Working with Maggie

Alex Wardle, Lighting Designer

I first met Maggie Forsyth when I was assistant director on a production directed by Katrin Magrowitz, at the Greenwich Studio Theatre, who I had met in Berlin while I was studying there. A couple of years later, shortly after I left Goldsmiths' (a one-year MA) Maggie asked me to operate the lighting desk for The Nun at BAC Studio 1. The lighting designer was David Plater who had hired a Strand M24 lighting console for the show: all-but-obsolete, but very fast for programming - and he had a lot of channels and many cues. (Tim Owen was sound op, we swopped around sometimes.)

Backup for the M24 was to a cassette tape. At some point during the middle of the run, the lighting desk failed to start up before the show. After a couple of phone calls, I was speeding down to Fulham on my scooter to collect a replacement console from White Light, which I shoved in my rucksack. Back at BAC, it turned out the cassette backup was corrupted and would not load.

BAC had a two-preset manual console, but it had fewer channels than the show (David had hired in extra dimmers). We patched the most important channels from David's extended rig onto the house dimmers, I made sure I had all the channel numbers noted on the lighting plan, and I proceeded to busk the show on manual.

The reason for this long preamble is that Maggie never doubted for a moment that the show would go ahead and I felt her implicit trust that I could do this. She couldn't bear to watch the show, but came to find me in the interval and asked if I needed anything: I think I asked for a large whisky.

From Eddie Marsan's production of  "Lonely Lives" at the Union Theatre, October 1999,
with set design by Maggie and lighting design by Alex.
Maggie always managed to assemble vast casts of supremely talented actors and design scenery that looks like it had cost a fortune. Always entirely practical, she knew precisely what was achievable and pushed to make the most of everything. The companies always seemed happy: lovely people doing brilliant work together, with immense respect for each other.

The next time we worked together was Spring Awakening in the Main House at BAC. David Plater was the lighting designer, but he was also Chief Electrician at the Donmar Warehouse and was stuck in technical rehearsals there. I was to take over. I arrived at BAC, Maggie took me for a coffee and explained the synopsis of the play. About half the rig was focussed and we were to open with a preview that evening. We went in and focussed the rest of the rig. I felt we needed a couple more fixtures to pick out some dead spots (I had probably misunderstood David's focus notes), we rigged and focussed those and we started plotting: recording lighting cues into the console.

By dinner break we had plotted the first act. We reset ready for the audience and the show started. Maggie sat next to me and we recorded the second act in "blind": Maggie whispering to me what was going on in the scene, where the actors were, and me guessing levels for the various fixtures and recording those as future cues which we would get to after the interval. I'm pretty sure there was a rogue blackout at some point but we got through it and had plenty of time the next day to tidy up. Again, there was no sense of doubt from Maggie that this mad scheme would work; she was utterly calm and precise. There are few directors who have such a strong sense of when a lighting change needs to happen, luckily we were entirely in tune with each other: except that she was much more of a perfectionist, whilst I was inclined to be lazy about plotting extra cues.

The next occasion was Send for Mr Plim with Cantabile, which I remember with huge affection. This was an "opera in a week" at BAC, rehearsed within 1 week and then running in Studio 1 for several weeks: this time Maggie asked me to be the lighting designer. It was a glorious production and it's a great shame that there hasn't been a proper revival of this absolute gem.

The only unplanned excitement I recall was an audience member fainting during a performance: I was operating lighting (and sound) from the auditorium and quickly brought up the houselights; the ushers efficiently revived the person and took them out; Mr Plim (Nicholas Lumley) made sure everyone knew where to start from and we continued.

Our last show together was a beautiful production by Eddie Marsan of Gerhart Hauptmann's Lonely Lives, at the Union Theatre in Southwark. Maggie designed it, I lit it. I remember Eddie providing Berocca effervescent Vitamin C to the entire company at coffee breaks. The Union had very little equipment and a two-preset manual desk with very sticky faders (I suspect rather a lot of beer had been spilt over it). We hired a very few decent spotlights (Strand Brios! a short-lived innovation) and miraculously found, buried upstairs in the dressing room, some ancient cyclorama battens (Strand S battens I think). I butchered these to make perhaps three out of five of them work, with two colours, and used these to backlight the long upstage window Maggie had designed, which was covered in something like tracing paper (see photo). It was astonishing that something so simple looked so absolutely beautiful.

We were in and out of contact after I moved to Cornwall in 2000. Julian put my Dad in contact with Steve Edis, Rosalie Genay and Dale Rapley when he was putting together a Kurt Tucholsky cabaret at the Arcola; Maggie and Julian both came to that. The last time I saw Maggie and Julian was when they came to visit us in Winchester shortly after our daughter was born. Maggie brought Edith a present of a lion-hat to dress up in, and told us about her childhood in Ethiopia, living next door to lions.

November 2024