How new EU rules threaten British theatre
It’s a few years hence and you decide to treat yourself to a night in the West End. Why not Les Misérables? You shell out your money and prepare to be transported to revolutionary-minded 19th-century France. Yet as those thrilling opening chords strike up, and the ragged figure of Jean Valjean emerges from the ranks of convicts, a sickening feeling descends. The show has all the atmosphere of a business conference or a public library. Everything is too coldly, too baldly lit. You want to leave with “Do you hear the people sing?” ringing in your ears. Instead, your abiding memory is going to be the sight of actors looking hideously exposed and ordinary. It’s like a bad dream.
If a new set of EU regulations governing lighting is approved later this year, with no exemption for stage shows included, that farfetched-sounding nightmare could become a grim reality.
An emergency forum convened at the National Theatre on Friday – ahead of a one-off delegation to Brussels and the European Commission this Thursday – outlined the alarming threat. In a grand eco-drive, the EU is tightening up its requirements so that no light product that doesn’t meet the new standards for energy efficiency will be permitted for sale after September 2020 – unless specifically exempted.
The snag is that most lighting equipment in use across UK theatres – as well as in rock venues and film studios – hitherto granted vital exemption, won’t pass muster. And there’s no emerging LED lighting (the only light type that meets the requirements) with a comparable intensity, flexibility and reliability.
Even with what’s available, the nationwide cost of replacing existing theatre lighting as it expires is estimated to exceed £1billion, and the sums are likely to be prohibitive for small-scale venues. Brexit won’t help; even if we could opt out of regulatory alignment, the UK can’t establish a self-sufficient market in the lighting wares of yore. The Association of Lighting Designers is running a campaign to raise awareness with the slogan #savestagelighting. But it should be #savetheatre – this is a massive looming crisis.
Lighting is an integral part of the art form. The ancient Greeks were playing with light thousands of years ago, and since our own theatre began flourishing indoors in the 17th century, audiences have delighted in technical innovations while deriving a primal satisfaction from light at its warmest and most natural. In the 21st century, it looked like we would have the best of both worlds: state-of-the-art technology, allowing painterly finesse, combined with the earthy splendour of tungsten incandescent lamps.
In the time that I have been reviewing, it has been a golden age for lighting. Think of War Horse, with its mighty steeds of light powering through the haze, or the mazelike intricacies of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Both these shows also wowed New York, which has now fallen under the even greater spell of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, whose stage magic entails much lighting wizardry that focuses audience attention in one direction while surprises are cued up elsewhere.
Imagine those top-end shows under bare-minimum lighting specs. It’s actually impossible. The awardwinning lighting designer Paule Constable – responsible for War Horse and Curious Incident – was emphatic at the Friday forum: she wouldn’t be able to do any of her previous work going forward. “I can’t do my job.” For Nica Burns, who co-runs Nimax, the theatre group which owns the West End home of Harry Potter, the regulations would “turn the clock back 50 years”. Nick Allott, managing director of Cameron Mackintosh Limited – the producing powerhouse that has given us Les Mis, The Phantom of the Opera, and Hamilton – even warned me that it might be curtains for those long-runners altogether. “I can’t see a situation where we’d allow flagship productions to carry on in a simpler visual state. We’re not being luvvies about this.”
The public consultation period is alas at an end, though it can’t hurt for people to write to their MEPs, and MPs, on the subject. Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights enshrines the right to freedom of expression. That urge to expression was evident at the dawn of Europe – at the birth of democracy and Western drama. Lighting is part of it.
‘Imagine those top-end shows under bare-minimum lighting. It’s actually impossible’