Background casually, please. Or in another manner of asking, what’s a good middle-class boy doing in theatre? And why lighting?
I can tell you about my beginnings in theatre and how I came to design lighting or design sets happily enough but not sure the “middlle-class” bit has any bearing on either being in theatre or not! I mean just look around you at the time I was “growing” into theatre design and you will have a who’s who of middle-class young men and women doing precisely this.
In a culture where there is still only one drama school in our country, the NSD, all of us who did theatre did it out of the desire to do so. Our productions were desperate in their excellence or what you may call “professionalism”. As in high standards of excellence, aesthetics, values, performance quality, acting abilities, the layers of complex interpretation from Ionesco’s Chairs to The Cherry Orchard or Lear or Hamlet….
