VENUES: Shakespeare Outdoors

[DoItYourself090]

Hi there, I'm looking for some advice from people please.

I'm currently working on producing Shakespeare's Henry V for summer 2011.

The venue is an open-air location. It is a sea-front fort in the UK. We intend to be performing the show in the courtyard and using the various staircases/balconies for performance too.

Our actors will have one room to use as green room/dressing rooms. The entrance to which is at the back of the "performance area" and has stairs leadin down.

The audience themselves will be seated in the courtyard but seated in the traditional auditorium style (i.e. 10 rows of 20 seats facing the "performance area" with an aisle in the middle).


I'd be interested in any ideas people might have as to problems I may run into managing the show. As we will be performing in daylight we won't have any lighting systems and we will be having live sound. So we've no electrics that can go wrong. In fact the only comms that we should need are between props, costume, FoH and myself.

Any ideas on things problems we might run into?

[nick_tochelli]

The most obvious issue you'd run into is weather and if you can control that, I would like to build a shrine to you. 

Especially being sea front, moisture can be an enemy. Are the stairs you are using for the performance stone or wood? Either one can present a serious slip risk. Are you allowed to add any grip tape or slip strips (whatever they happened to be called) to the stairs?

Some manner of comfort in the dressing room/green room for the cast would probably be a good thing for a summer production. Though expensive, tower fans push a lot of air and are pretty quiet so they will still be able to hear the show and not have to struggle through a loud whirring industrial fan.

With all that said, the only outdoor performance I was a part of was in the early early spring and we had to deal with extreme cold, so I can't think of anything else that might happen in summer production.

[late_stranger]

I worked on a summer outdoor Shakespeare this summer, and we didn't really run into any problems. The only thing, especially close to the water, is that you don't want to have any exposed wood - we painted the undersides of the set all grey, just for weatherproofing purposes (yay, internships!). I don't know anything about your set, but we tarped ours every night, to keep the rain off most of the stage. And we had a metal container for all the props.

[DoItYourself090]

Thanks for the replies.

@late_stranger: We are not having any sets...our location is the best set we could ever ask for. It's the reason we chose it. We also have indoor storage for costumes and the (very, very few) props.

@nick_tochelli: The steps and "natural features" of the location are all stone (it is a napolionic military fort after all!). I am going to do a risk assessment, and will ask if we can use grip tape. I doubt we'd have to worry about the moisture in the air. I've used the location for filming before and we've not had a slippery steps problem.

[hbelden]

Is your "performance area" stone, or is it packed dirt?  How are you going to keep all the battles safe and low-impact on the performers' knees?

[DoItYourself090]

The "performance area" is actually wood. That said the construction of the fort is mainly stone.

Simply put, we do not intend to have elaborate fight scenes. Our Henry V was trained by re-enactment people and is a competent swordsman, he will be choreographic any fight scenes. We think though, because we can have the "English" charging up to the balconies and other features, we could even cut out fight scenes.

If it comes to it, the tunics the actors will wear should come to below the knees. Knee pads should not be noticable if we have to use them!

If you've got suggestions though, I'd welcome them gladly.

[SMLois]

One of the biggest problems that we ran into the summer that I did Hamlet outside was high winds.  These would blow down branches from the nearby trees, and one night even threatened to blown over the fences around our site (these fences were to help keep the homeless from moving in to the set). The weather app on my iPhone became my best friend, as I compulsively was checking for wind warnings.

[saladressing]

I'm not sure of your local conditions, but from my experience..

- prepare tarps for single-pull use at your exposed props tables and/or quick-change costume racks in case of sudden changes in weather
- beware insects getting into costumes!
- providing an ice-box with ice would be most welcome (both for cool drinks and treatment of injuries)
- prepare large quantities of rags or mops to dry performance areas before the show in case of precedent bad weather
- prevention of heat stroke especially during tech rehearsals

[Bwoodbury]

I did a summer R and J tour outdoors and my big things were:
-Prep for rain: have someone responsible for all valuable equipment and have a priority order
-Be super vigilant about fight call the fight captain and I did each fight at least 3 or 4 times at half and full speed on terrain that's probably very different from where it was taught/rehearsed.
-Do a walk through RIGHT before you start. I had equipment unplugged, props moved, and friends of casts who thought they could stay backstage during the show because there was no stagedoor, so I did a check-in and called places myself then ran back to the boards. That way I could check everything myself and review last minute entrance changes and hear actor concerns in person.

I think the key thing is to be comfortable owning the show: feel free to cut things if they seem unsafe at show time and be enabled to respond and adapt to actor concerns.

[Ezekiel.Baskin]

One of the biggest problems I ran into doing outdoor theatre this past summer, discounting weather, was bugs. Admittedly, we were in a different location (swampy Massachusetts) but I would recommend giving the FoH a few cans of bug spray and making sure the audience can use them at their own convenience. Also, keeping one on yourself would probably be a good idea. (My tech table was right behind the lighting instruments, and the bugs swarmed me nightly).

[VilleSM]

I ASM'd an outdoor Shakespeare (Midsummer Night's Dream) last year... One of our greatest challenges was moving everything every day. Because the play was a part of a whole summer festival, we were able to leave our stage floor, back wall, and the trusses up, but all lighting, sounds, tents (except the costume tents), props, costumes, etc. had to be moved in and out every day.

To do this, we set call 15 minutes earlier than it needed to be to use the cast as a run crew at the start of the night. We had very clear jobs for each cast member (i.e. ACTOR will move prop wagon A to the Costume Tent; ACTORS B and C will assist ASM moving speakers into place; ACTORS D, E, F, and G will move portable lights into proper positions). It made the transition much smoother. The SM and I oversaw everything, and put the final touches on (raising the light bars to the right height, reconnecting all wires, etc.) and at the end of the night, we reversed everything...

Now, in certain situations, you're not allowed to ask actors to do any of this, but the point is that you need to have a very clear run sheet of EXACTLY what needs to happen before each performance, timed to when everything needs to happen.

Break legs!