WWW.LSIONLINE.COM • APRIL 2020 17i INDUSTRY ISSUES
With the live entertainment industry having been hit
particularly hard by the on-going coronavirus pandemic,
we talk to designers, engineers, operators, rental houses,
manufacturers, venues and associations about their
experience and response so far...LIGHTING GOES DARK
Rob Halliday discovers how the members of the lighting
industry are handling the current crisis...The show must go on. Cliché, maybe, but also our driving
mantra. Until now when, as you know, we are shut down -
and rightly so. We know why. But the speed it happened at
is still astonishing. We never just down tools and walk away,
but this time we did.There are doubtless many of these stories; here are just
a few: “We’d just got the production desks out and the cast
were mic’d up for an afternoon rehearsal on City of Angels
at the Garrick,” reports production electrician Dan Large.
“That became a company meeting, then someone from
sound put on the live broadcast of Boris Johnson’s ‘I am
asking people not to go to the theatre’ speech. When he
said that, people started unclipping their mics, and that
was that. We just left the desks out; I’m sure they’re still
there, waiting.”Across London, at drama school Mountview’s new building,
designer Adam King “had just finished tech for A Clockwork
Orange when the decision was made to shut theatres; 600
lighting cues that will now never be seen.” Similarly, at the
Royal Opera House where James Farncombe was lighting
a new production of Jenufa, “it all became very immediate
when our Austrian video designer announced he had to
leave as the Austrian borders would be closing.” Or in
Portugal, where Peter Mumford had been directing and
designing Die Walküre (The Valkyrie) for San Carlos Opera:
“We’d got to dress rehearsal with a 100-piece orchestra on
stage tuning up and cast at the ready when the whole thing
was cancelled by government decree and the building shut
down; we had to all just say goodbye and disperse. I don’t
think I’ve ever known anything quite like that.”It wasn’t just theatre, but everything we do. In Europe, some
music promoters had tried to work around bans on
gatherings of more than 500 people by having artists
present two concerts a night each to half the audience, but
a stop was quickly put to that. Any TV production with a live
audience, pulled.And future shows... “I’ve had tours postpone, and they’re
now postponing to next year; some of those shows will
never come back,” notes LD Tim Routledge. “We lost 25% of
our year in one phone call; that’s pretty devastating,” says
LD Luke Edwards.There had been warnings. American theatre had stopped
a week earlier, Broadway closed down and many theatre
tours stopped, some with their scenery, lighting and sound
effectively abandoned in whatever theatre they were in. For
those who’d been watching closely, particularly those
closely involved - as many now are - with manufacturing in
China, the warnings had gone back further. Chris Ferrante
of Ayrton notes that their “mother company went through
all of this in Guangzhou in February, so we’d started putting
a plan in place as far back as then.”In our tightly interconnected industry, the effect was felt
everywhere, immediately - especially by suppliers with large
overheads who need constant cashflow to keep them going.
In London’s theatre world, a meeting was quickly organised
between some of those who produce the shows and some
of those who set them and supply them, the suppliers keen
to present a united front. Bryan Raven of White Light
comments particularly on the involvement of Julian Bird,
the chief executive of the Society of London Theatre (SOLT)
in these meetings: “Julian’s been excellent - in the
suppliers’ meeting, he very much talked about the theatre
eco-system, that there’s no point in saving the theatres and
saving actors if we don’t save the technicians and the
supply companies.” Many of these companies have found
that our industry is no longer a small one: companies with
more than 250 employees are unable to claim back sick-pay
from the government’s new coronavirus scheme, and
a number of suppliers just tip over that number. However,
they will benefit from other measures, particularly the
furloughed workers scheme. “On Friday, we were preparing
the presentation that was going to send everyone home
from 1 April, then at 5pm the government announced the
furlough scheme,” recalls Raven. “The sense of relief at not
having to lay off 250 people was quite overwhelming.”Backed by government in countries where help was offered,
the approach from the supply side seems to be to furlough
workers where possible, and for those still on-duty, now
often dispersed and working from home, to impose pay
cuts or part time working - above all, to try to come out of
the other side of the storm with an experienced workforce
largely intact.Prior to the formal UK lockdown, some had been
experiencing the strange world of working at a distance.
“Myself and our main production engineer had been doing
different shifts in the workshop,” explains Artistic Licence’s
Wayne Howell. “It’s a bizarre way to run a railroad - but it
seemed to be working!” All are also doing what they can to
help each other and the rest of the industry, even if that’s
through things as simple as providing online training
opportunities. Steve Warren of Avolites sums up the efforts
of many: “We are determined to make sure we are here for
everyone throughout the duration of this, keeping our
operations active, continuing to offer support and