A railway arch, a pile of rubble, a lot of mud, an obstacle course to get to the location, an electrocution risk only avoided by a fortuitous last-minute equipment switch, a very wet producer, costume designer, actor and photographer, all to get some apt publicity shots of star Alastair Brookshaw for The Grand Tour. The escape-the-Nazis musical caper will open at the Finborough on 1 January. 
All posts by Scott Rylander
Portrait of the Artist
Portraits of painter John Ward, photographed in his southeast London studio.
Transference
Back in July, I looked at how we approached the publicity shots for Martin Sherman’s play, Passing By, to make sure we did justice to the fact this play isn’t gay, it just happens to be about two gay people, and how we jiggled the look when, after the initial Finborough Theatre run, a new cast took over for the transfer to the Tristan Bates Theatre.
This time round, I thought it would be interesting to show you the production shots from the two shows. The old space and the new were recognisably the same but different. Likewise, Alex Felton and Steven Webb in the original run and James Cartwright and Rik Makarem in the transfer brought their own souls to eke recognisable but totally different lives from the script.
Trumpet!
Some publicity stills of the wonderfully talented trumpeter, Harrison Cole, shot round and about various less-known corners of London.
Where the wind blows…
There are few places in the world quite like Dungeness.
The only official desert in Britain, it’s dependably gloomy, creepy, desolate and, what with being sandwiched between a nuclear power station and a military firing range, in all ways just not quite right.
Which means, of course, that photo nuts flock to it.
If a print from this collection takes your fancy, you can order them here.
Ne me quitte pas
Jacques Brel smoked a lot, sang a lot and left behind some memorably not anodyne songs.
They’re revisited in wonderfully Technicolor style by Gina Beck, Daniel Boys, David Burt and Eve Polycarpou in the new production of Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, now playing at the Charing Cross Theatre.
Don’t squash Louisa!
This one’s from a couple of years ago.
I was asked to shoot the poster image for A Broken Rose at the Cockpit Theatre with a very specific brief in mind.
The play was about a teenage girl who’d drawn herself so deep into her imagination to deal with her childhood that she could no longer see where reality ended and dreams began, with disastrous consequences.
And to advertise it, the producers wanted a classic Disney-type image: the wonderment of opening a storybook to have a fantasy world of light and colour pour out before your eyes. But with a riff, in that the background to it all needed not to be Christmas trees and tinsel but something a bit “off”.
The graphic designer would deal with the sparks and whatever that needed to come out of the book. I needed to come up with the rest.
Okeydoke, easy enough. Light up her face with light coming out of a book. How hard could it be to fake that?
Well, it turned out, after extensive testing on the cheapest model I know (namely, me), that getting the basic lighting right for what we wanted to do was fairly straightforward (if you discount the sheer number and variety of lights involved in what looks like a simple shot).
But on the book I was asking the wrong question. Because faking light coming out of a book is very hard. In fact, I suspect it’s impossible.
Rather easier, though, is not faking it. And actually making the book light up.
Enter the largest book you have ever seen (so big it took two people to move it into the right position), a Stanley knife to gouge an enormous hole through the middle of it to stick a flash in, and the delightful and uncomplaining star of EastEnders, The Bill and loads more besides, Louisa Lytton, on whose poor knees the monster had to sit.
The Road to Serfdom
So, frequent collaborator, makeup artist and all-round creative whirlwind, Siwan Hill, called me up.
“I need to do some effects,” she said. “What can we do with effects?”
“Effects?”
“You know, blood, gore, carnage, that sort of thing.”
“I dunno,” I said, “but I’d quite like to do the evolution of man… You know, hunchback becomes homo erectus without the full-frontal nudity.”
“Okaaaaay…”
And thus, many emails later, we decided to revisit the recession and make a gentle dig at Hayek’s Road to Serfdom by watching what happens when capitalism reaches its logical conclusion and switches into reverse.
And we did this by covering our models in mustard.
Fun fact: the most difficult prop to procure was the right kind of paper bag.
Concept: Siwan Hill and Scott Rylander
Makeup and styling: Siwan Hill
Models: Katerina Jugati and Paul Hughes
Ombra Mai Fu
Shots from the English National Opera’s Xerxes.
A revival of director Nicholas Hytner’s production of Handel’s opera, the show runs until 3 October.
The Other Side: Under a Breton Sky
Sea, sky, clouds, an abbey and one of the world’s more desirable private houses (unless, that is, you want to go to the shops at high tide).
It can only be Brittany.
You can buy prints from this collection here if something takes your fancy.
