Production

Our production meeting last night with the Producer, Designer, Stage Manager and DSM enabled us all to get a real handle on what was needed, technically, for the first act of Beauty and the Beast. There is much to machinate during the performance from:

• 4 proscenium arches
  
• 8 forest trees
  
• a cottage (to materialise)
• a village (to pop-up)
• a multitude of trunks and cases
• chandeliers (there are 7) flying in and out
• thunder and storm
• the accordion
• the violin
• the Beast's Castle
• other special sound effects
• radio mic machinations

We spent a couple of hours working through the detail of the first act and then mapped out the second act a little. The latter will become clearer once we have worked on it and developed the ideas in the rehearsal room this week.

It was an important meeting because it became clear when scene changes should actually happen. As we are making a feature of these transitions, in that they are being signalled by Madame Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve (Gabby) with created dialogue, the moment at which the physical changes happen is crucial.

It was an inspiration to have seen Wall•E at South Hill Park's very intimate cinema - see below - just after the meeting yesterday because imagery, motifs, the art direction, character, dialogue, style all seem to be incredibly integrated in the film and, in my analysis, took me back to those undergraduate days in the late 1980's when 'concepts' seemed to be the rage in terms of the critique of work.

The image system for Wall•E dictates so very much the way we experience the film and thus how we view it. There is a charming simplicity to the piece in terms of how we associate its animation qualities, and themes, and how we might understand its relevance to today.

It is a disaster movie, a romance, a quest, an animation, and it says so very much about us as consumers and how technology might one day stop us talking to one another - stop us communicating, perhaps, as we once did. There are also one or two small health issues explored that are frighteningly comic.

As the Axiom space ship prepares to configure its journey back to planet earth, there are technical malfunctions and its passengers roll from their float-mobiles and collide down one side of the tilting ship on the vast, requisitioned pool deck; it was hugely reminiscent of the end of Titanic and had me in hysterics and I am not sure why...

Concepts, themes and image systems are developed ideas that guide the imagination and creativity of film-makers, theatre-makers, poets, writers and artists - people - and should not, necessarily, be feared.

But whether they are a conscious thing that have been articulated earlier on or not, the concept - an image / a theme - will always materialise.

The play-within-a-play / theatre-within-a-pop-up-theatre design concept for Beauty and the Beast, with the post-French Revolution back-drop (a detail), is crucial to making the piece work.