Let There be Light!

I think that one of the most disappointing productions we’ve ever had in Ashton was of The Sound of Murder. Do you remember it? Did you see it? Possibly not, because the reason it was so disappointing was that after weeks of rehearsal we only managed one performance before a heavy snowfall blacked out the whole of the village for several days. Cyril, the director, wondered if we might be able to have people in the front row holding torches, but we decided that without proper stage lighting the audience wouldn’t really have their money’s worth!

Stage lighting is more than just illumination, of course, but we do rely on our lighting team to make sure that we can see all of the action. Lighting is also a very important tool which can help create mood, heighten tension, direct the audience’s attention, distinguish between day and night or simply mark the beginnings and ends of scenes.

If you look around our village hall during a show, you’ll see that there are basically three different kinds of stage lights:

‘Fresnel’ spots produce a more or less circular beam of light, with soft edges, which can be made larger or smaller. Fresnel, by the way, was a French physicist in the early 19th century who gave his name to the particular kind of multi-faceted lens these lamps use. ‘Profile’ spots usually have a set of four independently operated shutters to adjust the shape and size of the light beam, which is focused by a lens at the front. These lamps can give very hard-edged, well-defined areas of light – in other words a traditional ‘spotlight’. ‘Floodlights’ don’t have any sort of lens and are used to give a diffuse, overall illumination especially useful for background scenery. The basic design of each of these lamps hasn’t changed for a long time, although the technology has improved to enable a greater light output for lower power consumption. This is a good thing for the Village Hall, because as our productions get more ambitious we need to run more lights from the same restricted electricity supply.

The overall effect for a play is built up by using several lamps at once to cover the whole area of the stage. These lamps have to be suspended, carefully aimed and then faded up to the right intensity. One of the difficulties which we have with our shared use Village Hall is that we don’t have any means of suspending lamps above the audience. As a result most of the ‘Front of House’ lighting has to come in from lamps on those scaffolding bars at the sides of the hall. This can create uneven illumination of faces, very prominent ‘nose-shadows’, and ‘hotspots’ – areas where the light intensity is greater than it really needs to be. Nevertheless, our technical colleagues do a great job, and without all that lighting, Ashton Players' productions would be very dull affairs indeed!