Concordia 2025

Concordia Winter 2024

Julian Slator's designs for My Fair Lady

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T heatre has always been an important part of Julian’s life, as he explains. ‘My interest dates from my own school days when I helped backstage either in a studio theatre for small productions or in the town theatre, where the school was lucky enough to put on its annual major production. This initial enthusiasm continued at university, where I spent much time working as lighting designer for the University Dramatic Society, including taking productions to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. In the teaching profession, I was always keen to get involved in drama and allow pupils to experience the challenges of putting on a play or musical to as high a standard as possible. I enjoyed not only taking a play from “page to stage” but also seeing boys and girls develop their own involvement in drama, whether as actors or as technicians behind the scenes.’ The Studio Theatre, repurposed in the late 1980s from the old Gym, is often the venue for smaller productions, but the musical is staged in the Great Hall, with the attendant challenges of converting the cavernous space into a theatre. Before any staging was made, Julian went through the script in meticulous detail. ‘I would read the script a number

up in someone’s face while they were preparing it) and building huge sets’. Ben Trisk recalls that ‘It took weeks of effort to build the sets for the productions in the Great Hall — usually every lunch break and many afternoons after school. As well as the physical effort of getting the scaffolding and other building materials into the hall, the sets were often complicated and clever: different backdrops for different scenes could be used with the aid of lighting techniques or movable sets. The plans were followed accurately, and it still amazes me how a bunch of 13- to 18-year-olds, in school uniform, erected scaffolding up to the ceiling of the Great Hall without any supervision, site shoes, harnesses or general regard for health and safety’. The riskier elements of stage-building and lighting became a job carried out by professional riggers, as it is today — not before one near miss for Julian resulted in a trip to A&E at Watford General Hospital, which fortunately confirmed that no lasting damage was done. As opening nights neared, pressure built on the production crew, resulting in late nights and extra hours over the weekend at school, as Julian explains. ‘Intertwined with all this building and painting there was increasing pressure from the directors and cast to have

of times, making notes about each scene: where it was set, the historical and geographical context, and how it might be lit. With the director, the style of setting (proscenium, or apron stage, or in the round; realistic or abstract; flat stage or levels; painted scenery or just drapes; screen projections) and practicalities of scene changes, props and lighting were agreed. I would then produce sketches for how each scene might look, keeping in mind the practicalities of the space. Once scaled drawings were produced, the Art Department helped to finalise colour schemes, textures and agree scenery painting.’ Ben Trisk (1990–1995) remembers that ‘there would be very detailed diagrams of the set design in different elevations, which would have taken Mr Slator a long time to produce’. In the earlier days, the pupils and SCR would build the set, hang the lights, couple up the electrics and fix the drapes. That would take hours of work in the weeks before the opening night, something that Howard Sefton (1994– 2001) remembers with great affection: ‘Whoever decided it was a good idea to let a bunch of kids play with scaffolding was a genius, or a maniac! I loved being involved in something bigger, playing with power tools, smoke machines, pyrotechnics (banned after one blew