Sixteen years pass in one cue. The first half is lit almost entirely from behind and above; the second admits front light for the first time.
The play breaks in half. Sicilia is a court that has stopped listening to itself; Bohemia is sixteen years later and outdoors. The usual solution is to make the second half warm, and we did not want to do that, because it makes the first half look like a mistake rather than a choice.
So Sicilia is lit almost entirely from behind and above — steel and congo, steeply angled, faces half-read. There is no front light in the first half at all. The audience spends an hour leaning forward.
Q71 is the only cue anybody remembers, and it is the simplest in the show: front light, open white, up over fourteen seconds under the line about the statue. It is the first time in the evening anyone’s face is fully lit. Nothing else changes.
Fourteen seconds was arrived at by trying eight, then twenty. Eight is an event; twenty is a scene change. Fourteen is slow enough that most of the audience never notices it starting.
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.
A pub in the west of Ireland, lit as though the only sources were the ones on stage. Practical-led, and almost nothing above.
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.