The Month From Hell

So, today I go into fit up for a job I’m completely out of my depth on.

Well… sorta out of my depth.  I’m AV operator in my favourite theatre, and while it’s my favourite theatre and thus I feel fairly confident in it, it’s video work, and therefore very much not my kettle of fish.  I took the job for several reasons… firstly, it’s money, never to be knocked.  Secondly, video is slowly seeping into theatre in an unstoppable way (‘cinema!  The future of theatre…!’) and therefore it seems like a cool and groovy thing to learn about.  Thirdly, it’s fantastic experience to be responsible for a major part of a show instead of, as is usually the case in this theatre, very much the junior chicken at the end of a very long pecking order.  Finally, the show in question is running in rep with another, which means, hopefully, I can have a week on and a week off and a week on and a week off and so on and so forth, allowing me to Live The Dream and do theatre one week, writing the next.  This is the cunning plan.

And so far, so good!  Except… I’m really not an AV technician.  I mean, I’m an okay lampie, and I can do some groovy things with a fresnel.  But gone are the days when you could just plug a laptop into a projector, and hello a glorious new era of servers and network hubs and switches and splitters and routers and…

… and it’s all a bit of an adventure, really.  And success!  I am indeed ticking point the second – learning lots – but the process has involved such a huge amount of error to such a bare proportion of trial that even now I find myself looking at the miles of cable involved with a shudder of trepidation.  And then there’s the downside.  The show is long.  There were hopeful rumours that it would be trimmed back, a brisk little trot through blood and violence and religious furvour but oh no, it’s gonna be what we shall tactfully refer to, as a Mamma.  To make matters worse, no sooner does this particular project vaguely get into the swing of things, than it’s reboot-brain time and off to do four shows in two weeks with my lighting design hat on.  Sleep will not be the theme of this symposium.

So yes…

… it’s going to be an interesting month.  And while I will naturally try to keep the blog up to date, quite possibly with tales of exploding projectors and bewildered actors staggering to centre stage, if you find most of my entries being summarized by a valiant call for all good citizens to go to bed early and get up late, I hope you’ll understand why…