How did you get into opera?
I fell into it by accident; I never intended to go into opera. I never knew anything about opera before I started. After college I was applying for jobs and I never expected to get a job with the Welsh National Opera! It was a great opportunity, so I jumped at it. I got on quite well with the company, so I stayed for six seasons. And then I talked to my boss, he got on the phone and I ended up at The Royal Opera House working there on and off.
What is it like in The Big House?
Ummm… it’s big. It’s an amazing place. Everything is automated. You press a button and the floor sinks or the set just tracks on stage.
At the Gatehouse it’s very much getting up the ladder to rig your lights and focus them all. At the Royal Opera House they have a fixed lighting rig. You rehearse one show in the morning and then clear that off stage and bring another show in for the performance in the evening. They have a set lighting rig that every designer has to use so you don’t have to re-rig. It is all automated, so most of the lights overhead move by themselves. You set everything up on the lighting desk, you put the disc in for a new show, the lights move to the right positions and they all change colour. In that way the job’s become easier from previous years.
In November you light Carmen at the Gatehouse, in a small place with the audience very close to the singers. Does this change how you work?
Of course, you cannot have a standard plan that fits into every venue. The difference between the Gatehouse and the ROH is that at the Gatehouse you are lighting for three rows, where the person in the back row can see all the subtleties a person in Covent Garden wouldn't see from the back row. The problem in the Gatehouse is that there’s no front lighting positions because the audience are so close. Basically, there’s a brick wall with no lighting positions on it, so the front-of-the-house lighting stops where the audience starts, which is actually on the setting line on the stage. Anyone standing on the setting line has to be lit from above, so it is hard to light singers coming downstage, whereas the ROH has got as many lighting positions as they want.
Another problem is to have to consider the view points of the people sitting on the side seats as well as the front.
Is it any different in Grange Park?
They built themselves a new theatre, now in its second season. It seats about 500. It’s a very wide stage, and quite deep as well. They have no flying tower, no height above the stage to take scenery in and out, which is a bit restrictive. Before that they used to perform opera in the Orangery, at a grand old house down in Hampshire. You had to construct the stage and rig the lights.
How do you light an open air space like Regent’s Park?
With difficulty. All the lighting happens overnight. Your rehearsals are done from ten o’clock at night to three o’clock in the morning. Then you have to let the Sun do its job, and when the Sun goes down, the lighting comes into effect.
You worked for the WNO for many years.
I worked for the Welsh as one of nine electricians. We were doing six weeks in Cardiff, getting three shows ready, and then five or six weeks touring, depending on the funding. Just before I left it went up to seven or eight weeks touring.
How does lighting differ when you work on a bigger production?
With bigger operas like Tosca you need lots of people to run it. Tosca has three totally different sets and you have to install the changes in a very short time. After act one you had a 40-minute interval to clear all your lights out of the wing, the stage boys come on, take the set out, put a new set in, you put all your lights back, refocus them all - and the curtain goes up again. It’s quite tight sometimes, with quite big changes. You have to be aware of what’s going on.
That’s what makes it fun, I think. The excitement of all that. It’s quite amazing just to see a set disappear and another move in in such a short time. And then the curtain goes up, the audience are clapping again, and we’re off.
Fantastic. It’s all magic, isn’t it?
Yes, opera is full of the tricks and the wonder of theatre, on a grand scale. I worked on the latest production of Don Giovanni at ROH. It has jets of fire that come out of the stage, it’s full of dry ice and smoke. At the end the whole stage retracts, it’s hell, and then there's a big metal hand, swinging above the stage like a pendulum, and that spits fire as well. It’s that sort of thing that makes it all worth while.
Does a lighting designer do special effects too?
Sometimes. In a big opera house the lighting designer just concentrates on the lighting. In Hampstead Garden Opera, I would be responsible for everything.
And it can go very wrong… Can you tell us about any mishaps?
There is always something going wrong, but that’s what live theatre is about - you can’t go back. I don’t think any of my shows have gone disastrously wrong. At the ROH there are always problems because they’ve got so much machinery to move the sets and do everything in that building. You get half way through the show, there’s the big scene change and everything will stop. You don’t know what’s happening, they have to stop the orchestra, everything pauses for five minutes and gets reset.
In this particular production of Don Giovanni there was a problem with the smoke effects, we had a door open somewhere and it activated the fire alarms. Fortunately it happened in the rehearsal, so we didn’t have to get the audience out. Theatres can be quite dangerous places, but fortunately there’s a lot more awareness of health and safety regulations. Still, things do go wrong.
What’s the biggest disaster that can happen to a lighting designer?
You can lose your lighting desk. Everything is becoming computer-controlled and if your computer crashes, it’ll take out your lighting desk.
After I left college, I was in a production of Romeo and Juliet. It wasn’t the lighting desk that failed; it was something within the control chain. Suddenly I saw some moving lights. I got out of my booth, looked up and all of my lighting rig was flashing and chasing. It was like a disco. In the middle of Romeo and Juliet! There was nothing I could do. I was stuck on the lighting desk. The cast just carried on. They didn’t stop the show. After three or four minutes I brought the house lights up to stop the audience going crazy. Another technician ran around and found the problem, put the piece of kit back in and everything was fine.
One time, we were touring with the Welsh National Opera and we had the beginners’ call on stage - and suddenly all of the power went out. Fortunately, it was off only for a couple of minutes. The Bristol Hippodrome’s got a roof in the auditorium that can be opened up and as it was summer they had it open. So no one really noticed that the power was out.
Do you ever think that you would like to be on that beautifully lit stage yourself?
Everyone wants to be an actor when they start to do theatre. After a while you realise that you can’t - and that actors are out of work most of the time. You become a stage manager or a designer. I am very happy in the job that I’ve got.
What are your present engagements?
I am doing two shows now. I had four shows at the Edinburgh Festival and two of them are coming to London, so I’ve got to go and re-light them. One’s a kids' show and one is a comedy take on Shakespeare, Macbeth the Pantomime, from the series of Shakespeare For Breakfast.
How do you light a pantomime or a comedy?
It’s a lot more light-hearted. Traditionally, you tend to have lots of bright lights for comedy because you want to see the faces and the humour; you’re concentrating less on the set, the mood or the atmosphere because it’s not so deep or in-depth.
The pantomime is a very British tradition with a British sense of humour. I grew up doing the pantomime; when I was ten, I started as the back end of the donkey in my local village hall. I enjoyed doing it: lots of fun, very light-hearted. I do like opera as well and I would like to light a lot more opera because of the scale, the drama and the subtleties.
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Tell us more about your shows at the Edinburgh Fringe this year.
It was hard work. It’s crazy. Very challenging. As a lighting designer you are very limited in what you can do because you have so many shows in one venue. The lighting rig is a standard rig. The venue has chosen all the colours for you. They focus all the lights. You can’t move anything in the venue apart from one or two lights, if you’re lucky.
Basically, you have four hours as a technical rehearsal for your show and in that time they’ve got to put the set up, you’ve got to see how they focused the light in the rig, because it will always be different to what you’ve been told when you get to the venue. So you turn up, you see what you’ve got and you say, ‘ok, I’ve got to light a show now.’ You go to the lighting desk, hammer away at the buttons for as much time as you’ve got. At the same time you have the director in one ear, asking if you’ve finished yet because they have to do a run-through with the actors. In the other ear you have the person operating the lights asking for instructions. I’ve been at the Festival for the past four years in a row but only stayed up there once. I’ve always done the work and then run away again.
This year I plotted two shows, hammering the numbers into the board, without really seeing what they looked like. I watched a dress rehearsal, wrote down notes in my book. Fortunately I can take the disc away from the lighting board, put it on my laptop, do all the changes and bring it back the next day. Obviously, in that way you can’t see the changes until the show, so it can go horribly wrong. Fortunately, it didn’t.
You need as much planning as possible before you get to the venue. But you don’t know quite how the rig’s or the colours are going to work, you cannot pre-plan everything.
We did three shows for a smaller venue in Edinburgh and it was very difficult. It was hard work and the technical staff weren’t quite sure what they were doing. I had to fight for the lighting rig which didn’t have all the elements.
I also did a show at the Assembly Rooms which is a much more established and prestigious venue. They had two technicians there who knew everything. It was all fantastic and so easy, until I put my disc in the lighting desk (we had been touring with the show, so it was all prepared) and discovered that the whole bar of light which I thought would be lighting the whole stage, was lighting two foot of downstage. I had to forget everything I planned. The director was very understanding and we didn’t do a run-through with the cast, but went cue by cue to try to tidy it up. Of course, the first performance looked shocking… But then the director trusted me to do it all again at night on my laptop. It had to work - it was my last night at the festival. It did. I was very happy with the show at the end.
I’ll have to think twice before I go next year, I think. I work very hard to get the shows up to presentable level, I come back and the smaller venue has changed the lights, there are new dark holes appearing and it is all looking untidy again. I felt a bit like I was wasting my time. I’ve got my name on this show for the next month and I don’t quite feel it’s what I want people to see.
You have to know your technology...
Yes. It’s a case of knowing your lights and knowing what they’re going to do; there are so many different makes of light. The nice thing is I’ve been working as a technician before doing lighting design. I’ve been working up the ladder. I know how to use the kit and what its limitations are. Before I sit down and draw a plan as a designer I know if it has enough power to reach the stage. You are more dependent on the venue or the hire company. It’s the way the kit has been maintained and looked after rather than the kit itself.
The ROH is a fantastic place to light a show because they have an almost unlimited budget and a fantastic array of kit, while at a little pub theatre you’ve got 12 lights and you feel like you’re fighting against everything.
When you’re trying to establish yourself as a lighting designer, you’ve got to do all the rigging and focusing, you’ve got no kit to use or the kit you’ve got is broken or falling apart. And that’s when you really have to prove yourself. When you have proved yourself, you’ve got it easy. You have a crew to do the rigging for you, you’ve got as much kit as you want, as much time as you want - it just doesn’t seem fair…
Is there a set path to your type of career?
No, you have to follow your nose. A lot of it is luck: right time, right place, cover someone, get the job, get your design noticed. But it’s a lot of work before you get your lucky break. Keep plodding on. As you plod on, the shows get better, the venues get slightly better each time, and your work gets better. There is hope.
Did your training prepare you for the reality?
The stage electrics course I did gave me good ground knowledge, with basics about the conventions of lighting design. You don’t necessarily stick to them but it’s good to know them. But lighting design, I think, is not one of those things you go to college to learn. It’s mainly learned by doing it and through experience; by going to watch shows and seeing how others do it or working on a show and seeing how the designer uses that particular light.
Speaking to top lighting designers you’ll find out that most professionals are above the age of 35. It takes time to gain experience and make the contacts. You never stop learning in this job and always discover new things, new amazing colours. You discover your own style as you work through.
I am experimenting at the moment with different ways of lighting shows. When did Il Trittico for Hampstead Garden Opera, in Tabarro I used a lot of light from one side, which I never dared to try before. I felt that opera is something different, something adventurous. And it worked.
Lighting opera I found so much easier: music tells you what to do, when the lighting changes should be - it all just happens.
How much of the design is yours? Do directors interfere a lot?
Some directors won’t have a clue about lighting and they will leave it all to you;
others will have a very clear idea and they will tell you what they want. A good lighting designer would have his own vision and a lot of ideas, but of course you have to collaborate with both the director and the set designer to make a coherent show.
The set designer would have a general concept of the piece. I come in after the set has been made and see how I can contribute to that. However, my girlfriend, who is a set designer, thinks that the lighting designer should be there right from the start and contribute to it as much as the set designer. At the moment most directors bring their lighting designer in much later than their set designer. Is it changing? I don’t really know.
Does your work then start when you’ve seen the set? Do you ever come to rehearsals?
I read the libretto and listen to the music to get the idea. I try to see some rehearsals to find out where people are going to stand on stage and what I‘ve got to light. Then I think about the technical side of it.
I try to use photographs and colours, references to films or paintings to communicate my ideas to the director. It helps if the director has a bit of lighting knowledge and can visualise. It is down to trust. The main problem with lighting design is that you don’t get to see it until it’s happening as it were. You can never accurately tell how the light is going to work on the costumes or the backdrop. In that respect it tends to be a last minute job, at the technical rehearsal in the theatre. You have to think on your feet.
What was your first opera?
Turandot was the first opera I ever did, with the Welsh. When I turned up at the Plymouth Theatre Royal I didn’t know anyone. I spent all day wondering what was going on and rigging the lights. I sat down in the evening and listened to this amazing show. It was fantastic.
What opera would you like to do?
It is more the production than the opera. It's getting involved with the right director and designer, finding the team that really works and working well together for a fantastic show. It’s more about the experience than the music; it's about creating the product.
Would you risk dividing opera composers into ‘more visual’ and ‘less visual’?
Turandot has got that very powerful music which I can pick up on more easily than The Marriage of Figaro or The Magic Flute. They would be more of a challenge.
Were you involved in the new Madama Butterfly at ROH? The set and the lighting were breathtaking.
Were the singing and the acting so bad that you noticed the set? (he laughs) Yes, I did a few bits on it. The team have been together for years, they did a lot of shows for the Welsh. They understand each other very well.
Are you planning to focus on opera or straight theatre?
I always want to do everything. I’d like to do more opera, just because of the scale and the magic. I suppose I got involved with the theatre originally because of the magic, the awe and the wonder. On a financial note: you get paid a lot more to do big operas (and that’s a consideration when you’re trying to make a living from it). Opera is a very different world. As a lighting designer you get booked about four years in advance, whereas in theatre it’s a couple of months beforehand.
What are your plans for the autumn?
I will be lighting Madame Bovary on tour, coming to London in November and then I am back with the Hampstead Garden Opera for Carmen.
View Peter Harrison's page HERE...
Carmen by Hampstead Garden Opera.
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