Real magic in fakery at the props shop
Designers are creating a world for the actors
Theatre festivals are traditionally strapped for cash and in perpetual fundraising mode. They’d love a licence to print money.
The Shaw Festival doesn’t have a licence, but prints it all the same — although it’s clearly marked as notlegal tender.
It’s also mostly out of date. The $10 American bill on Anna Baumgart’s computer is vintage 1934. The handfuls of currency she pulls from a drawer are similarly unspendable. But they really look the business.
“We try to make everything as convincing as possible,” says Baumgart, a self-taught expert on antique paper products.
This is the festival’s props department, where miracles are routine, the impossible sometimes takes a little longer, and if the devil’s in the details, he’s a fiendish nitpicker.
Need some stamped envelopes for Terence Rattigan’s French Without Tears? They may as well be authentic-looking French stamps from the 1930s and properly franked. All done in-house.
It may seem like going to extremes to produce something that most of an audience will be unable to make out. Head of props, Wayne Reierson, explains, “The actors can see it. We’re creating a world for them to exist in.
“But you’d be surprised what people can see. And when we make a mistake, there’s always an ‘expert’ who spots it and thinks it’s their duty to inform us that we got it wrong.”
As Reierson shows off what the dozen prop-makers can do, some of their design tricks are off-the-record, so as not to ruin that satisfying little gasp of surprise when the audience sees them for the first time.
The entire set for last year’s production of Heartbreak House was
“The actors can see it. We’re creating a world for them to exist in.”
WAYNE REIERSON, SHAW FESTIVAL HEAD OF PROPS
kept secret, because, at the play’s climax, the stage suddenly begins to rock like a ship at sea. The props department was also involved with the set builders in a visual subterfuge last year — a trick of perspective in My Fair Lady to make it seem that a bridge across the stage was actually disappearing into the distance. “We made birds to sit on it,” says Reierson. “Big birds for one end and little wee birds for the other.” Their most recent work has been for Hedda Gabler and His Girl Friday. Bunny Turnbull, Andrea Willette and Jennifer Stevens, selfstyled — although no one disputes it — “soft-props queen” are redoing an antique couch, chair and footstool in button-tufted silk. Even the buttons are made inhouse. Investing in a simple, handoperated tool proved cheaper and faster than contracting the job out.
The department is a big eBay customer, constantly looking for period items, from old phones to china and glassware.
“We always try to buy extras,” Reierson says. “Things have a habit of getting broken on stage.”
Deliberately, sometimes. A fibreglass replica of a whiskey bottle will, when it’s done, be carefully smashed and glued back together, so it can be smashed again. And then reglued. Night after night, for every performance.
Illusion is everything. That includes smoking. Real, or even herbal, cigarettes, have become a no-no on-stage, so electronic ones are used. “But some of the young actors don’t even know how to smoke,” Reierson says. “You have to teach them.”
One of the department’s proudest possessions is a dyeing vat. Not only because it’s big enough to take almost 50 metres of cloth, but also because it was supposedly blessed by Pope John Paul II when he visited Downsview in 2002. It was used then as a soup kettle.
Baumgart, the department’s props coordinator, has a stack of 1930s newspapers — New York Times, New York Herald, Brooklyn Eagle, L.A. Sun — that look as if they’ve come from a well-kept archive.
They’re fake: reproduced and then modified with headlines and castmember photographs to match the play. Photo reproduction back then wasn’t as crisp as today, so the pictures are made slightly fuzzy. Details, details.