Watching from the Back

Cross reference to the on-screen page if you like and you'll find I'm working on Calixto Bieito's Carmen at the London Coliseum right now.   It's something of a dream to find myself here.

Long ago when the world was new and I was doing my first paid theatre job, assisting on a youth theatre production, there was a TV series called "The House."  A Fly-On-The-Wall documentary about the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden.  I watched it hungrily and even let some unrealistic ideas slip into our own production - mostly to do with things that turned out not to be physically possible.

Now, less than a century later, I find myself working just next door at the home of English National Opera.  A similar repertory company in a similar theatre - there's no denying the Coliseum is a smaller building and I can barely imagine where they keep everything - because it generates the same kind of extraordinary productions and it is some venue to lose yourself in. Labyrinthine corridors lead up tiny spiral stairways and through unlikely gaps in the architecture to turn you out unexpectedly in the back of the ladies toilets on the balcony front-of-house.  I frequently worry that I'll never find my way back to my dressing room.

Yes. real cars.  Mercedes!  And there are several more.

I was watching the stage being laid out for a rehearsal yesterday - the crew often stay overnight to do the changeovers but this day they were working while I was awake (and sober) and I sat and watched them for a bit. Terry Pratchett wrote once that opera only happens because an astonishing number of things unexpectedly fail to go wrong.  But it's more astonishing just how many  people it takes to drive a stage like this, all seasoned craftspeople at the top of their trades, from welders to electricians to carpenters to painters, the stage is a huge factory floor and probably houses more potentially lethal heavy machinery than many would care to know about.

There may be sets for as many as four different shows waiting in the wings

To make sure so much fails to go wrong, the crew have every activity timed to the half second throughout the day so that that ramshackle pile of steel truss and cloth and furniture wedged into the corner, and over there and up there and under that, has miraculously formed itself into the Duchess' Castle, or the Pirate's Ship by the time the artistes come in to start constructing the bit that the critics tend to write about.


(There's a crap job for you:  To look at the work of perhaps hundreds of incredibly skilled people, each of whom have poured their heart and soul into losing sleep to make sure that every tiniest detail is the best they can make it and it's your task to tell the world why the finished product wasn't quite good enough)

In an opera house there exists somewhere amongst it's staff, the skill set to achieve anything that is physically possible - and several things that apparently are not.

It's a breathtaking thing to watch the unrealistic ambitions of it's directors forming, like clouds, into the acclaimed shows that only run for a few weeks before slipping off to tour the world with different casts in myriad languages and I have to say it's an awesome place to call work.