Last year, having some time to kill, a stage crew at the Dorfman in London’s National Theatre added up all the productions that Paule Constable has worked on there. They tallied up 60 productions, which she found surprising. “Considering I only do about ten shows a year, that is a lot,” says Constable, the multi-award-winning lighting and production designer and director. Her first show there was Street of Crocodiles with Complicité in 1993, for which she was nominated for an Olivier Award for Best Lighting of a Play. “It’s where I grew up,” she says. Since then, Constable has won six Olivier Awards (Don Carlos, His Dark Materials, The Chalk Garden, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, The Ocean at the End of the Lane and Oliver!) and two Tonys, (War Horse and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time ).
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One of her recent shows, Ballet Shoes, based on the novel by Noel Streatfeild and reimagined by playwright Kendall Feaver, is a warm and energetic production and although it is set between the wars it has themes that still resonate today. Constable did not read the book as a child, she was a tomboy, she says, and the title alone would have put her off. “In a way, it is a shame it’s called Ballet Shoes because it is as much about Petrova, who wants to become a pilot as it is about Posy who wants to dance,” she says. “It is a very female-centered story, about women surviving in a particular time in history between the wars, and they survive by relying on each other independently of men.”
Constable has known the director Katy Rudd since they worked together on The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time in London and on Broadway and the National Theatre production of The Ocean at the End Of the Lane that transferred to the West End. She really enjoyed working with her so gave the new version of the story another chance. “I love the period and the contrast between the sisters and what they want, and it feels really rich to take the audience on a journey through multiple locations and situations.”
The production is anchored in a beautiful old house with moments that take the audience to various locations including vignettes of past events and the elaborate shows the three main characters work in to make money for the family.
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The house is not a static location. Constable says, “Frankie’s design (set designer Frankie Bradshaw, who is nominated for an Olivier award for Ballet Shoes) is a beautiful composite space but it is not where the show takes place, I have to create the geography of which room they are in in the house, with just a basin and a table we create a kitchen but then that has to transform into a dance studio and a playhouse and the Croydon aerodrome. You must very quickly make the audience believe in a credible location while also inviting them to use their imaginations as well. It is exhausting because it feels as though you are holding the narrative ball in the air without dropping it, but I do love doing it.” There are no shortcuts as the emotional timbre changes even when the locations are repeated. Constable also has to maintain the feeling of the 1930s, even during the theatrical set pieces where the girls are performing. “Alice in Wonderland has to feel like a show and there is much more self-conscious and overt use of color, but you want everything to have a kind of charm, you don’t want Alice in Wonderland to suddenly feel like LEDs and contemporary, you have to maintain the nostalgia, the joy and naiveté in a way, so we work with color and the angle of fixtures.”
At the beginning of the process, Constable approaches the show by laying out the “beats” in the landscape to figure out what the rig has to deliver.
“I work out what the beats are and where the light might come from, and the quality of the light, so I can choose a mover that can cover that. All the front and the low front is done with Encores because they give me the flexibility to create the soft quality of light that we have in the domestic interiors, but can also be quite saturated and heightened, they are tools that will give me both. When we are in the house, all those cases at the back with the dinosaur bones are lit and I was aiming for an old lab and or cabinet of curiosities feel about it. You see the fossils in the warm blue-green-gray of the set and I treat the people the same way as I treat the dinosaur bones, they float in a pool of greenness, making them feel a little bit like the objects in the cabinets.”
For scenes set outside, the house becomes a silhouette with shafts of light coming through it to give the audience a clear sense of place.
The Olivier Theatre, where Ballet Shoes is playing, was a repertory house with a set of gear that can be moved around as needed for a particular show. “The gear means I know I have a basic area covered and I can move or refocus for my show. The front of house bridges are covered in Lustr 2s giving a system of coverage I can focus specific to the show. There are Encores in useful positions scattered through the front of house and side areas which I chose not to move as they delivered what I needed. Then there are a bunch of Mac Ultras that you can put where you need backlight.”
One of the challenges about the set for the show is that the house walls meet on a diagonal behind midstage, and downstage of that there is a false proscenium of cabinets of dinosaur bones and curiosities. There is very little room to get any light into those spaces.
Constable's rig:
The backlight workhorses are Mac Ultras.
The workhorses for the rig generally are Encores, both washes and profiles.
We used Auras for cross light because they are small and stay out of people’s way and some GLP battens because they are really slim and we are really short of flying room downstage so we could fit those in in the gaps.
“When the model is being developed you look at what is possible with what you already have. Each of the three theatres has an allocated stock of equipment and they have a shared stock of things like par cans and extra Lustrs so you can ask the production electrician for extras.”
Par cans stand in for aircraft lights that evoke Croydon aerodrome at the end of the play, but the theatre builds a lot of items, including the practicals on set and lighting for the paleontology cabinets. Constable designed the illuminated mirrors that transform the stage into a dance studio. She put LED tape and the nylon gauze fabric that is used to make tutus in tubes running around the outside of the mirrors. She says, “They needed something on them so they had a presence but mirrors would never have anything like that back then so I had to invent something. I tried to make them look a bit broken down Bride of Frankenstein/1920s movie making.” The mirrors have a built-in battery and wireless dimming.
As the play follows the sisters and the other inhabitants of the house, Constable makes all her cues blind to make a map that she uses as a starting point she can refine later. “You create the structure and then move within that for your cues. Even if a cue does nothing, it means you are always at the right point in the cue stack.” For Ballet Shoes, she says, “There is never a scene where you can sit back and let it play out, every moment is a corner.” This means previews are critical to make sure the audience is coming along on the journey, “We are watching and noting and watching and noting to see if they are finding themselves where we want them to be.”
While Constable is obviously very comfortable at the National, she works internationally and points out there are big differences working in the UK versus the US. “I do find it astounding how much deep misogyny I still come across, particularly when I work outside of the UK. In New York everything is combative. This is partly because money is so present in the conversation. I’ve grown up working in a subsidized arts sector, a world where the making of the art was valued, as opposed to how many people buy tickets. That is not the case on Broadway.”
She also started her career back when analog desks were the norm and has adapted to huge shifts in technology, but, she says, “One of the things that frustrates me is that everybody thinks that lighting is about gear. Lighting is about storytelling and dramaturgy and darkness. I’m drawn to light because it is a thing that carves a truth out of darkness. I’m very claustrophobic and I’m frightened of the dark and it is the thing I love the most, having as little light as possible.”
For young people just starting she recommends being visually literate – being interested in film and fine art as well as design, and finding where they want to focus in the many different areas of the discipline. “I went to see Hamilton when Howell [Binkley] lit it and I wrote to him afterwards and said the show is amazing but it’s like you and I are doing a different job, you are riding a bicycle and I’m knitting a jumper, we are asking different questions.”