Flying – The Production Blog – By Flight Commander Doyle

29 July 2013

Great, our summer spectacular The Witches of Eastwick has opened and, as we feared, the flying was a nightmare!   Oh no.  Not the three Witches. That was easy. It was all the other stuff.

 We use the term flying for all the things that hang over the stage, whether it be bits of set or lighting bars. Early on in the production process Nelly (Assistant Production Manager) and I knew we were in for some fun times when, some set drawings and the lighting plan seemed to show things in areas of the theatre that are just not there!

Still, we started to draw up the Hanging Plot. With our first hanging bar we allocated what we were going to hang on it and then gradually added bars in, moving upstage .

1. Front LED lighting batten,   2. Lighting bar1,  3.The Lenox house, etc with 16. Star cloth 

With standard bar spacing and the size of The Watermill, that hanging plot should put the final hanging, the sky cloth, somewhere in the river outside!

But we have a secret weapon -“The Goose” our top gun in the flies!  Because Amy (Assistant Stage Manager, Amy Wildgoose) is so smooth at flying stuff ‘in and out’ (the term we use rather than ‘up and down’) we have managed to cunningly get stuff very close together. In fact, one piece of set has had bits taken off its back and bottom so it flies through the lights, and the back curtain track has a right angle bend to move the star cloth out of the way.

Even so, I did have one of those Mr Creosote, Monty Python Meaning of Life moments, when Tom, our designer, asked for just “One more wafer thin piece” to be flown. Even I had to admit defeat. But that does not mean it’s not there…see if you can spot how we managed to get the dinner menu sign onstage.

Tomorrow brings us new challenges as we get the set designs for Sherlock’s Last Case. No doubt they will bring us some more challenges, but I’m sure they will all be …elementary .

Lawrence T Doyle – Production Manager