Learning the ropes

“Where the hell is the Stage Manager?” is a line from Stephen Sondheim’s musical ‘A Little Night Music’ – yelled into an empty stage by Desirée Armfeldt, a fading theatre beauty trying to make sense of the disasters in her life. Making sense of chaos is the stage manager’s job – they are the key purveyors of information, the main schedulers and arrangers, the callers of cues, the encourager of talents and the moppers of the furrowed directorial brow. The stage management team must make all the arrangements for the technical transferral of a play, an opera, a ballet – a whatever – from page to stage. The play itself is taken through its often technically complex and diverse paces from curtain up to curtain call. In performance, the stage world moves only on the stage manager’s say-so.

RADA has been training stage managers since the mid-1950s when the then Head of Stage Management, Dorothy Tenham, created the concept and set the standard for training stage managers in this country. Her tenacious and inspiring personality led to an equal partnership at RADA in training of all the varied Technical Theatre areas. This added to the impulse to change professional theatre practice by giving proper status to the ‘back stage’ arts – leading to proper recognition for set, costume, lighting and sound designers too.

The ability to deal with towering egos, irrational requests and seemingly immoveable problems is what makes a good stage manager. Recent RADA graduate Gemma Thomas knows this only too well. Currently calling the cues as what is known as ‘book cover’ for the West End hit musical ‘Billy Elliot’, Gemma also undertook her RADA work placement on ‘Lord of The Rings (LOTR)’: “Working with an Assistant Stage Manager who was also a prop maker on LOTR,” she says, “made me realise how much of an advantage my training in props sourcing and making is. … The training gave me a better understanding of what props were originally made of and the best materials to repair them with, and also which materials will withstand eight shows a week.

“Also, working with a diverse range of directors prepared me for the different people I’ve come across. At heart, communication within the team is THE most important thing, and anything that is told to a member of stage management should be shared with the rest of the team, no matter how small, because if it’s not it can often lead to confusion. It is also important that every member of the team pulls their weight – it’s a real strain on the rest of the team if one person slacks. (RADA training definitely taught me that!) And the manner in which a stage manager communicates to the rest of the team and company makes such a difference – the stage managers on both LOTR and ‘Billy’ have a very calming, patient and non-condescending way of putting across their point.

“Nothing, however, can prepare you for handling a ‘show stop’ or an accident until it happens, and the second something goes wrong stage management have to be aware of all the potential problems, safety issues and repercussions.”