Every Saturday, in almost every city, town and village in the country, school halls are reverberating to the sound of children singing, playing Splat! and learning how to step-ball-change. The demand among young people to perform is so great that thousands upon thousands of Stagecoaches, Pauline Quirke Academies, Performs and the like open their doors every week to help train starry-eyed children. What is offered though, to those young people who are equally passionate about what happens off the stage?
Kerrie Driscoll, company stage manager at the Watermill Theatre, grew up wanting to be a dancer and was mildly offended when her dance teacher pointed out she’d make an excellent stage manager. Sitting down to watch Swan Lake, Driscoll's teacher pointed out the stage filling with smoke, the sound of the overture filling the Royal Albert Hall, the lights dimming on the auditorium and rising on the palace park. The magic had already begun before a single dancer stepped on the stage. Everything that was making the hairs on the back of her neck rise was being meticulously orchestrated by a stage manager and she realised ‘there's a whole world going on backstage.’
A rare opportunity
The Watermill itself is one of the theatres leading the charge when it comes to offering opportunities for young people interested in technical theatre. For the third year running the Andrew Lloyd Webber Foundation has supported a year-long scheme that employs someone between the ages of 18-25 to learn about technical theatre and production before they go on to further education. Kerrie is justly proud of the scheme, the only one the ALW Foundation has supported consecutively, which gives the successful candidate three months of experience in stage management, three months in production and six months across all disciplines. Since its inception it's been an extraordinary success, with those who participated going on to train formally (Laura Parkes is now an assistant stage manager on the Fame tour, for example) or in some cases to stay at the Watermill itself in both technical and production roles. One recipient now helps market the outreach department for the Berkshire powerhouse.
This remarkable initiative – an apprenticeship in all but name – is rare to find. For obvious reasons, explains Driscoll, theatres don't have the time or resources to teach enthusiastic young people about technical theatre and production first-hand. She's also worried that, with more and more drama school applications being done through UCAS, brilliant and able students are being put off, worried their academic grades may be a barrier. Furthermore, while conversations about diversity and representation are starting to bear fruit, this sort of revolution does not seem to be taking place backstage. In order to widen the net for backstage diversity, schools must do all that they can to educate their students about technical theatre roles.
Looking toward the future
Some secondary schools may allow their students to operate the lighting or sound on school plays, but this is entirely dependent on what equipment the school can afford. Driscoll says that the Watermill receives relatively few requests from schools to go in and talk about technical theatre and production as a career. While none of the Watermill's 36 weekly Outreach programme classes are exclusively for technical theatre, participants sometimes get the chance to make props and build set. Driscoll would be happy to do more and feels confident that her colleagues across the profession would agree.
At the JAM Academy in Marlow, students learn singing, acting and dance, alongside weekly classes in stage management and lighting. All pupils construct sets as well as helping with get-ins and get-outs. For Jo Noel-Hartley and Mark Hartley, the artistic director and producer respectively, this is essential. Partly because it engenders a better understanding of how the theatre works and fosters professionalism, but also because, they say, ‘it is important for our performers to consider if they become choreographers, directors, writers and producers… If they move into creative roles, then an understanding and appreciation of the technical roles and skills are crucial.’
The more aware young people are of these roles and skills, the more likely it is that the next generation of technicians will come from a variety of backgrounds. The Watermill's life-changing work, impossible without the support of the ALW Foundation who fund similar schemes at the Birmingham Royal Conservatoire and the Wales Millennium Centre cannot inspire a generation alone.