Hi, I’m Ethan, I’m 18 and I love theatre. I currently work for a Youth Theatre in Birmingham called Stage2 in a full time apprenticeship post. I am studying Community Arts Management Level 3 and in the future I am looking to work in theatre doing lighting and stage design. I have worked in quite a few theatres and theatre festivals but never somewhere like the Royal Opera House.

After entering the getintotheatre competition at Theatre Craft 2011 – a backstage careers event at ENO’s Coliseum in London – I was shocked to find out I had won the chance to go to the Royal Opera House’s production workshop in Essex for the day.

At the Workshop, they build 3-4 full sets a year for the Royal Opera house.

They build totally from scratch and renovate and retouch countless sets from past shows. This is really exciting and the chance to meet the team of 25 who make this happen was a great one.

Upon arrival, I was shown upstairs to the offices of the Heads of Construction, Mark and Tom, who work with production assistants and designer’s assistants at the Opera House and turn their ideas into construction drawings for the teams working away downstairs in Metalwork, Carpentry and Scenic Art.

It isn’t just the aesthetics that need to be taken into account.

In the office, I was able to look at the drawings and models for shows currently being constructed and to learn about how complicated it can be to turn a designer’s artistic ideas into something which can actually be constructed and kept within a budget. Tom and Mark both have to use extraordinary communication and organisational skills in their work to ensure that designers and creative teams are getting the sets they need on stage but also that the construction team can achieve this on time and to the correct specifications. When developing construction drawings, it isn’t just the aesthetics that need to be taken into account; because the Royal Opera House is a repertory house, the sets also need to be able to fit into storage spaces perfectly and need to be very quick to assemble and disassemble.

Sets currently under construction.

Once I had finished looking through production designs and their partner construction drawings, we were able to go and look at the sets currently under construction. Falstaff and Trojans were being worked on and the chance to see the Falstaff set – now totally structurally complete - was brilliant. I was able to stand inside the set and hold the model box from which it was created and they were identical. I learnt about how specific tweaks had been made to cut down weight or ensure structural integrity but other than this the set was exactly how the designer had envisioned it and was a credit to everyone at the workshop.

Next I went in to work with metalwork, who were making new pieces of set for orchestral rehearsals and concerts. Each piece was curved in exactly the same way (for acoustic quality) and it was great to be able to see people working on each section from rolling the aluminium to welding the frames. It was also really interesting to look at the structural work that needs to be done in metal which is then clad in other materials to create the final product.

In the Carpentry workshop, trucks were being made for Trojans and I was able to lend a helping hand, drilling decking and bolting on castors. The woodwork department use as many traditional techniques as they can to make sets and churn out really large volumes of work.

The sheer scale of this work was amazing.

In the paint shop, I got to see another example of the vast scale that the opera house works on. Outstretched on the floor were two cloths maybe 15 x 7 metres in size, each being painted up in layers to create a walnut wood effect for the flattage in Falstaff. These huge sheets were then being cut up into small pieces and painstakingly stretched over frames before being varnished to create the final – very realistic – product. The sheer scale of this work was amazing and the fifteen or so people working on scenic art had their work cut out. Around the room were various other pieces of artwork, with stunning realism and although not a good painter myself, I was able to apply the walnut effect to the polycarbonate structure to mimic wood in pieces which will actually be used on stage!

Overall the trip was brilliant, I was really excited to meet the people working at the workshop who were all really friendly and were happy to let me get stuck in and have a go. The workshop does offer work experience, and to anyone who wants to get into scenic construction or art, this would be an amazing opportunity to investigate.

Thank you so much to getintotheatre for great day where I learnt a lot!!