Interview: Lighting Designer Lucy Carter

Could you tell us a little about your background?

I went to university to do a degree in dance and drama, and one of my main interests was choreography. All my choreography stuff started off with a visual idea, and the only way to realise those visual ideas in a studio where you don’t have any money was to play around with the lights, and try and get that to say something visually. I ended up doing lighting for everyone else’s choreography too, and so I found my interest and the thing that I really enjoyed.

When I graduated I went to Central School of Speech and Drama and did a one year postgraduate lighting design course which was great. My first job was at the Place Theatre in London, a contemporary dance venue. A large number of companies came through all the time – sometimes it would be three companies a day. I got lots of experience through helping these companies with their lighting. It was varied work but all dance at that point. I was doing some drama outside of that, and gradually I began to explore opera, theatre and ballet, and carried on.

What do you see the role of Lighting Designer for theatre as being?

In text based work I think Lighting Designers create the visual moods and environments that help locate the audience in the right place and time. And that doesn’t necessarily have to be a real place or a real time, but I think that’s one of the big roles of lighting: to make the audience feel, emotionally, that they’re in the right place – to make them understand where the actors are just by the sensation of lighting. Because lighting, although very visual, is also very emotive. And in our subconscious as we experience a piece of theatre we tend not to notice that the lighting is manipulating our emotions, but it is.

Another big thing in theatre is that the lighting can help shift the dynamics, the flow and the progression of the evening. If you’ve been in a long slow scene for quite a while, a quick shift with the lighting and the sound and the environment adds the dynamic that wakes the audience back up or shifts them quickly. And I think that’s a really big role, varying and shifting the audience’s interest.

When starting work on a new production, are there specific themes or elements you usually look out for in the script?

I would normally start with the script. Or if it’s a new play and the writer hasn’t begun and I’m already on board, then we’re talking about themes. But when I read the script for the very first time, I’m writing down really simple and obvious notes like the time of day, the location, and descriptive stage instructions – are there any light references? Do they talk about the sky? Or ‘it’s getting dark’, or ‘the morning light’s too bright’ – any environmental references basically. That’s the first read, and that’s always a good starting point. Quite often the designer, the lighting designer and the director will just decide to ignore all the stage directions, but actually times of day are quite important to the telling of the story and the emotional positioning of the actors and characters. So you tend to stick to those quite often if it’s important for the audience to know that.

The scenes in Oil take place over a number of years with lighting a prominent and key element in each – what was your approach to creating the right feel and aesthetic for audiences?

Ella wrote her ideas about lighting this play at the beginning of her script, and we’re translating those onto the stage to tell the story of oil. There is a very emotional human story going on in the play, but it is also about the discovery of oil – how it changed our lives, how it became a commodity, and then how it’s going to disappear and our lives are going to change again. So we felt that was very dominant in the text. We are going to try and be extremely truthful about what was available in the time period of each scene.

At the beginning of the play we’re starting with a lack of power, and how the day is very short. The characters can only work during the hours of daylight; it’s very cold and everything is a struggle. Cooking is an exertion; even being able to see is trying. In the next scenes we move forward through oil’s history, accentuating the shift from a lack of power into an abundance of power, and then back to a lack of power again.

What effect do you think that will have on the audience?

For the first scene the lighting will reinforce the difficulty of the living conditions – I think the audience are going to feel restricted and be intrigued. Then later on there is a sheer abundance of light and brightness. We would probably consider it to be quite harsh and unpleasant now in our living conditions but that has its own emotional quality. There are parts where the power has gone out, and we are really interested in seeing how dark we can be. Ultimately they could well be sitting in darkness as the daylight is dying outside, waiting for some kind of power to come back on. I think it is a really important part of the script and it’s really important for the audience to feel.

When I started to read the script, looking into the periods, and finding out what was available at those points in time, I thought ‘my god, how hard was that?’ And then by the time it gets to the future, I thought, ‘oh my god what the hell are we gonna do?’ Are we going to be sitting in darkness? Are we going to go back to blackouts? It made me think, and it made me realise what we’ve been doing to the planet and how stupid we are. That’s something that we really want to get across to the audience.

What do you see as the main challenges when it comes to lighting a stage production?

Every script has a different challenge. I think in theatre, the biggest challenge is trying to create the right emotional lighting environment is time – the technical time to actually try things and experience them and watch the show under those environments and then make tweaks. That’s always I think is my biggest challenge, having enough time to get it right.

And finally what sort of work excites you?

I love that I do a wide variation of work – opera, theatre, dance, ballet, and also my own lighting installation work. I wouldn’t say that one or the other really excites me more. I know what doesn’t excite me, and that’s total naturalism in lighting, so I appreciate that its really good for me when I have to do it because it tests me. But my tendency would always be to move towards abstraction and stylisation – I think those are the things that excite me.

Lucy Carter is the Lighting Designer for Oil.