The Hunger Games, a new theatrical spectacular based on the young adult novel by Suzanne Collins, is the first production to go into the new, £26m Troubadour Canary Wharf Theatre in London. The venue provides 1,200 seats (some of which move) in a purpose-built venue less than 15 minutes from Tottenham Court Road and Central London on the Elizabeth Line. It is home to London’s largest hydraulic stage, a 35-meter performance area, and the ceiling can support up to four tons.
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The young adult novel, The Hunger Games, which also gave birth to a blockbuster movie trilogy, is set in a dystopian future and follows several young people from Panem, a fictional area in North American, who have been chosen to participate in a fight to the death to win favor for their districts. In the production, the action takes place in District 12, an impoverished mining area, the bright and colorful wealthy Capitol City, and in a 20-acre woodland “arena” where the action is broadcast live to the nation. The in-the-round seating evokes an amphitheatre where the gladiators or “tributes” battle, and presents an expansive stage for choreographed fight scenes and large set pieces including a train carriage and forest, created with pieces of truss which the cast can climb and hide in.
Lucy Carter, whose work has been seen at the Royal Opera House, Teatro La Scala, and English National Opera, designed the lighting for this new production.
Carter, who originally trained in drama and dance before studying lighting at Central School of Speech and Drama, approaches the work very much as a choreographer. There is a lot going on, and in the middle of the balletic fight scenes the tributes are dressed similarly and running around the auditorium so the audience relies on the lighting to interpret the action. Carter’s lighting also locates the action, creating a beautiful woodland, harsh, bright scenes in the Capitol, and a warm and welcoming home in District 12 for the main character, Katniss Everdeen.
LD: What made you choose lighting after a focus on performance?
Lucy Carter: I fell in love with the idea that it is not just the object or the choreography or the direction that tells story it’s the lighting that creates the location or mood just as much as the scenic elements and the costume. That's the bit that I still really love, the concept and the development of that and the idea that all the elements are working together to help the audience “read” what they are watching. In the theatre the lighting acts like the camera’s eye in film, revealing what you look at but also showing you how to read what you see.
Lighting is so multifunctional. It acts like an editor, but it is also creating the atmosphere and the way that the audience feels, in addition to the practical things like giving location and supporting the narrative. I'm fascinated by all the many functions lighting fulfills in a production but the part that I still really love is creating the feelings. I always talk about lighting being a feeling rather than something visual, the look isn't driving your lighting design, it's the feeling behind it.
LD: This is very evident in Everdeen’s home in the impoverished District 12, which is created with a collection of hard wooden doors and windows (no walls) but feels warm and welcoming.
LC: The concept for my design was based around three main areas: District 12 was very organic—we decided not to use bold colors so outside her home in the industrial landscape [of the mining district] there were cold whites but inside they were warm because it is her happy place. She also takes solace in the woods where the sunlight is dappled rather than harsh and she can feel free.
When she goes to Capitol, [Panem's capital city] we created a different world that we wanted to feel like Tokyo on steroids, color explodes everywhere and it evokes a kind of height, things are taller and more high tech contrasting with her cozy home. It’s scary and overwhelming for Katniss because she's never left District 12 before. For her, it is pretty scary and overwhelming with the weird and wonderful people that she meets.
The third place is the games, which is the second half of the show, which is artificially generated nature, created by the game makers.
These were our three worlds and I wanted to create distinct languages for each one.
Working with the entire team, we started off by talking about and around the films and the books and the script what the environment means to Katniss and how the design works from her viewpoint. Everybody's on board with the same ideas and the same concepts right from the beginning. Eventually I produce a kind of ‘mood board’ of colors from all the conversations which works to guide the audience through and make sense of the story.
LD: You left the ‘tree branch’ as a piece of truss with lighting on it which is flown in. What was behind that choice?
LC: We wanted to emphasize the artificiality of the environment, and Katniss spends a lot of time in the woods in District 12 so she would feel that. The whole idea of the tournament is that it is generated by game makers in order to manipulate the tributes and keep them under control so that they will kill each other. We always knew that we wanted environments to change very quickly, to be able to slide in and out of a space, which was Matthew [Dunster]’s idea. Make it very mobile, moving from one state to another as the game makers just press a button and the whole world changes keeping the tributes uncertain.
And we used our whole tool kit to make the audience feel that they are at the games and therefore complicit in watching children kill each other. Tributes come down the stairs where the audiences sit, they run around the walls, the whole space makes up the arena for the games so the set designer [Miriam Buether] and director and I discussed using an artificial tree branch versus the truss and decided we wanted the truss—the tributes are in the game makers’ environment not a real one.
In one scene, the set designer delivers a couple of sofas but the rest of the environment comes from the feeling from the light, video, and sound and the audience is able to fill in the blanks. That way they have some responsibility and it doesn’t destroy the images that people who read the book have in their heads.
LD: And the audience seating actually moves during the sequences in the arena to emphasize that spectators are part of the action.
LC: We made everyone a part of it without being completely literal.
LD: You've worked a lot in historic buildings like the Royal Opera House. How was it working in a brand-new custom theater?
LC: You definitely think, okay, let's pitch for what we really want. But then reality bites with budget and with the physical space. And once you have the plot and [management] knows how much you need then some compromises are made. Definitely compromises were made over the substage because we're right up against the Thames barrier wall, so we couldn't have a full substage. [There is a lift for onstage entrances and exits with multiple lighting fixtures to convey different locations and highlight different characters.]
The biggest challenge, and my heart always sinks when I hear it, is that they wanted to do it in the round. It's really very tricky designing for 360 degrees because somebody's backlight is somebody else's front light. Looking from the audience’s perspective, you can't do a big, bold backlight because some people will see that as a front light. You can't easily put lights where you want to put them, for example, face lights on the around the balcony and fill and things like that. So being in the round was a massive compromise although I knew that before coming on board, although we didn’t know at first how high the audience seating banks would have to go, or that they would move. So my initial sketch had to change when they figured out the amount of seats which filled up the space. The lighting then had to go up really, really high, as did the sound. We have a 12-meter high rig, making all the light come from up top and so you filling in faces so they are not in shadow all the time was critical.
There are also towers, which were didactic almost, imagined as part of the Capitol world, President Snow the dictator’s world. We have search lights on them that scan the audience as well as the arena and are quite threatening and oppressive.
The big rig was a big win for me. For my provisional rig the producers were concerned because there were a thousand lights or something like that, but I pointed out the physics of covering a 33-square-meter space. This is where lighting design becomes physics. You need a certain amount of lights to break up the space into areas, which have to be lit from four sides, and you need different types of light in each of those areas. That becomes a hell of a lot of lights really quickly. There were 52 scenes in the original script which we had to create, and they were very choreographic. Fortunately the director fought for the lighting budget to create that without big, physical, scenic elements.
In the end we had about 800 lighting units, but with the house lighting system in the aisles and walkways etc it’s roughly a thousand. Every single lighting unit has to do so many things for so many scenes. It is a hardworking rig as the cast is up in the air, down in the substage, in entrance ramps and the aisles.
LD: What follow spot system did you use?
LC: We had an automated tracking follow spot system called ZacTrack. Each of the 22 performers wears two trackers on their shoulders, and any one of the 800 lights in the rig can be chosen to follow those trackers. It is a large number of people and a complex operation as members of the cast take on multiple roles so I knew each individual was going to need multidirectional lighting and varied fixtures depending on the environment and mood. The ZacTrac system can do that.
There are two tags because you get a better reading to locate the performer in this 360 world. They are on each shoulder because the performers don’t usually wear wigs, which is where one would usually be.
LD: Can you talk us through your fixture choices?
LC: My main profile heads were Martin Mac Ultra because they do all the precision shuttered and gobo work. The audience is looking down into the arena and we needed to break up the floor and create interest. They also do a lot of the beam work throughout performers on trapezes and the towers. I was looking for a big stadium floodlight and found the Martin Raven, which has a lot more capability, they're big wash lights but can do effects so we use them for scanning the audience etc.
There are some Martin Auras. We also have GLP FR10s. They were a really big part of my design from the beginning because of the length of the space which is about a 35 meter playing area. I wanted to create big sweeps of light along the space so we've got four rows of FR10s.
We had two lighting programmers, David Ayton, the main Eos programmer who worked with me on all the looks and environments and a special effects and ZacTrack programmer, Jamie Harley, who worked with [associate lighting designer] Tom Johnson. It was a complete collaboration between the four of us to just get it up and running.
For more information about The Hunger Games onstage visit www.thehungergamesonstage.com.