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Huw Pritchard, acting as Technical Support for Enlightenment by Shelagh Stephenson, our April play, tells us about building a very special item – The Contraption!
For all the modern equipment we use on stage, sometimes a good no-nonsense effect is what’s needed – something that relies on nothing more high tech than gravity or maybe a big spring if you’re going to be really fancy – and that’s what I went for when I was asked to create the contraption for Enlightenment.
I’ve built practical effects on our stage many times before, including a device that destroyed a plate as if it had been shot with a gun; for our 2019 production of The Haunting, I worked on various effects including books that threw themselves off shelves, and made an owl visibly fly into a window with an accompanying thud.
The contraption in this play had an extra complication – it had to be picked up, moved about and used by the cast, and so reliability and ease of use were incredibly important. When you give something to the cast you have to be confident that they can just walk up to it and make it work without any complicated preparation – the script rarely allows for it, and the last thing you want is an actor trying to figure out why something doesn’t work as it should at the same time as trying to keep the play on track!
I’m satisfied that we’ve created one of the simplest and also most reliable machines possible for this play. It wasn’t all plain sailing – the first prototype ripped itself apart – but with the aid of a few members of our build crew, I think we’ve been pretty successful in what we’ve done. I’ve been doing theatre work for about 30 years now, and in all that time have never felt the urge to go on stage. I love solving weird problems, and I think it goes to show that there’s more to creativity in the theatre than just the people you see in front of you when you watch one of our performances.