A pub in the west of Ireland, lit as though the only sources were the ones on stage. Practical-led, and almost nothing above.
Four people in a bar telling each other ghost stories. The set has nine practical sources in it — wall lights, a fire, a light over the bar — and the design proposition was that those should appear to be doing all the work.
They cannot, of course. A practical bright enough to light a face is bright enough to be the only thing you look at. So there is a rig, and its entire job is to be invisible: low-angle straw units that arrive from roughly the direction each practical sits, at levels that sit just under what the eye will attribute to the practical itself.
Three units and a flicker effect that we rewrote four times. The version that worked is not random. Fire has a slow component and a fast one, and if you only build the fast one it reads as a fault in the dimmer.
A staging that puts the underworld above rather than below, so every descent in the text is a physical ascent into the flies.
Side light only, for fifty minutes. No front, no down, no cyc. Six booms and a great deal of argument.
A single amber special and eleven minutes of near-total darkness. The hardest thing we have been asked to light.
That is genuinely enough to start a conversation. Dates and budget help, but they are not the first question — the first question is what the room is being asked to do.