At the National Skills Academy for Creative & Cultural's Open Up event at the Royal Opera House, students at Skills Academy Founder Colleges got to meet and talk with the Senior Stage Manager, Simon Catchpole. He shared a few stories, tips and insights into what his job involves.

Everything at the Royal Opera House runs on schedules. This is a huge building and nothing happens here – even in the smallest room – without being recorded on an enormous schedule detailing what’s going on in each place.

The key to stage management is communication. It starts from the very beginning of a production, when you’re organising rehearsals. You need to consult the schedule and see where you can go, and then you need to make sure all the relevant people are informed. You need to think about props – what do the actors need? Who is the person to organise that? Who do you need to tell? In La Traviata the female singers all perform in crinolines. So you’d never dream of rehearsing Act 1 (the party scene) without all your female chorus wearing skirts that are a similar size – that’s the only way you can figure out the spacing. You can’t rehearse in their full costumes, so you’ll need an underskirt. Where’s that coming from? Who needs to be told? You need to make sure these things are all communicated to the right people at the right time.

If you’re a stage manager you can’t forget things. For me, everything is lists. You need to write everything down and always ask yourself what effect each item on that list will have on everything else. For example, if your heroine needs to produce a letter halfway through the act – as in Traviata – where’s it coming from? Does she need a pocket, for example? If so, you need to tell Costume. They then need to know how big the pocket needs to be – well, how big is the letter? And so on.

Animals onstage can present problems. Eagles can be particularly difficult as they take a long time to train, but get bored very quickly once they’ve learned what they have to do. On such occasions they have been known to try to squawk along with the singers... On one occasion it was so bad the conductor told us to cut the eagle out of the script altogether. That’s the sort of thing the Stage Manager has to consider – along with questions like ‘Can the Royal Opera House stage support the weight of a two-tonne horse and rider?’ You get some really varied problems.

The big bit of advice I’d give someone who wants to be a Stage Manager is ‘know what aspect of the industry you want to go into’. Do a course – maybe two years in drama school (three is too long) – and find out what you’re interested in. Onlydo all the work experience afterwards, when you know what you want to do – that’s how you’ll get the contacts, which is the next important thing. I see lots of students who say they want to do work experience with me, but they’re really looking for experience doing West End shows. Those require completely different skills and it’s another world altogether. So work experience for those people will just give them a load of useless contacts! That’s true across the board, of course – the only possible area of skills crossover between West End musicals and opera is the lighting.

La Traviata runs at the Royal Opera House from 3 October 2011 to 25 January 2012.

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