia and horror as I've revisited venues that I toured to a few years back. In the case of the space we're performing in right now, it's where I got my first full-time employment more than 20 years ago.

It's such a contrast, when this company tour in Europe, we go to huge festival size venues; the stage at the Volksbuehne in Berlin is large enough for them to have mounted a five a side football tournament between Berlin theatres (complete with spectators onstage), they lost. We are generally looked after and appreciated, even though there is a faint air of mystery about the whole thing. In the UK, we've been touring to Arts venues mostly; University theatres etc. The whole experience has been thoroughly dispiriting; I have seen more institutionalised technicians than I care to. It's not that they are necessarily bad at their jobs (although in some cases...), but they are diabolically managed; in one nameless venue somewhere in Shakespeares county, they have a technical staff of fourteen, almost all of whom seem to be managers of one sort or another and yet the rider for the show (lighting plan, technical requirements etc), sent out in August, was never passed on to the people who were actually due to put the show in.

This has been a recurring theme, you negotiate with a production manager or some such, and he agrees to stuff, but the requirement is never passed on. Thus when you arrive on site you are inevitably wrong footed, because they claim never to have been given the information.

Currently we're in West London, a venue down by the river, and I think it has been the worst fit-up I've done in an age. My disappointment is drawn partly from my own nostalgic enthusiasm for the theatre, as I have mentioned, it was where I got my first proper job, and I had the best time ever. We had international companies, circus, concerts and crazy art exhibitions all at the same time, I regularly worked twelve hour days, six days a week and couldn't get enough of it. The space is now sadly diminished, in spirit and in reality, the big studio space is now a TV studio, knocking out a stream of low-budget game shows, chat shows and 'yoof' programmes, and the arts centre bit is very much the poor relation. The foyer is clustered with media types and PA's shouting into walky-talkies, meanwhile, in the theatre space, we have two semi-skilled technicians to do everthing (rig sound and lighting, put up masking, lay out the seating and so on), a big call by anybody's standard. Add into this heady mixture an inability to read a lighting plan, or to use the technical equipment properly and we're heading for trouble.

One of the pleasantly civilised features of working with this company is the custom of putting the show in a day before the first performance, generally speaking we arrive about ten, rig the lighting and flash it out by lunchtime, colour and focus in the afternoon, and then I either program the lighting desk in the afternoon or do it next morning. At six o'clock on the first day down by the river, the lighting rig was still down on the ground, bits of it were working, but not a lot. After a certain amount of discussion, we made a strategic withdrawal, having extracted a promise that it would all be working and coloured up by morning. Surprise, surprise, when we came back next day, all was much as it had been, although we were regaled with stories of how late they had worked. By lunchtime on the second day I had focussed two bars (out of nine) and we had a soundcheck and press to fit in before we performed. All I can say is that we got there, but the rest of the day is a bit of a blur.

It has been a shock to me that theatre technicians in this country can be so poor and unmotivated, we're not talking grunts here, but people with real reponsibilities. It makes me wonder where all the eager little techies I used to train have gone. Actually, I realise that a dead and dying venue isn't going to keep staff if they are so badly managed and paid so badly, but this shouldn't necessarily apply all over the country. It all comes back to management I'm afraid; if you stand still long enough in an arts environment someone will promote you, so the dross floats to the top.

Apologies for a not very entertaining posting, there's not much fun being had at the moment. Still, I promise that the next post will be more full of joy.

posted by Lampy @ 11/09/2006 12:13:00 pm