Making the Magic

The theatre could not function without the talented creatives, administrators and backstage crews who make the magic happen. From sound and lighting technicians to costume designers, ushers and bar staff, it is the behind-the-scenes team who ensure the show goes on.

‘We're not a big West End show where we're trying to do all the glitz and the glam, we’re just trying to create an environment for the play…
ultimately the job is to serve the script’

(Stuart Burgess, Technical Manager)

Words and language have always been at the core of the Orange Tree. Productions are generally paired down and achieved with minimal setting and staging, allowing the script to shine. This is not only an abstract decision but a physical necessity for in the round theatres, where large pieces of set can obscure the view.

This makes the Orange Tree’s floor one of its most important and imaginative tools. In recent years it has become a living garden where real flowers began to grow and bloom (‘Humble Boy’), a swimming pool-esque bath of flowing water (‘The Mikvah Project’), a giant drain of blood (‘Pomona’) and a black hole made from carved polystyrene covered in jesmonite (‘Statements After An Arrest Under The Immorality Act’). The ‘Humble Boy’ garden required 18 tonnes of sand, gravel and bricks; ‘The Mikvah Project’ pool took 8 hours to fill with 2500 litres of water.

‘The Mikvah Project’, 2020.Image credit: © The Other Richard.

‘There were lots of opportunities to spring scenes on the audience from unexpected places’

(Alistair McDowall, Writer)

Lighting, too, takes on great importance. Those who have worked at the Orange Tree describe its ‘incredible blackouts’ which, combined with the number of exits at each corner of the stage, allow directors to cut quickly between scenes.

‘Stuart Burgess [Technical Manager] was phenomenal - we'd ask him if we could set the middle of the stage on fire, and that lunchtime, he would be in the car park trying to find a way to do it’
(Ned Bennett, Director)

A dedicated storage space for props and costumes - as well as room for rehearsals and set creation - was finally created in 2003 when the theatre was extended into the former Royal Bank of Scotland building next door. Space had always been at a premium, meaning little was kept which couldn’t be auctioned off or used elsewhere.

Props, furniture and costumes were borrowed from anyone – including members of the audience - who could supply the right pieces. This extended to loans from an antique shop fortuitously located next door to the Orange Tree pub, which permitted its wares to be used in shows before they were sold. More elaborate and period costumes were regularly hired from professional suppliers and painstakingly maintained by wardrobe technicians.

‘The first production that was on when I started in wardrobe was called "The Marrying of Anne Leete"… it was a massive cast and they all had period costumes… so it was just endless sewing of hems… you get like snow blindness from all the ironing of white shirts’
(Imogen Bond, Director and Former Education Director)

Backstage, c. 1980. Image credits: © Unknown. Images held at Royal Holloway University Archive (uncatalogued material).

Occasionally, bespoke items were and are commissioned and created specially. ‘Pomona’, for example, called for the production of a tentacled ‘Cthulhu’ mask to represent a monstrous creature, born of the urban dystopian wasteland, which haunted the stage. Designed and made by Isa Shaw Abulafia, it quickly became an iconic symbol of the play and features in the exhibition. The display also showcases an incredibly realistic mask designed by Georgia Lowe and made by Andy Fordham for the ‘Br’er Rabbit’, an anti-authoritarian trickster character who tap-danced across the stage in ‘An Octoroon.’

Shoestring budgets and necessity have encouraged creative solutions:

'We did a production of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ in the room above the pub, all squashed in, Rachel Kavanaugh [the director] was also working at Regents Park… I think the costume department gave her all the off cuts – so I remember her turning up to rehearsal one day with a sort of rag bag of all these extraordinary ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ costumes from over the years and we would spend hours putting them together to try to turn them into something for our show.’
(Clare Lawrence Moody, Actor)

Perhaps most poignantly, in 2021 the theatre’s first ever live streamed productions, ‘INSIDE’ and ‘OUTSIDE’, offered a means to connect with audiences at a time when physical presence was impossible.

‘Lockdown happened and theatres went dark… I’m hoping that people will remember how important theatre is to their lives’
(Harriet Devey, Trustee)

The Orange Tree has adapted to the Covid-19 pandemic: re-opening after more than fifteen months of enforced closure with a socially-distanced auditorium and regular streams of live shows. Though theatre as a genre must contend with ever-increasing amounts of digital content, it is hoped that public appetite for live, irreplicable interactions in a physical space will return greater than ever - experiences which cannot be reduced to a screen.

'In times of civic crisis, one of the theatre's historic functions has been as the place people gravitated towards for solace, for shelter, for political meaning: literally to regroup'

(Paul Miller, Artistic Director, quoted in WhatsOnStage April 2020)

Pictured on the 31st December 2021 (l-r, from the back): David Cornwell (Former Local Councillor and Chair of the Board), Gillian Thorpe (Former Administrative Director), Veronika Hyks (Actress and Audio-Describer), Marsha Hanlon (Former Stage Manager and Theatre Manager), Paul Velluet (Former Trustee), John Thorpe (Supporter). Image credit: © Paul Velluet.

It was only fitting that the day of the 50th anniversary itself be marked by six of the theatre's former key staff and early supporters, on the stairs which once led to The Room:

'So on the 31st of December 2021 - which was the actual day that the first lunchtime performance happened at the Orange Tree - at 1:15pm, half a dozen of us from the early years gathered at the pub, sat down with a drink… After we'd raised our glass, we went and stood on the stairs, going up to where the room was… as though we were queuing to go to that first performance… Gillian [Thorpe] phoned up Sam... Auriol was on speaker on the other end, along with Sam, and we passed the phone around, so we all had an a one-to-one with Sam, with everybody listening in and raising a glass to the past, the present and the future of the Orange Tree'
(Marsha Hanlon, Former Stage Manager and Theatre Manager)

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