Production Design: Lighting, Set, and Projection

When it came to our design, we first wanted to create the feeling of the physical locations: Middlemore Hospital, Raf’s home in Wellington, and the Minister’s office. We wanted to be able to go between those locations really easily, as though in a memory; because that’s what the play is: a recollection of memories.

We wanted it to feel really ethereal, and a little bit heightened, and quite a beautiful experience that these stories just kind of tumble out of. So the main design concept is that there is a large circle in the middle of the stage that’s used as several different things: a living room; a heart; an operating theatre; and a reception area. So that’s really like the heart of the show, it revolves around that. There are also various design items that fly in above it: there is a lab that flies in; and there are some monitors with heart rates on them, that happens in the left and right in the wards, if you will. We also have a large painted floor that resembles the lino in a hospital, and it has striped markings on it, which is also a reference to New Zealand artist Ralph Hotere, whose work

Anapela was really interested in. His work was a major jumping-off point for the colour palette of the show, which is actually a really earthy colour palette, rather than the green and cold palettes of medical dramas; we were really interested in flipping that by having a really earthy look, and that palette carries through to the costumes, too. Ralph Hotere also does a lot of line art, so the floor pattern on the stage is kind of inspired by his work and real hospital corridors.

Hotere’s work also inspired the central circle - and it became just that, a space where everything happens, and everything moves in and moves out. And then from there we investigated the plastic of hospitals. So there is plastic everywhere, like hospital plastic but transparent; it’s very refractive, and it takes projection, so we also do some projection on it.

For the Minister’s scenes, there’s a whole lot of venetian blinds that fly in, and at various points we also bring them in to close the space down and have the nurse’s station in the middle.

In its entirety, the set is almost the whole width of the ASB Waterfront Theatre stage, and it goes all the way back, so it’s quite a workout for the actors to walk it!

With regard to the details, Anapela didn’t want it to be hyper-realistic, with every single prop and set item from a hospital represented on stage; so we only have just enough to tell the storythe furniture, props and costumes are only what’s necessary and real enough for the actors to interact with, and they have this layer of cohesion across them.

We also looked at lots of architecture because Middlemore Hospital is a real place, and Auschwitz is a real place, so we wanted to be evocative of that. And then we looked at the similarities between those two places; Middlemore has a train station right next to it, so it has that train-station feel. Another inspiration was oldschool medical lecture operating theatres, whose seating rows went up quite high, and everyone in the seating block looked down to the centre, watching procedures or operations - not dissimilar from the audience seating at ASB Waterfront Theatre. Other imagery we looked at was veins in nature, organic growth, and that’s kind of the rib cage around the heart of the story.

So we used set, lighting and projection and combined them to use as one storytelling device. With lighting and projection in particular, it was important to us to use those elements to create movement in the piece, so that this collection of memories would be an active recollection or storytelling; so taking those memories and making them active, not passive. Also with the staging, it’s a company play, a collaborative work; so we’re trying to layer in the company moving through the space, and transforming the space, and we’re trying to create a space that allows them to do that. This is a pretty big part of the show, because the play is largely about the collective agreement we have as a society.