07 December 2007

Senior Stage Manager Diana Childs has been with Birmingham Royal ballet since it was based in London under the name Sadler's Wells Royal Ballet. She has stage managed every single performance of The Nutcracker since its creation in 1990. We asked her about her role, and some of the work that goes in to the ballet.

While she evidently takes her responsibilities very, very seriously, she is constantly careful to point to the work of all the other backstage crew; the stage staff, wardrobe department, those on the fly floor, the electricians and lighting technicians.

'I very much believe that it's always a shared thing between me and Nick [Ware, lighting] and Doug [Nicholson, Head of Scenic Presentation] and all their teams. My role is very much from when the curtain goes up.'

'I'm responsible for making all the lighting and scenery change at the right moments,' she explains carefully, conceding that it's 'a bit like a conductor for the visuals. I Stage Manage The Nutcracker from the prompt desk. For plays and other theatre this spot is used to prompt the actors but for us it's a control desk with monitors. I have a score, and all the cues are written on it to indicate when everything has to happen. I wear a headset and I'm connected to key members of the stage staff, electrics and fly floor [the gallery above the stage]. I also have a cue light system with red to get ready and green to go, in case they don't hear me on the radio. So it's a double-cue back up. For example, I will have been given a place in the music by the director - in this case Sir Peter Wright – when he wants the curtain to go out. I'll turn on the red lights for the team to stand by for their cue and also give them a verbal stand-by over the radios, then at the right place in the music I'll give a green light and a verbal go for the tabs [curtains] to go out.

'Another example would be Drosselmeyer's pyrotechnic effect. A device is set up upstage of him and detonated from the side of the stage. We have lots of rules and regulations and people watching to keep the dancers safe. I give the cue, and say 'flash, go', and it’s as easy as that, but it has to be right on the music and exactly as Drosselmeyer turns round. The operator who presses the button is in the wings near to him, with a second person watching, and if at any point they think that the dancer's cloak is too close or there's any risk whatsoever, they just won't fire the explosion, because it's just not worth hurting somebody.'

Some of the effects are handled directly by Diana herself. 'I have a gun for sound effects during the battle,' she says. It's as real as we're allowed, but has been modified so you can't put real bullets in it. At the allocated point in the music, the soldier flourishes his gun and I fire the gun to make the noise. One year a long time ago some of the crew rigged up a small cup of feathers and hung it from a wire above my head, tipping it up when I fired the gun. I've got my head down concentrating on the score and the next cue, and I fire the shot on cue and all these feathers come drifting down around me!'

Some of the biggest effects in the ballet are actually the most straight forward. One of the most popular is the opening of Act II, where Clara crosses the stage on a flying goose above a cloud of dry ice. While the technology is very simple, Diana reveals that the timing requires a great deal of attention.

'The dancer gets in at the bottom right down on the floor during the interval, and I send her up,' she explains. 'It takes time to strap her in and get her up there and lay all the dry ice underneath her and I've had complaints where the audience has all been in and ready and they've just sat there for five minutes while we’re still setting up. But also I have to be aware of how nervous the ballerina is who's performing the role. Some of them really don't mind, and I can send them up there and they're happy to wait, but some of them get really scared up there, so I send them up at the last possible second so they’re not up there any longer than they need to be.'

'Luckily I've been doing this ballet for quite a long time now, so I've become quite a good judge of when people are nearly ready and I know when the audience are nearly in.'

Continue to part two