In 2009, Hilary Mantel’s epic historical novel about the rise, and future fall, of Thomas Cromwell took the literary world by storm. Now on stage at the Winter Garden Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company production of Wolf Hall has reached Broadway. Imported from the Swan Theatre via a stage on the West End, British royalty has come to the Great White Way. The complex six-hour political saga is told in two parts, with scenery designed by Christopher Oram, who received a 2015 Tony Award for the costumes and was nominated for the scenery. Read about Oram's scenic design.
Paule Constable and David Plater’s dramatic lighting, also Tony nominated, uses shadow and piercing beams of light to expose the world of Mantel’s characters. Each play, or part, has 33 scenes, and the productions rely almost entirely on lighting and minimal props for location, time of day, and mood. The open space created by Oram’s set serves, at times, as a backdrop to the dramatic storytelling of the light. Single shafts of light etch out the characters and skim along the reveals of the cross in the upstage wall. In Part Two, color and texture pull apart some of the darkness of the old world.
Constable, lighting designer of Part One, became involved in the production through her relationship with director Jeremy Herrin. “I designed a production called This House for Jeremy,” she says. “We really enjoyed working together, so when he was asked to direct Wolf Hall, he came to me.” Because of the schedule and timing of the original productions, Constable says she was torn. “I love the books. I love Jeremy and Christopher, but I didn’t want to give up so much time over Christmas,” she says, adding that they settled on the idea of Constable conceiving the world for both shows and actually designing Part One, relying on Plater to light Part Two.
Constable and Plater have known each other for nearly 20 years, from when he had been the head of lighting at the Donmar Warehouse in Covent Garden. Constable explains how she led the process at design meetings but let each of their aesthetics really push through the design. “David listened to me riff on the idea for the show,” she says. “I worked this into a first draft, and then he added stuff he was specifically interested in. He pushed the sense of light coming through the ceiling more than I did, although in the end, I used this more than he did. Likewise, with the color palette, we both wrote lists of what we’d like and worked this into a single list. It was pretty seamless, but we had to start with my taking the lead.”
Once they had developed their ideas, Constable worked with her associate to draw up a provisional plan that she and Plater reviewed together. “I had a few additions for Bring Up The Bodies, Part Two,” Plater says. “A lot of the generics—[ETC] Source Fours, PARs, and 5kWs—have scrollers. We talked about the colors that would be common to both plays and then split the remaining frames between us. The core shared rig is basically made up of moving lights in as many positions as we could fit lights, although the ceiling prevents a lot of clear shots to the stage. There is a comprehensive backlight of traditional PARs with scrollers, and a low cross-light cover developed out of what the Swan Theatre has in its repertory plot, which has been adapted and grown into what we have in the Winter Garden.”
The three spaces in which the production has been produced are radically different: The Swan Theatre is a narrow thrust stage, the Aldwych Theatre is a conventional Victorian proscenium arch, and the Winter Garden is one of the larger Broadway stages. Constable describes the lighting, inspired by both the set and the original texts, as the “machine” for Wolf Hall. “The principal of the show has remained constant: a Brutalist, modern environment with light present and active in the space,” she says. “The light creates and shifts the architecture. It’s not hidden and polite; it’s present and bossy. The light relates to the architectural environment and is the main way we shift the space. By being present to the audience, it makes it clear that we are being very declared in how we tell our story. This contrasts with very detailed costumes and subtle performances.”
Rock 'N' Roll Meets Tudors
From the beginning, Constable’s ideas developed in the world of the scenery, with the concrete wall and how that would sit in the Swan in Stratford and work alongside the orange finish of the wood and brick space around it. “I felt that light should hold the space,” Constable says. “It’s sort of rock ‘n’ roll meets Tudors.” To create this effect, she pulled much of the vocabulary of the design from her early career in live music. “I don’t think I’ve ever put so many PARs on a show since I worked in the music industry.”
The openness of the design, of course, created some problems to solve. “The relationship between the ceiling and the kit was something I was unsure about,” says Constable. “The section was mad. I love the simplicity of it: the single backlight in the dark carrying so much. We put lights in places they have never had lights at the RSC. The relationship of lights to scenery was always a tough one to decide. So much felt scary, but that’s good.”
The lighting design, like the scenery, does not depend on technology. The lighting equipment was provided by Christie Lites, and the only automated fixtures are 10 ETC Source Four Revolutions, 12 Harman Martin Professional MAC TW1s, six Philips Vari-Lite VL3500Qs, and five Clay Paky Alpha Beam 300s. The show runs via an ETC Eos. “There are also three eight-lamp DHA Digital Light Curtains,” says Plater. “They have eight VNSP PAR 56 lamps in each, and they do pitch but not in the show. I use them sometimes individually but mainly in a line for the Wolsey Ghost scenes pulled right downstage to create a sheet of light in Rosco 3220.” Plater and Constable have also included atmospheric effects. “We have rain, snow, a lot of haze, smoke, and a series of real flame effects in the floor,” says Plater. “It is interesting using the flame as a light source or at least as a key to the light source.”
Depending on the light to create so much of the production is always a challenge, Constable explains, “creating darkness in a world of gray concrete and trying to be active with light without being dominant, remaining sensitive to the moment and making something architectural and declared but that also has great subtlety and a lightness of touch when needed.” Ultimately, she and Plater were successful in creating both a cohesive world and one that shows their differences. “David’s work is neater, more ordered than mine,” Constable asserts. “The same rig does something so different in the two shows. That says so much about the art of lighting. We are all so very different, even with the same tools. I use color much more sparingly, emblematically. He uses it to create images in a different way.” The austere world of Part One explodes into color and texture in Part Two, a feeling that, perhaps, translates the hope that Henry VIII feels in his discovery of Jane Seymour.
Plater also cites the amazing team that contributed to the design process. “The scale of the project, in terms of the number of scenes and transitions that needed to be tied in with sound, was just a case of working with Nick Powell, the sound designer.” In the Winter Garden, much of the sound and light cueing is tied together via MIDI to ease the cohesion of the show. Sometimes lights trigger sound and sometimes the other way around. Plater also notes that the production has “a fantastic production stage manager on the book, Michael Passaro, who is great at holding things together and communicating between the various departments.”
This team also has plenty to do post-Wolf Hall. Next up for Oram is Photograph 51, directed by Michael Grandage at the Noel Coward with Nicole Kidman, and then The Winter’s Tale and Harlequinade for the Kenneth Branagh season at the Garrick Theatre. Plater recently lit Outside Mullingar at the Ustinov Theatre in Bath, and next for him is A Dream Within A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Second Coming, both ballets in a large outdoor stage in Naples, after which he does The Effect by Lucy Prebble at Sheffield Theatres, and then onto The Mentalists in the West End at the Wyndham’s Theatre. Constable is taking a bit of time off before designing wonder.land for Rufus Norris at the National.
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