A look behind the scenes when a theatre goes dark
Don’t go thinking for a moment it’s holiday time when a theatre goes dark.
Nothing could be further from the truth for technical director Sam Garner-Gibbons and his team at Chichester Festival Theatre. Under way right now – complete with mind-boggling stats – is the most massive job of cleaning, servicing, maintaining, lubricating and testing.
The winter season has ended – and we are awaiting the start of the summer festival with Lia Williams and Joshua James opening proceedings in Noël Coward’s The Vortex on Friday, April 28.
By then the most monumental job of checking and cleaning will have been completed, as Sam explains: “When the theatre closes every year, lots of people think it is a nice break for us but the reality is that it is an incredibly busy time. We've got to get ready for the next festival season and for there st of the year after that. We don' t stop from the start of the summer season until the end of the winter season, six or seven days a week, especially during the winter season when on a Sunday we will be taking one show off and putting another one in. There is something happening for 46-47 weeks of the year at the theatre and the fact is that there is precious little time for anything else.”
Hence maintenance is the big priority right now :“For instance, we have got the best part of 800 individual theatre lighting units and all those lanterns have to be stripped to their component parts and cleaned and dusted internally, the lenses and the reflectors have to be cleaned and everything gets lubricated and checked for safety and then all put back together again.
"We've also got approximately 4,600 metres of cabling which is enough to go from here to Goodwood if you laid it end to end!
And again all that has to be meticulously checked for damage with every plug and socket taken apart and checked :“When you've got so much equipment and so much cabling it can be really hard to locate a fault if something goes wrong and to find the point of failure so what we are doing now is really critical. Also there is the sound equipment. There 80 amplifiers across the two spaces and they have to be hoovered out and tested. There are more than 200 speakers across the two spaces dotted around all over the place. You're not aware of them but the sound is distributed all over the place rather than two big speakers in front of you. And all of those have to be taken down tested and cleaned. And the sound team have got 13 show control computers and all those computers have to be checked and made up to date. And then you've got all the statutory things like building electrical certificates. Plus all the lifting equipment, anything that hangs from the roofs or flies in or out. Everything has to be checked.
“Compliance is really important. We have to have safe methods of working and safe mechanisms and it's really important that people are trained to use them.
"So this dark period is absolutely crucial for all theatres.
Every theatre will have a dark period where they do all this essential maintenance work. We have a natural break at the beginning of March and it fits in nicely that we do all this now.”