Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 2019 - 39

when I heard the actor Ian Charleson
(Ariel) refuse to try out the trapeze. The
insurance wasn't in effect yet. A little
kerfuffle, but then who should lift off
from the stage into the rafters, behind a
shimmering scrim, but the master himself. There was a delighted twittering
amongst us while, with no snag, a safe
landing was achieved."
In another one of Koltai's productions (Geoffrey Hill's version of Ibsen's
Brand) with Robert Stephens at the National Theatre, the stage set "under the
glacier's rim" was another challenge for
the actors to navigate. How often do we
see a stage floor transformed into anything truly resembling the great spaces
of water and of land?

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Brand (Ibsen). National Theatre, 1978. Model. Photo by
Ralph Koltai.

Mike Barnett was the mechanical
engineer who developed the hydraulic
system for Brand and astutely observed
Koltai as "an intuitive engineer." He recalls that people can still remember
the shock at the first production meeting when Koltai presented the Brand
scale model to the production teams. As
Koltai happily demonstrated his model
of a huge mountain side with snow at
the highest point and grass at the stage
floor end, ending with an avalanche,
with all the sections moving rapidly, he
was enjoying himself so much, he was
unaware of the deep silence that fell, as
people wondered about the cost and the
achievability. "Ralph claims he doesn't
have any idea about engineering, but
he is actually an intuitive engineer, and
he loves nothing more than to be in an
engineering workshop with the actual
problems right in front of him," Barnett
recalls. "Ralph was always practical,
worked quickly and mostly three dimen-

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SPRING 2019

THEATRE DESIGN & TECHNOLOGY

| 39

09-Jan-19 10:00:53 AM

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Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 2019

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