Sliver Of Light For Macbeth

Photo: Johan Persson
Photo: Johan Persson

If you want an insight into how the long-standing and hugely successful collaboration between designer Christopher Oram and lighting designer Neil Austin works, you need look no further than the “Is this a dagger…” speech of their recent Macbeth collaboration, staged at the deconsecrated St. Peter’s Church in Ancoats, east Manchester, as part of this year’s Manchester International Festival.

Oram’s design for the show effected a radical transformation of the space, locating the audience on either side of the central nave and filling the gap between them with soil on which gallons of rain were dropped during the show’s dramatic opening battle sequence, merely mentioned in the text, cinematically staged here. At one end, the church’s altar was filled with candles; at the other, a balcony was constructed, fronted by rough timber boards in which were set three double doors that opened to reveal the witches.

Above the altar, Oram had hung a crucifix. The intention of the creative team, led by co-directors Rob Ashford and Kenneth Branagh, who also played Macbeth, was that the first appearance of the dagger would be created by lighting through this crucifix, throwing a dagger-shaped shadow along the length of the performance area. In practice, this turned out not to be possible: limitations imposed by time, budget, and the building’s regular occupants, the Hallé Orchestra, ultimately meant that no suitable place was available to rig a light to achieve the effect.

Sometimes, though, the best ideas are kick-started by limitations rather than ultimate freedoms, and by a good night’s sleep. Post-rehearsal, a long meeting saw many people throwing ideas for an alternative solution into the ring before finally retiring for the evening, the problem left unsolved. Austin returned in the morning with a new idea. The witches’ doors already featured vertical slits, lit from behind using three Philips Vari-Lite VL1000AS fixtures to create dramatic cracks of light. Austin’s suggestion was simply to create an additional notch in the middle of the central door. At a casual glance, it would pass almost unnoticed, perhaps just a door handle, but lighting through just the central crack would then create a dagger-shaped image of light on the mud-soaked nave.

All involved grabbed the idea and ran with it, the notch quickly cut and the idea tested. Immediately prior to that moment, all of the doors were backlit, showering an array of shafts along the length of the long central performance area, giving a sense of a life inside a distant room with Macbeth left isolated on the outside. Then a cue ran that faded out the outer two Vari-Lites and pulled in the shutters on the central unit to isolate the beam to just the central crack. The result: a dagger-shaped image of light, landing just by Branagh’s position a third of the way along the nave.

Macbeth turned to see this handle of a dagger reaching out toward him. The line, “Is this a dagger I see before me, The handle towards my hand?” has never been introduced more cleanly. The next, “Come, let me clutch thee. I have thee not, and yet I see thee still,” has never been justified more clearly, this dagger ephemeral, a mental trigger (“a dagger of the mind, a false creation”) that then leads him to imagine two solid daggers floating in the air, these realized courtesy of illusionist Paul Kieve.

All were delighted with the effect, Oram adding just one further tiny refinement: cutting identical notches in the center of the other two doors, so that there was nothing special or different about the center door to give the effect away in advance.

This simple moment is both a perfect collaboration and also a perfect example of the Oram-Austin style, which favors real textures and surfaces and objects to manipulate and be manipulated by light rather than relying on theatrical “tricks” such as projection or gobos. The same approach saw Austin creating massive transformations in the feel of St. Peter’s by lighting through the church’s windows at various points of the show, while Oram followed up the rain with a pit of real fire, courtesy of Howard Eaton, for the witches’ apparitions.

The dagger slit itself ultimately became one of the most commented-on moments of a highly praised production, appreciated by the 260 people a night fortunate enough to obtain a ticket to the show itself as well as those who watched it via its NT Live cinema broadcast.

This production of Macbeth will be staged in New York at the Park Avenue Armory’s Drill Hall in June 2014. These designers’ collaboration can be seen later in the year, across the US in the touring version of last year’s Broadway production of Evita, and in London in Henry V, the last production in the year-long Michael Grandage Company season at the Noël Coward Theatre.

Rob Halliday divides his time between lighting shows, programming shows, and writing about shows, work which has taken him all over the world. www.robhalliday.com.