Theatre Design & Technology - Dec 1966 - 22

This is what is behind my own design of the Royal Opera
House 4-preset control system of 240 dimmer circuits
with its full set of levers and tiny room at Covent Garden.
Indeed experience seellls to show that under these circumstances three presets would have been adequate there
and at the London Palladium the new installation, also for
240 dimmer channels, restriction to only two presets for
their type of enterta:nment has been proposed by me and
accepted.
The trouble about multi-preset systems, as I should not
need to point out, is that the sheer space occupied and
time taken in resetting outweighs any advantage in having, so to speak, ten changes up one's sleeve. Since ten
presets as such will not in any case suffice unchanged,
one must devote one's design attention to facilitate the
changing of those and only those levers, which have to
change. This means ability for the operator to form groups
and recognize them easily from the information displayed.
In contrast, in any system designed to give so called "infinite presetting" there should be no groups whatever.
Each preset then contains all information and therefore
once that particular preset is connected to all control
lines the original lighting will be reproduced in whatever
order the presets may be taken. This is of course the
idea behind "platten" and "punch card" systems. The
"platten" is an attempt to replace expensive punching
and reading machinery with a kind of hand-set card. As
an idea it is worthy of respect and where there are few
enough dimmers to fit on one platten it probably works.
Provided one can load and unload plattens quickly enough.
The need to supply a rather large number of plattens
means that each must be made to a tight mass-production
budget. In consequence the dimmer sliders tend to be
rough and unsuitable for in-scene changes. One can
switch over to the rehearsal system for such changes,
but this is, to say the least, rather a nuisance. Once
there is any real number of dimmers the situation becomes hopeless because there have to be several plattens to each preset. Loading cannot possibly be fast and
setting all these will take a long time in the first place.
It is here that it would be claimed that the automatic setting and loading of a punched card system takes over.
With this in mind and having seen both the Swedish and
German punched card systems, I looked at the Vivian
Beaumont control. But no one can claim speed as one of
its virtues, either in the punching process or in the later
reading for reproduction. The trouble is, to be logical all
lighting cues have to be performed from a card; using
four cards per cue, though it appears fast, is in reality
slow. Engineers just do not seem to realize how fast
actors can move about a stage and this is what governs
speed of lighting change. In the case of any infinite presetting system, reading has to be instantaneous. It is no
solution to read from cards into two stores which are then
faded in and out; for this, in fast cues, reduces the infinite preset control in effect to two presets. When recording cues the process can be slow but not much
slower-as the Vivian Beaumont has found Ollt. Time in
seconds soon adds up when there are, as is not unusual,
hundreds of cues. A further point arises: in any case the
lighting has to be set on something resembling a normal
control before it can be approved (at any rate till it comes
around again!\ and recorded. My aSide In the brackets
indicates another problem, constant need for catering to
second thoughts and in consequence the need to be able
to modify at all times Including during the actual performance.
It follows that the actual channel controls are going to be
very important and I was therefore astonished to find that

in this instance they appear to be nothing more or less
than the replaceable plattens described above but screwed
in permanently. The question immediately arises: why is
this role played by such a humble understudy in this important theatre] After all, the other controls, which the
same firm is famed for using on its rehearsal ;ystem, are
the most elaborate and gracious levers to be found anywhere in the world. The answer is, I imagine, that as
there have to be 180 of them those levers would not fit
in the space available. It's an example of the false security induced by years of American patching. Presumably
when it was decided that the 800 circuits in this theatre
could not be fobbed off with less than 180 dimmers
some compromise had to be thought up. The fact is that
this punched card system is probably excellent for a
40-channel-or-so college theatre but does not, in my
opinion, really suffice for dimmers of the numbers common to a professional theatre of this international standing. Only some form of magnetic recording can be instantaneous enough and even there the problem of the levers
still remains if one is not careful. For example a television studio in New York is using a magnetic recording
system of a sort but is putting it in a strait jacket by
trying to make the levers move mechanically.
Last I come to the most disappointing example, the new
Metropolitan Opera. What would we say if Mr. Rudolf
Bing announced that he was not going to adventure at all
in his production program; that only the well-tried operas
and stars known to attract capacity houses would ever be
put on. There would be a complete sense of let-down. So
it is with their lighting control. In order to play safe, a
multi-preset system of extreme orthodoxy, and therefore
of extreme size, has been chosen. In so doing they have
lost to American stage lighting and indeed World stage
lighting a great opportunity. What "The Met" has failed
to real ize is, just as in architecture and in staging a production, so too in engineering there is a duty when
spending money on those terms to provide a challenge
and a stimulus. Since when has it been American policy
to bury one's head in the sand and ignore modern advances in technology: To play it safe and never to dare?
It will be apparent that behind all my writings on lighting
control there is an assumption that it has to be a one
man affair. With all the labor employed in an opera
house, for example, why quibble at whether one man or
four are required to work the control console] Use of one
man only has governed my thinking right from the beginning. It was certainly the guiding principle behind my
Light Console invention in 1935 based as it was directly
on an organ console. This was designed by me to "do"
my own lighting. In other words the operator was to be
his own lighting designer and it is a fact that my particular instrument was very bad at carrying out lighting imposed upon, rather than composed upon, it.
Thus behind my own work for lighting has always been
the notion of the organist at his console rather than of a
conductor with his orchestra of operators situated either
at the controls or at the lighting instruments themselves
scattered about the theatre. I think there IS a practical as
well as artistic logic behind my assumption because here
alone, of all the ingredients that make up a show, it is
only the lighting that has to be finally composed and rehearsed while all the rest are present. A dress rehearsal
is only a flllal polishing for the other departments but for
lighting it is the first time one can really see, and lighting
is seeing, what it is all about. It is the time when intensity levels and timing of changes fall into place. However
much advanced planning and positioning and plotting goes
on there can have been no equivalent to the intensive

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THEATRE DESIGN AND TECHNOLOGY

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