Stage Management alumnus, Anna Hill, is a Deputy Stage Manager at the National Theatre (pictured above third from left with fellow RWCMD alumni also on the production staff at NT ). In the biggest challenge of her career to date, she was DSM on the recent one-off event celebrating 50 years of the National Theatre, which was broadcast live on BBC 2 and to cinemas across the world through NT Live. This hugely ambitious performance brought together an unparalleled cast of actors reproducing classic scenes from the last half century of NT, including Dame Judi Dench, Dame Maggie Smith, Ralph Fiennes and Rory Kinnear.
The project started for Anna in June when she and the Stage Manager met up for a week’s workshop with National Theatre Director Nicholas Hytner and his team. They read extracts from different plays, and watched archive video footage so that by the end of the week they had a rough idea of which plays they’d be using and an initial running order.
Intense rehearsals started five weeks before the broadcast date which, for Anna, included evening and weekends. On 22nd October, the actual birthday of the National Theatre, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh visited to watch a staged rehearsal of the Guys & Dolls segment.
Anna explains: “It was without doubt one of the most unique and special rehearsal periods I have ever been a part of. A stand-out moment for me was being alone in the room with only Dame Judi Dench, the Musical Director, and the rehearsal pianist after Nick Hytner had sent everyone out of the room so that Judi could practise Send In The Clowns. She was amazing.
Rehearsing No Man’s Land with three ‘Sirs’ in the room was another first for me (Sir Michael Gambon, Sir Derek Jacobi and Sir Nicholas Hytner), and rehearsing on a Sunday with the History Boys and Alan Bennett was great fun and very special.
The tech rehearsal was probably one of the scariest I’ve ever done: we had only four sessions to tech 26 segments of live performance (and all the links in & out of the VT segments in between). For King Lear we’ll get six sessions (which still isn’t very much time) but that’s just for one show.
Once we got into the tech and then after that, the dress rehearsal, the preview, and the broadcast performance, the actual running of the show was a kind of relay race between myself and Laura, the Assistant TV Director. She sat in the broadcast truck with the TV Director, and her job was to count out of every different section of the show, and to call all the different camera shots to the camera operators during the live performance. Each time we moved from a VT section into a live section, it was as if she was passing the baton to me, and then I would pass it back as we moved back from a live section back into a VT section.
We were all nervous on broadcast night: playing to 1200 people in the Olivier Theatre is one thing, but when they are the great and the good of the arts world, and you know there are 2.5 million people watching on TV, and the NT Live cinema audiences of thousands are watching worldwide, that’s a totally different ball game.
I was in my control box cueing for three hours: including calling the audience to take their seats, and the speech of welcome from Nick Hytner to the theatre audience. It’s quite a long period of time to maintain that level of concentration for, I find it’s a bit like balancing on a tightrope for three hours.
The show itself was truly a once in a lifetime experience, and I feel so proud and privileged to have been a part of it – and it’s my voice calling the Beginner’s Call on the screen version, and there is a fleeting glimpse of me with a file in my hand wishing Adrian Lester good luck just as he’s finishing his introduction speech! I found it very hard to watch the VT clip of Dame Joan Plowright doing the speech from Saint Joan, because it made me cry every time, not good when I was trying to cue the show!’
Here’s Anna’s first memories of her first job working in the National Theatre and facing Salman Rushdie’s bodyguards…
The National Theatre’s King Lear with Simon Russell Beale, and directed by Sam Mendes, is on at The Olivier Theatre from 14 January 2014.
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