I went for a minor surgical procedure a while ago, which involved wearing one of those back-fastening gowns that stops just below the knee and reduces anyone who wears one to an ambulant heap of embarrassment. As I climbed down from the couch, the doctor peered at my legs and asked how I’d got the assorted scars on my shins. They’re an interesting set of parallel indentations, some rather faded now, but others still livid against the pale skin. I explained that I worked in theatre, and the scars are almost all the result of walking into a tip-up seat that hadn’t tipped up in a darkened auditorium. Most people I know have at least one of these, the severity depending on the speed at which the scarred party was moving at the time of the impact. Urgent departures from production desks to sort out pressing problems almost invariably lead to an unexpected impact and are liable to produce an extremely colorful invective from even the most taciturn of technicians. I suppose that wearing shin-pads would be a sensible precaution, but I somehow never manage to pack a pair alongside all the other paraphernalia that I seem to end up dragging to technical rehearsals these days.
It got me thinking about the other theatre-related injuries that I’ve incurred over the years and pretty much accepted as part of the job. Not so long ago, I was working on a production in a theatre that I have known and worked in for 25 years. I could, and frequently did, walk around in almost total darkness, knowing each and every concealed corner and unexpected step, but for this production, the auditorium had been adapted to play in the round and the usual stage replaced by a circular podium. I’d gone on stage to check a contact microphone that was picking up footsteps and, having moved its position to a more viable location, stepped back to admire my handiwork, the only problem being that, where there had been a stage for 25 years, there was now a five-foot drop, into which I gently toppled backwards, scraping my arm on a passing bit of scenery and bouncing the back of my head off a cast-iron pillar. I’m told that I fell rather gracefully and that no profane language passed my lips, probably because I lost consciousness for a few seconds, following the blow on the head. We were about 20 minutes away from the end of the technical rehearsal, and it seemed a shame to hold things up, so my arm was bandaged by an ASM, and, after a quick check to make sure I wasn’t seeing double or frothing at the mouth, we carried on and plotted the denouement. I took a cab to my local emergency room where, having told the triage nurse what had happened, I waited for about an hour in an empty department because the dog-tired doctor on duty jumped to the mistaken conclusion that I was a drunken clubber who needed an hour to sober up. She was most apologetic but pointed out that the triage note had simply stated “fell off stage and hit head,” and as I had walked myself in, rather than being wheeled in strapped to a gurney, it was the most obvious conclusion to draw.
On that occasion, there was no damage done, but over the years and long before the more severe rules on health and safety came into force, the catalog of injuries is reasonably impressive, although none of them has prevented me from carrying on with the work I was in the middle of doing. (Jump to the end for exceptions, by the way.) Almost all of them were as a result of someone else’s negligence or thoughtlessness, although the early injuries were all my own doing, as was the fall from the stage, of course. In my youth, I clambered around high places in theatres without a care in the world. I balanced on rickety rails to place microphones, dangled one-handed from unsupported ladders while attaching speakers to proscenium booms, and, on one memorable occasion, threw myself down a flight of wooden stairs in the cause of creating a realistic sound effect. Stupid? Almost certainly, but I had the bravado and confidence of youth that, these days, leads to teenagers killing themselves in late-night high-speed car accidents. Thankfully, I survived through those years unscathed, but with hindsight, that was mainly down to good luck, rather than good judgment. When I go into a theatre to prep a show today and see everyone on stage with hard-hats, riggers clipped on with harnesses, and speakers securely fastened with safety lines, I’m rather thankful that the gonzo methods of yesteryear are now in the dim and distant past.
List Of Injuries
For your entertainment, here’s a list of some the injuries I’ve sustained, roughly in chronological order:
Crushed index finger of right hand after being too gung-ho with a chain-operated roller-door. Nail still deformed after 40 years.
Crushed toe after trying to stop a truck full of counterweights with my foot. No steel toecaps and, consequently, a lovely time in the ER involving a red-hot, straightened paper clip and a nurse who stated quite categorically that it was going to hurt a lot, and I could scream if I liked. I liked.
Broken ankle sustained while descending a cat-ladder in the dark, at the base of which someone had helpfully positioned a flight-case. Took self to local cottage hospital, where gleeful nurse inexpertly applied a plaster cast, explaining that this was her first time and how excited she was. Carried on with the show on crutches, much to the amusement of the local crew. Later, at the rather bigger hospital where I went to have the cast removed, the technician viewed it with the disdain of a seasoned craftsman surveying the efforts of a cowboy builder, with the words, “Which idiot did this, then?”
Broken ankle sustained while working in a raised orchestra pit from which someone had equally helpfully removed one panel of the flooring but replaced the carpet.
Severe bruising sustained by actually falling into an orchestra pit where a whole section of the covering had been removed, and, once again, someone had replaced the carpet. That injury really wasn’t helped by a famous actress laughing her head off at seeing me disappear through the auditorium floor like a demon in a morality play. I’m looking at you, Cate Blanchett.
Knee swollen to the size of a soccer ball after kneeling on a screw head left proud of the floor by a distracted carpenter, thus damaging kneecap. Slightly embarrassing as unable to remove jeans for examination, so had to have one leg (of jeans) sliced open. Repaired, of course, with copious amounts of gaffer tape (the jeans, not the kneecap; that still gives me gyp in wet weather).
As I get older, I let others do the climbing and the rigging, and content myself with trying to find a hard-hat that actually fits and doesn’t fall off when I tilt my head back to check speaker positions, but there are other ailments that afflict the older person, particularly those with a somewhat sedentary lifestyle. I spend a lot of my life in rehearsal rooms and theatres, sitting down for many hours, with coffee and cookies on tap for much of the time. It turns out this really isn’t particularly good for you, and a recent visit to the doc following a “not feeling too good” episode was fairly swiftly followed by an appointment with a consultant and a brief spell in hospital for a whole series of tests. At the time of writing, I’m still taking the tablets and feeling rather a lot better, thanks very much, and I got some decent recordings of the sounds in the recovery room in the hospital once I’d come around from the anesthetic, so it had its upside.
John Leonard is an award-winning designer who has been working in theatre sound for over 40 years. In his spare time, he records anything that makes an interesting noise in high-definition surround sound. He is also almost certainly the only sound designer in the world to have piloted a Spitfire. His sound effects libraries are available online at www.asoundeffect.com.
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