Further adventures in lockdown
With Christmas in the past and the new year creeping in I decided that another recreation of an old piece of theatre design as a CAD model was in order. I have done several over the years, working from working drawings, production photographs and memory. Why do I do it you may well ask: stage design and performance exist only in a particular time, and date very quickly and revisiting them can never be more than a mirage but good memories are needed more than ever in these strange times.
Irma la Douce was one of the few English language productions mounted by Theatr Cymru. It was in 1972 and it was directed by Malcolm Taylor who the previous year had directed a very successful Under Milk Wood. Ruth Madoc played the leading part: very very well. It was interesting to work on this production as strangely I had designed it only a few years before when I was briefly resident designer at the Harrogate Opera House doing 2 weekly rep. Images from that production, which had quite a different look to Malcolm Taylor’s can be seen on the Harrogate page..
Why did I choose this one? Well, I had a the photo (above) of the set model and a production photo (below) by Geoff Charles but on this occasion, no working drawings. It was originally staged in Theatr Gwynedd, now just a memory, and I have plans of that and had previously made a CAD model, so that gave the basic space with which to work. After that it was a question of carefully examining the various elements and making educated guesses what the dimensions of the individual parts might be; working bit by bit to build the whole.
Below is a series of screenshots of showing the development of the model. The programme I use is TurboCAD pro v17, now very dated. I use it for my own pleasure and since retiring from professional design I have no need to keep it at the cutting edge.
Having established the architecture, bringing it to life with light was the next stage. Not an accurate reproduction of what the original actually was like, but an attempt to imagine the atmosphere and have fun. The production photos were done, as was the common practice back then, at a photo call when all the lights were set very bright, unlike today when they would be taken during a dress rehearsal thus more easily capturing the atmosphere.
I recently posted these CAD images on Face Book and was amazed and gratified that they sparked so many good memories of the production, either of working on it or watching. That made the project worthwhile.
