The play is being produced by the Michael Grandage Company and this current run marks its UK premiere. White Light was called upon to provide the lighting equipment for this much-anticipated production.
The show was lit by Tony and Olivier award-winning lighting designer Neil Austin, who has an extensive history of working with WL. He comments: "Photograph 51 is an interesting show as it is told as a posthumous memory by the other scientists around Rosalind. It flicks between character dialogue to direct audience address to scenes of memories of the past. Therefore, telling this interwoven story theatrically allowed for some really exciting opportunities in terms of the lighting design."
The lighting became an intricate part of the show, as Neil utilised it to help the audience members differentiate between the various time zones and locations on stage. Neil comments,"With the lighting, I wanted to help delineate between time and location and indicate who was being addressed and when. It needed to be subtle enough not to become jarring but obvious enough to help the audience navigate the intricacies of the narrative."
Neil worked alongside production electrician Rich Mence and programmer Daniel Haggerty and, in order to realise the fairly complex lighting design, drew on WL's range of lighting technology. This included ETC Revolutions, Vari*Lite VL11000AS ERS, DHA Digital Light Curtains, an ETC Ion 2K Console and an Atmosphere Haze machine. He comments, "WL's extensive equipment helped make my vision a reality. For the posthumous narration parts of the show, the Vari*Lite VL11000AS ERS created a strong blue arc-source look which gave a sense of otherness and the after-life. The ETC Revolutions and DLCs gave a warm tungsten sepia glow which worked ideally for capturing the sense of a remembered past."
(Jim Evans)
