22: 2009 - Death By Fatal Murder

A return to that staple of the stage: the lounge/sitting room. Anyone involved with the theatre will have seen nearly as many of those as they have plays in total. Design is usually a matter of deciding where the doors are going to be, then filling the spaces between them with a few flats and handing over quickly to the set dressers to fill it with furniture and decorations. In this particular case, that gave two problems. The first was the double doors at the back of the stage: still not a tricky prospect in itself, but requiring a fair bit of the depth of the stage to achieve. Since the play had quite a large cast and lots of entrances and exits, almost exclusively through them, it was a headache to avoid obscuring the action or making it impossible for actors to get on and off stage. We briefly toyed with the idea of a half-width passage that would have given an additional alcove at stage top right, but decided the small gain in space would be offset by the artificial look of the hallway. Instead, the doors were offset left as far as possible and the passage made as narrow as we could get away with.

The second problem was the other door. It only got used once or twice, but in each case there had to be several people clustered around and the space beyond had to be partly visible. That was solved by bringing the left wall as perpendicular to the back as possible, instead of having the more usual outwards rake.

Even so, with the cast on stage there was very little room to work with and a struggle to get much movement going. One of those productions where the director has to really work quite hard to get the action flowing and not leave people marooned in odd corners. Fortunately, we have directors who can do that...