With all of the bombastic, turbocharged productions that have invaded Broadway recently, it’s nice to find a show that gets back to the basics: a compelling story, great acting and powerful lighting, sound, and direction. Mary Stuart delivers the goods. A semi-costume drama (half period, half modern dress), it tells the harrowing tale of Mary, Queen of Scotland (Janet McTeer), who is imprisoned for years for the alleged murder of her husband by Queen Elizabeth (Harriet Walter). The true reason is that Queen Mary makes a rightful claim to the British throne based on her lineage, and Queen Elizabeth does not want to relinquish it. The show is a three-hour epic that is full of political intrigue and raw emotion. Each of the two acts begins with a dramatic moment: a chest being smashed open with an axe at the start of act one and a rainstorm that lasts several minutes at the beginning of act two.
Lighting with Convention
Lighting designer Hugh Vanstone — a West End and Broadway veteran with 25 years of theatre experience and three Olivier Awards under his belt, with recent credits including Shrek and God of Carnage — helped originate Mary Stuart independently in London. He moved along with the show when it graduated to the West End several years ago before hitting the Great White Way this year. He uses what he describes as a conventional lighting setup. That may have been the case, but the results were powerful nonetheless and garnered him one of the show’s seven Tony nominations this year.
“I’m very fond of the production, because it doesn’t really add anything it doesn’t need to,” says Vanstone on the phone from London. “It’s interesting the way the show evolved, because the theatre where it originated, the Donmar, is a tiny, tiny space. In the first place, it didn’t seem like a challenge, because you’re just lighting for that space. There was nothing on stage except what you saw, but it doesn’t seem so daunting lighting something in a smaller space like that as it is when you move it up in scale. The biggest challenge came in moving it up in scale. It first moved into the West End for a limited season, then several years later it is up on Broadway. That was the harder part, trying to keep the atmosphere that it had originally in a bigger space.”
The central challenge for Vanstone was to create space and depth on a stage where a brick wall was the only backdrop, with a few spare props like a bench, throne, or bed used at key moments. So he needed to be clever about how he lit each scene. Because it is a “pretty shallow set,” the designer needed to “add interest to the brick texture and make sure there’s a strong identity to each scene, lighting-wise, whether that’s a door or a streak or a color on the wall or sometimes just backlight.”
Powerful Light in a Dark Atmosphere
One of the final scenes in the play relies heavily on powerful sidelight to generate its dark atmosphere. “That was something that was really only possible to add when it moved into a West End theatre, because in the Donmar, the audience is on three sides, so the set had no side walls there,” reveals Vanstone. “In that case, cross light wasn’t possible. That was a bonus of moving in to the West End.”
Vanstone explains that the show looked pretty much the same when it graduated from the Donmar to the West End, the striking difference being that the two small sidewalls were added into the latter production, whose stage was ultimately narrower than at its current Broadway home, the Broadhurst Theatre. “Lighting-wise, it had to get a little brighter than it had been in order to reflect the larger space, but otherwise it remained pretty true to the way we started it,” he says. “Those same ideas were all there, it just went up in scale a little bit.”
The lighting designer feels there was nothing particularly fancy about his choices, including ETC Source Fours and PAR 64s, the latter which he uses “rather than Source Four PARs, because I slightly prefer the oval beams.” He also employed a small handful of Vari*Lite VL5Bs and six Wybron CXI scrollers. The console that has stayed with the production from London to New York is the Strand 520. The production fits within 200 channels. “Equipment-wise it’s very conventional,” he remarks. That may be true, but the show looks great. That comment prompts a laugh from the designer. “Sometimes good things come from simple stuff,” Vanstone says.
Chance for Showers
Even the rainstorm is simpler to light than one might think. Most of the light for the scene comes from a big bar of backlights above the stage, but there are six Source Fours with a very soft breakup in them that light the faces from the front. They are located on the stage right box boom. In general, most of the lighting comes from onstage, with the exception of some sparsely used lights on the front of house truss and the box boom lights.
When he says that lighting the rainstorm was not a big challenge, “I don’t mean to sound flippant,” Vanstone he clarifies, “but when we did it the first time around, the rain pipes had to go in a certain place, because that’s where the bridges for them were, and the lights had to go in a certain place because there was only one logic to it. That was it. It worked, and away we went. We’ve just gone down the line with that, and when it moved into the bigger theatre we did more or less the same thing and expanded it a bit.”
The truly tricky part about having a rainstorm onstage was to make sure that there was ample separation between the water pipes and the lights, which were located just above the pipes. In the New York production, “there were only two lines of water pipes, one which is underneath the first electric and the other a little further upstage. I just had to do some careful work on the cross section to make sure that they did not get in the way. “
Vanstone says there was no worry about water splashing up because of the way it escapes the pipes. “It just doesn’t go up, fortunately,” he says. “The only thing that gets a bit wet are the uplights on the back walls. They get a bit splashed sometimes, but don’t seem to mind. We didn’t have any trouble at all with the rain.”
When asked how he feels about all of the technological changes that have transpired over the last two decades, Vanstone replies, “Kind of happy, I suppose. I like using lots of new things, but it’s funny how you also find yourself going back to the basics an awful lot. Here I am using VL5s, which have been knocking around for at least 15 years now, and they are still probably my favorite moving light, even though they don’t actually do that much. I’m very happy with all the technology, but I rarely find myself screaming out, desperate for new things. There’s so much to use and apply already.”
