GLP Creos makes theatre debut at Almeida

Theatre lighting designer Howard Hudson leaned heavily on GLP’s X5 LED range when animating the Almeida Theatre’s stage production of The Line of Beauty, a portrait of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain at its most divisive time. Based on Alan Hollinghurst’s novel, the show is produced by Michael Grandage, with set design by Christopher Oram. It was the first time the book had been adapted for stage.

The challenge for Howard was working with a white, minimal set, above a mirrored floor and telling an episodic story. This required a flexible lighting approach within the boutique London theatre, and GLP delivered.

Howard adopted eight each of the impression X5 Compact and X5 Bar 1000 battens, but the real surprise was the application of three powerful Creos wash lights with 18 x 40W RGBL LEDs, arranged in three rows of six pixels each. After becoming established on concert touring and festival riders, this was almost certainly the first deployment of Creos in pure theatre and demonstrated how effective larger light sources can be in confined spaces, even when the tone of the play is generally bleak (as it is set against the backdrop of 80s London and the AIDS crisis).

The cohesion of colour palette and intensity control across the X5 Series was one of the real features, Howard said: “The lighting had to do a lot of work in terms of the changing locations. In a minimal environment, you never quite know how the lighting is going to behave in the space. And so, we needed lots of angle and zoom options. As soon as we started turning lights on, we knew it was going to work well.”

Howard was working with GLP’s X5 platform for the first time. “The X5 Compact lights overhead were the perfect fixture for this scale of space, with only 350 seats, and so many scene changes to maintain the flow. They were used to dot around the rig and also played a larger part in lighting the scenes. They are great fixtures in that their zoom range is so huge, from a tiny dot to a very wide wash.”

Howard particularly praised the extended colour palette. “When we needed a saturated colour, for instance, at a party in the countryside that required ‘80s style blue and a bold red look, they were incredibly rich.”

He was likewise impressed with the X5 Bar 1000 battens. “They were fantastic. Really beautiful lights. Downstage, there was a corridor and we rigged eight of those above it to produce a sheet of light downstage. Having a bar fixture and wash fixture with the same chips definitely creates a good mix.”

Any leap of faith in specifying Creos more than paid dividends. “It’s such an interesting light,” Howard observed. “I’ve used impression FR10 in the past and these were like a thicker version, offering a slightly wider look. As we had such a rectangular design, we used them as a top wash light for much of the show. The way they fitted structurally into the set, a rectangular light on a rectangular set, it gave me a new way of thinking. And it worked extremely well. The colour mixing was fantastic.”

Finally, Howard has brought the best out of the two-way mirrored floor, stating, “We have achieved some beautiful free reflections and some nice transitory moments. For the final cue of the show, we light through the floor and the whole space transforms with tons of lights.”

He concluded by praising the amount of light generated from GLP products, given their compact footprints. “When you don’t have much space in the air, to have such a light that’s bigger and thicker at the source is what we are all craving.”

Howard added: “I also like the sophistication you get with GLP fixtures generally, much more so than with a lot of other manufacturers, which is so helpful when you’re trying to produce a classy, smart looking show. It’s great to have fixtures that can cross over from rock ‘n’ roll gigs to minimalist plays because of their excellent dimming and colour mixing. Creos are great fixtures and I really enjoyed using them.”

Finally, he described the work of his programmer, Fraser Craig, as “absolutely brilliant,” adding, “For both of us, it was really interesting to work with new types of fixtures like the Creos.”

Fraser agreed: “I really enjoyed working with the X5 fixtures,” he said. “The matching chipsets make matching colours across fixtures nice and easy, and the impression X5 Bars and Creos units in particular have a good, crisp colour output. Dimming curves are really nice on all of the units, so it’s easy to integrate them into a rig with other fixtures.”

Photo credit: Johan Persson.