Making a scene

The set determines the structure of a play. Entrance. Exits. Where the action happens. Cityscape gets to know the unsung heroes building the sets behind every great show at The Court Theatre.

The Court is the only theatre in Aotearoa with its own permanent professional set-building team. The full-time construction crew consists of three guys: Richard van den Berg (middle), Nigel Kerr (right), and Seth Edwards-Ellis (left). Richard and Nigel are both veteran artists and all-rounders, and Seth is a young-gun builder who’s lightning-fast at putting together framing and set structures. There’s also Richie Daem, who’s in his 70s now. He was the official Court metalworker for many years before retiring, but he still drops by to put his hand to a set construction from time to time. In his absence, Nigel and Seth pick up the welding gear. The two artists also sometimes do set design, and The Court has a pool of professional designers from around the country it calls on for different shows.

Here’s how it works

The designer produces a concept and then working drawings. Like architectural drawings, these tell the builders what to do. But there’s a huge variety of designers and a huge variety of working drawings. Some prescribe every little detail while some allow for a lot of creativity.

The builders are all problem solvers, with considerable experience in making things work. How will the different parts of the set open, close, move, stay in place, be safe and look amazing? Occasionally they’ll get lucky and find the perfect window at salvage yard Musgroves or another item at another store, but they build the vast majority of set equipment themselves, even down to the furniture, right here at The Court Theatre. The No. 1 material used in sets? Plywood. Sheets and sheets of plywood.

The life cycle of a set

Set building starts three to six weeks before opening night. There’s limited space to store it, and the builders need to coordinate with the designer and director before beginning. There’s always something abuzz at the Court, so things just have to happen quickly. Everything in theatre involves planning: the actors, the crew, the programming. It’s forever in flux. So with good planning, the builders install the set over three days, then there’s just two weeks to sort out the lighting, technical rehearsal and dress rehearsals on set. Enter lighting and sound and you’re ready for the big show. While the show is running, the builders get to work on the next set. Then, after closing night, they move in, dismantle the set, and install the new one. Done.

Q&A: Richard van den Berg

I’ve always been a maker. Because building a set is just making. It doesn’t matter what it is. If there’s something that needs a solution, I want to be part of it.

I started at The Court pretty late in the game, I started when I was 30, in 1999 or 2000. I’d never worked in theatre before, I had no concept of it. It just so happened that while by most accounts I was pretty unemployable, I just happened to have the right set of skills that made me useful to work in theatre.

I came from a maker’s background and a painter’s background. I spent a lot of my years painting large-scale murals, that’s how I cut my teeth. And then also I spent a number of years making clocks which I would sell at the Arts Centre, and they were quite successful. They were quite bespoke ones, quite sculptural. I had a studio in town. I would just be painting murals and making clocks and doing whatever.

The craziest set in this building that I’ve worked on was The Wind in the Willows. It had a giant motorised revolve, and a giant proscenium arch that we hung from our grid. A lot of things had to operate and move and be stored. Often storing things is quite difficult because you get them off the stage then where do you put it?

The most fun set, well, the old Court Theatre in the Arts Centre was a different space that required a lot of different solutions. For me, it was The Rocky Horror Show. That was really a fantastic combination of a really great show that I loved, and a really amazing set. That set required a lot of different considerations in terms of how we built it, what we did. We used a lot of different materials and paint effects, and the design of it was really fantastic.

The big shows are kind of daunting. You’re thinking, “Can we build this on time and in budget?”

I have done set design. I’m not one of the main set designers, but I’ve done a lot of touring shows, which is a specific type of set design because it has to be movable, it has to be easily installed and it has to survive the tour. There’s a high degree of survivability required. And they are more children’s shows or kids' shows or young adults’ shows. I prefer those. Stylistically, I enjoy them, they’re kind of less literal and for me they’re just a lot more fun. I’ve designed a couple at The Court on the main stage, and in the past we had a second theatre with a smaller stage space and some intimate sets.

I like things in profile. Pure profile or purely front-on. So it’s a way of trying to encapsulate the pure graphical nature of an object. It’s trying to capture the essence of an object or an idea.

I studied at Christchurch Polytechnic [now Ara], visual communications, which was very graphic design-orientated. I was always good at art but I didn’t have an eye for type. I found myself moving towards three-dimensional design, and I’ve always been a painter as well, which led to painting murals.

I finished painting murals because I went overseas. Up until about ’95, I had a reasonable amount of murals that were known around the city. And then of course the earthquakes happened and just about every one of those murals was gone. The easiest way to inject creativity back into a broken city was doing large-scale paintings, that’s the most bang for your buck. And so Christchurch suddenly got this reputation for really amazing wall art. All this new work was going up but my legacy had come down. So I suddenly felt disconnected from the whole thing.

One of the first murals I ever did, strangely enough, was revealed when a building came down as part of the demolition. I think I was 17 when I painted it. I had signed it and dated it like a true geek in 1988.

I have a few artistic influences. I’m very graphic and I’ve always been influenced by New Zealand artist Michael Smither. He is somebody that to me has a kind of clarity and a cleanness and a use of colour that I seem to have always had myself.

Now, I work on the computer. I haven’t painted art in years. Now I do all my work in Photoshop. If required for the image I’m working on, I’ll hand-draw it or photograph it or paint it, or I’ll find an image, but I don’t really care too much. I’ve moved towards digital collage. Back in the day, I would have thought that painting was the only way to do anything, but I’ve realised that just being a painter I’m kind of limited by my abilities. I was good stylistically on one level but never great enough to realise what I sometimes wanted.

It’s pretty easy to have the idea, there’s a lot out there, but the determining factor is to transform your idea and manifest it into a real thing.

I’ve always sold works through gallery shops. I make work to sell, and for people to enjoy. I get a kick from it, the idea that anybody pays money for anything that I do, it still blows me away.

In my spare time, I’m pretty obsessive. I’ve always got a project on the go. If there’s a moment that I can’t determine what to do, I’ll always fall back on a project. I spent like five years obsessing over and developing paper automata toys, which I produced a whole line of. That was just to keep me occupied. At home I’ve got a studio. I always make sure I’ve got a good space to work.

Q&A: Nigel Kerr

What I find really exciting at The Court Theatre is working with lots of different designers. They all have different characters and therefore different ways of working. Some of them are incredibly collaborative, some of them will come in with all the plans and you just follow the dotted line.

We are all, in our own right, creatives. So collaborating at the start with a designer, with their concept, enables us to invest more in the project, I believe.

There’s a magic in theatre that you can’t have on film or television. It’s so cheap to stay at home and watch Netflix and Neon and Amazon. We don’t want to be competing with them. We can do unique, conceptual things with sets. Rather than have a complete house with walls, just have a door and a window, or maybe just have a table. I think that can get people to think more about what they’re seeing. If it’s all laid out in front of you, you can just watch it all from beginning to end and that’s it.

With a set, the only thing you see is the surface, and it’s in a black box, so the only thing you see is what we put a light on, as opposed to a white box, a gallery, where we light everything. It’s a unique position, in the theatre, being a black box. And I think it’s something we can exploit to create something unique.

For The Girl on the Train, it was a Daniel Williams design, a young designer from Auckland who I’ve got a lot of respect for. Dan is a designer who doesn’t build anything. And because he’s not limited by thinking about the economics of material, his designs capture the essence of the show.

When I design a set, because I make things, I will make it to fit a 1200 by 2400 plywood sheet, or increments of 600mm, whereas he’s freer than that. He brought along a company from Wellington to do all the audiovisual stuff. That’s what I’m talking about when I say we should be exploiting our position in the black box. I like the modern take on theatre with the use of audio and projections.

I like it when designers, lighting designers, costume designers, sound designers, set designer, all of us, push our position. And I like it when we bring new young talent in. Give them a crack.

One of my favourite sets to design and build was for Stag Weekend, directed by the comedian Mark Hadlow. It was a bach in the bush, there were certain scenes that happened behind it and in front of it. So I put the bach on a revolve, and then took half a wall out so you could see inside. For the forest set, I wanted to use the offcuts from the very start of the timber milling process, which will give you just a slight round profile. So I got all these offcuts from Halswell Timber. These were real logs. So as a bonus, I got the smell and the texture of woodland.

Another cracker show that I have fond memories of was called Ideation, directed by Dan Bain and staged in the rehearsal room. It was a corporate office that was deciding, because of overpopulation, ways in which we could cull the population. So we, the audience, were implicit in this. The rehearsal room is also a studio used for song and dance and one wall of it is completely covered with mirrors. Normally, we would put curtains across the front of them and put the set long-ways with a stage at one end that we look into. But I put the set in front of the mirrors, so the audience was all the way around it and the glass was the background, so we could see ourselves. I think that connected us much more than just watching while they decided who should live and who should die.

When I was at high school I was not academic. I spent all of my time in the art room. And I remember doing School Certificate. I got 99% in art, which was the high score in Canterbury, and the rest of them were below 40. So the writing was on the wall.

I was a wharfie in Lyttelton for 20 years. I made heaps of money and travelled heaps. I used to spend summers here working and then bugger off for the winters.

Then I pottered around doing building in Lyttelton, the odd renovations and stuff, but it sort of wasn’t really me. I didn’t like the repetition, I didn’t like the fact it wasn’t that creative.

I wanted to retrain so I went to teachers’ college and became a secondary school art teacher. I had placements here in Christchurch at Christ’s College, the polytech, and Cashmere High. Then I went relieving for a year at Wellington Girls’ College, which I really enjoyed, before returning to Christchurch.

My first taste of working in film came when I was asked to help build sets for Heavenly Creatures. I loved the whole collaboration and the massive budgets were pretty impressive. After that, I started working on television commercials in Christchurch. Then there was an airport built in Queenstown, so all of the production companies moved there. It quietened down here in Christchurch and I wasn’t that keen on travelling so much.

I’ve been at The Court since 2000. A friend of mine was building a theatre set and needed help. And I liked it. I liked that there was a limit on budget so you had to be a bit more creative with materials.

I like the people in theatre. It was less ego-driven, it was more “We’re here because we love theatre.” And it’s creative.

Q&A: Seth Edwards-Ellis

I got involved in theatre working at The Street Theatre in Canberra in 2011 as a casual lighting, set and venue technician. I also did live sound and sound design.

I moved back to Christchurch in 2015 and qualified as a builder. I spent the next three years building domestic residences and then decided to take my new skills back to the theatre.

I started doing some casual work at The Court Theatre in February 2020 and then became full time. I am the youngest in the building team and am learning a lot from Rich and Nigel, who have shown me a trick or two. They have a wealth of knowledge and experience to tap into.

We are all involved in the planning and building of the sets once we get the design and plans, and it’s a very collaborative team approach.

I enjoy the artistic side and the freedom with it, but also enjoy the practical side and finding an effective way of doing something.

I love the creation of scenic elements and the process involved from start to finish. To stand back and see something that was once an idea turn into a fully realised working set is amazing.

A favourite set of mine was Little Shop of Horrors. The whole process was enjoyable; we had problems that needed solving, like the inflatable plants growing out the set.

Outside of work, I enjoy working on a smaller scale with model kits and craft projects.