Grounded, Part Four: Gauze At The Gate Theatre

In Grounded, a one-woman play by George Brant, a pregnant pilot is reassigned from active combat to handling a drone. Safe in a trailer in the desert, she’s half a world from her targets, but she can see them better, through the drone camera. Her life is shattered, not only because she misses cruising freely through blue skies: Just how do you handle everyday life at home after spending your work day killing people?

Brant’s language is so vivid, his descriptions so detailed, that readers may feel design is almost unnecessary. Turns out, designers say the play, which has been given over 35 productions and counting, is, as sound designer Lindsay Jones puts it, “a designer’s dream. It’s so vivid in so many ways and yet leaves so many possibilities for ideas.”

Should a play about surveillance and military technology be tech-heavy? Or should a character-centered story be less so? The five productions here all used projections, none to create literal locations, but they related to technology in different ways. Check out Part One on the The Public Theatre; Part Two on City Theatre; and Part Three on Unicorn Theatre.

The Gate

Scenic designer Oliver Townsend says artistic director Christopher Haydon and the team at the Gate Theatre in London knew early on that they wanted a simple, contained set, perhaps a gauze cube, for Caroline Byrne’s production. “We looked at variations on the theme but returned to the simple concrete-looking gauze cube, made to appear floating just above the floor,” says Townsend.

Grounded at The Gate. Photo by Iona Firouzabadi.

They hung some gauzes and asked performer Lucy Ellinson to see what it would be like. “When you bring the house lights down, your performer can't see beyond the walls of the set,” he says, “so she was literally staring at the walls of a small concrete-textured box, knowing the audience was out there but unable to see them for much of the time.” Ellinson was on board with the concept.

They integrated LX into the set, with speakers beneath, above, and behind the audience for sound designer, Tom Gibbons, and concealed an LED floor (from a dance floor kit) beneath a soft grey floorcloth. “Basically, we loaded our set up with kit,” says Townsend. “Lucy, and the text, did the talking and we matched that journey with all the technical capacity the box had to offer.” Benjamin Walden created videos.  

When the show toured to the Edinburgh festival, and later through the UK, they had to tension gauze around the cube without fixing it permanently and move the steel frame, compartmentalized floor, and ceiling pieces—difficult but doable.

Gauze At The Gate

For the final scene, the audience saw the textured walls that surrounded her and became aware of how trapped she was. “Tom put a slight reverb on her voice and the effect was that Lucy truly felt isolated and distanced as well as entombed and very angry.”

The gauze cube challenged lighting designer Mark Howland. “The key to the design is in its simplicity, and the fact that the small rig is contained fully within the scenic ceiling,” he says, adding that Townsend allowed holes in the ceiling so he could get the coverage he needed. “Generally, the proportions of the cube meant that the lighting angles from the sides of the ceiling gave a very good coverage.”

“The scenic cube is transformed by video and lighting from within, and the lighting design is so successful because of the confinements placed on it by the set,” he says. “The lighting for nearly the entirety of the show is contained within the scenic box, creating a sense of enclosure. The nature of the gauze surround and ceiling necessitates that the scenes are lit from within. Only for the very final moment is there light onto the box from outside.”

Grounded at The Gate. Photo by Iona Firouzabadi.

This also meant the rig had to be simple, twelve channels of dimming running to the set, powering 28x75W Par 16s. “These Par 16s are mounted into the scenic ceiling so as to be as discreet as possible. Outside of the box, aside from some simple houselights, are just 8x500W fresnels, two lighting down each side of the gauze cube. This gives us the effective final image of the cube as a solid, with the pilot hidden and contained within,” says Howland.

Changes between locations were simple. “There are two main states, ‘home’ and ‘work’ with the addition of a simple special to give a different quality to the desert and the mall,” adds Howland. “The final scene looks different by the removal of the video floor.  This allows the lighting state to give a strong sense of the walls of the set cube, the first time as an audience we see the internal set walls as solid.”

“The video floor was a very early idea and so was always part of the consideration about lighting the show,” he says, adding that the floor was a useful light source itself, and often the main marker for different locations, making it possible for the small rig within the set to be effective. 

Stay tuned for Part Five at the American Blues Theatre.

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