Staged for the Lennox Children's Cancer Charity at the Queen's Theatre

My preparatory notes for this include a list of location types: institutions, private worlds and parlours, underworlds and street scenes. Most of these occur by both day and night. I think the easiest way to explain the design is to make some notes on each of these in turn, and then talk about the implementation.

Underworlds

Including Fagin's den, and the various pubs and drinking dens. All of these are dingy but also warm— the shadowy grime is both threatening and comforting to Oliver amd the community that adopts him.

Institutions

The workhouse, by contrast, is both dirty and alienating. It's a colder, more saturnine kind of gloom that unsettles even the supposed authorities within these areas. I felt that this was largely true of the undertakers as well.

Private worlds and Parlours

The Brownlow and Bumble households needed to feel different to the other locations— they're more secluded and more comfortable to their inhabitants. I would have liked, especially with hindsight, to have made more of a separation of Mr Brownlow's house from the others. Both Brownlow and Bumble are respected figures of authority in their public worlds, and both have comfortable private areas to retire to, but Brownlow's house is supposed to be somewhere that Oliver obviously belongs in, which requires it to have a kind of virtuous cleanliness as well as warmth. On the other hand, the piece itself is pretty ambiguous when it comes to casting judgement on the different communities, so perhaps it was best not too distinguish Brownlow too much.

Streets

The streets are the most public of the different locations, and hence remained fairly neutral tonally,with a very exaggerated naturalism to depict the different times of day but very little that was intended to cooment on their feel or atmosphere.

Implementation

Time resrictions meant that the only practical course of action was to use the existing rig at the Queen's and make alterations where neccessary. Fortunately, my colleague Paul Stone had left me a pretty solid starting point with his design for Neville's Island. I re-gelled a large amount of the rig to create set of steel and CTO front washes, with more saturated colours in the sides (lee 728 and 156, if anyone's interested). There were also various bits of refocusing to accomodate the shape of the set. I then added various window specials put some keying features into the different locations.

Plotting–wise, I went mainly for slow fades that built faster than they dimmed, so that the lighting slid organically from one location to antoher. The design of the set meant that the company were able to do some imaginative journeys and live changes to get form one location to another, and I tried as much as possible to collabarate with this. Having two competent followspot operators helped greatly.

All photos kindly privided by Alan Blackholly