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 Thatcher’s Britain at its most divisive. 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 Hudson was working with a white, minimal set, above a mirrored floor, and an episodic story to tell. This required a flexible lighting approach within the boutique London theatre — and GLP delivered.
Hudson adopted eight each of the impression X5 Compacts 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 fairly bleak (set as it is against the backdrop of 80s London and the AIDS crisis).
The cohesion of color palette and intensity control across the X5 Series was one of the real features, he 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.”
Hudson was working with GLP’s X5 platform — with its iQ.Gamut and RGBL palette offering advanced color mixing — for the first time. “The X5 Compacts 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.”
He particularly praised the extended color palette. “When we needed a saturated color — for instance at a party in the countryside which 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.” The line of beauty, you might say!
Any leap of faith in specifying Creos more than paid dividends. “It’s such an interesting light,” the designer 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 — gave me a new way of thinking, and it worked extremely well … the color mixing was fantastic.”
Finally, Howard Hudson 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 devices, 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.
“I also like the sophistication you get with GLP fixtures generally — 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 color 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.”
The latter agreed. “I really enjoyed working with the X5 fixtures,” he said. “The matching chipsets make matching colors across fixtures nice and easy, and the impression X5 Bars and Creos units in particular have a good crisp color output. Dimming curves are really nice on all of the units, so that it’s easy to integrate them into a rig with other fixtures.”
Photo Credit: Johan Persson
