After last week’s post, I was looking around for what I could put up that’d provide a suitable tonal shift and stumbled across the publicity shots for Arion Productions’ 2013 revival of the first AIDS play, As Is.
It’s hard to describe the piece other than to say it completely avoids the (pretty miserable) clichés of the genre and features go-go dancing. And, ably assisted by irrepressible costume designer Pippa Batt, we wanted the advertising work to reflect that.
To ring in the new year I thought I’d draw from my archive for something big and different.
And so to director Phelim McDermott and designer Julian Crouch — founders of Improbable Theatre — for their ENO / Metropolitan Opera production of Philip Glass’s opera Satyagraha, which looks at the early life of Mahatma Gandhi.
These pictures are from the 2013 revival.
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.
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.
Some interesting challenges posed by advertising Passing By, Martin Sherman’s play about two men who fall in love which makes a virtue out of treating them as normal human beings rather than theatrical excuses for oh-my-god-they’re-gay-this-is-an-ISSUE angst.
First off, advertising for gay plays tends to be anything but charming. Traditionally, you stick as many topless buff young things as you can into the frame and make them strut. This may have no relevance to the plot but, well, it works.
But if you sold Passing By that way, you’d be cheapening the very thing that makes it different. That it’s not about guys shagging and being gay. It’s a love story between two fully-rounded individuals who live actual, you know, lives and happen to be gay.
Second, we wanted the imagery to conjure up a retro 70s feeling to match the 70s setting. But we absolutely didn’t want it to look like we’d just snapped a few shots on an iPhone and pumped it through a filter on instagram.
So the solution we came up with was to shoot outside and give as much of the retro feeling from the shooting technique itself as from jiggling it about in a computer, coupled with some spot-on costuming from Pippa Batt.
Then we came across a third problem. On the transfer from the Finborough Theatre to the Tristan Bates Theatre, the original cast of Alex Felton and Steven Webb were no longer free. Actors James Cartwright and Rik Makarem stepped in not, so much, to fill their shoes as to spin the play in an entirely different direction.
So we wanted the transfer advertising to reflect the vibe of the original, while making clear that it stood on its own two feet. The stills also needed to meet the requirements of shooting for bigger print formats and online advertising.
And how do you do that?
In the first shoot, oranges and reds were the dominant tones and the abiding rule was to trick the lens into behaving like a piece of plastic. For the transfer, everything was about the greens and shooting sharp as a razor. Different, but just enough of the same.
Assistant for lighting concept tests: Sara La Cuesta Calvo.
Sometimes people do things so contradictory to what’s come before that you have to stop yourself a second to experience that little bit of weirdness wiggling inside.
Hannah Montana goes from cutesie teenie pop to licking chains in her birthday suit. Britney Spears goes from chaste pig-tailed schoolgirl to lingerie billboard to scourge of those who just won’t put in the hours. Madonna discovers clothing.
A long time ago (2011, to be precise), I stopped myself in the Ashcroft Theatre in Croydon to experience that little bit of weirdness wiggling inside that comes from seeing the hilarious Clare Buckfield and John Pickard, whom I grew up knowing as brother and sister on the hit sitcom 2point4 Children, playing occasional lovers in the brilliant Same Time, Next Year.
That their screen mother was playing a predatory lesbian television executive up in town was the icing on a very wriggly cake.
With the London School of Musical Theatre but weeks away from their return to the Bridewell Theatre, I thought I’d revisit the second of their shows there last year, Applause.
Applause, based on the film All About Eve, is basically an instruction manual for aspiring stars who happen to be psychopaths. Think of it as Fatal Attraction meets Fame and you’re there.
Publicity shots of actor and all-round good egg Stevie Webb, shot at the Landor pub to advertise the Landor Theatre’s “An Audience With” series.
Poster shots and production photos from Burlesque, which ran at the Jermyn Street Theatre.
The musical, an engaging look at the plight of revue theatres under McCarthyism, went on to win the Offie award for best new musical.
Assistant for the poster shoot at the Southwark Playhouse: Jaap Jong.
Going through the archives the other day I came across the first publicity shots I ever took, all the way back at the beginning of 2010, to promote Tennessee Williams’ take on Chekhov’s The Seagull, The Notebook of Trigorin.
The piece went on to generate a debate in the Guardian over costuming accuracy, which has got to be something of a rarity…
