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Engineering

Heather Neill meets the people who keep the National working

Not many people visit “the Grid”. It is nine storeys above the Olivier stage, reached in a slow lift just big enough for three slim people, and it is not the place for anyone given to even the mildest sensations of vertigo. Step out from the lift and you can look down through the iron fretwork on to the set 110 feet below. It's as well to make sure your keys are firmly in your pocket.

This strangely atmospheric place is where Guy Kendall and Dave Meredith spend many hours each week upgrading the power flying system – the means by which scenery is dropped into place and removed for storage. They are electronic engineers, two of the 30 or so staff who make up the National Theatre's engineering department under the leadership of Chief Engineer, John Moffat.

John, a northerner who had a wide-ranging career in industry (including tool manufacturing and designing engineering plant for China) before he came to the NT in 1991, has responsibility for the whole building, not just the backstage areas. Two of his staff, a mechanical and an electrical engineer, are always on duty when the theatre is open to the public: “Could be a blocked toilet, an electrical fault, a squeaking door or a broken seat – those guys will deal with it. And meanwhile they are monitoring plant and equipment”, says John. And if someone drops keys down a lift-shaft (a not uncommon occurrence, apparently) or needs to be rescued from a lift, that's up to the engineers too: “We're trained in release procedures – one more little skill.” Skills required are indeed wide-ranging: those who are CORGI-trained gas fitters, for instance, probably only need the qualification for four or five per cent of their working time, but they must have the relevant piece of paper.

When you take into account the various catering facilities, 50 dressing rooms, dozens of lavatories, air conditioning (sensitive enough to be adjusted during a performance), water-handling, ventilation and IT systems, CCTV, lifts, smoke and fire alarms, gas and electricity supplies – even the light bulbs run into hundreds and are checked daily – John's domain seems more like a small town than a theatre. Running Nationalopolis – along with its satellites the NT Studio at Waterloo and the costume store in Brixton – includes everything from overseeing plumbing repairs to negotiating with English Heritage about minor changes to Denis Lasdun's Grade II listed building, from redecorating rehearsal rooms and offices to organising major refurbishment and overhauling stage machinery.

These days a manager in John's position has to pay minute attention to changes in legislation. Smoke detection is a case in point: “We've just put in a new fire alarm system across the building and it meets all current standards, but it is not necessarily theatre-friendly, so we have to adapt while complying with the law.” The public is not likely to be at risk from fire, but there was once a conflagration in the building: about three years ago water leaked on to switch gear in the middle of the night. John gives the occasion as an example of his staff's dedication: “It was discovered at 2-ish; by 4am most people were in. London Electricity estimated seven days to repair the damage; our staff did it in two.”

Legionella – the cause of Legionnaire's disease – is another potential problem, especially if water is needed on stage, as it was, for example, in The House of Bernarda Alba last year. The NT now has its own dosing plant so that risk is virtually eliminated by frequent treatment of stored water.

“Plant” can mean a number of different installations: there are 17 plant rooms altogether, providing heating, hot water, ventilation and air conditioning, some housing giant throbbing boilers and Brobdingnagian pumps. A change in electricity or gas rates has an enormous effect on bills here. “We're having a blitz on energy-saving”, says John, switching off the light as we leave a pump room on the roof.

The day-to-day duties, spiced with occasional crises like the south-London-wide power failure in 2003 or the fire which delayed the press night of The History Boys in 2004, are time-consuming enough, but major refurbishment can take years as engineers work around the rep system, often late at night and on Sundays. Sunday opening may soon have to be taken into consideration as well. Incidentally, I had assumed that the water on stage on The History Boys press night came from the sprinkler system. Not so, says John, “If the sprinklers came on, [the curtain] wouldn't go up that night – there's a 10,000 gallon tank in the roof”.

Major recent developments include a new computer server room and refurbishments of the Olivier drum revolve and power flying, which is now in the testing phase. Mike Finch, John Moffat's deputy and the NT's Engineering Services Manager, once spent six months helping to build the Nigerian National Theatre and worked at Sainsbury's HQ for 16 years before joining the NT six years ago. He's impressed by the flexibility and multiple skills of all the engineers. Guy Kendall (who used to design missile systems) and Dave Meredith (who was at the Science Museum until a couple of years ago) are two of them, but with rather special skills in electronics. They are responsible – along with Michael Lane who looks after the mechanical installations – for the revolve and power-flying systems, both of which were original to the NT building when it opened in 1976.

Visiting first one and then the other when The Life of Galileo is set on the Olivier stage is like experiencing some medieval idea of the universe, going from mechanical depths to the lace-work of the grid, a realm above the galaxies. “This”, says Guy of the drum revolve in the Olivier – all 150 tonnes of it, six floors below the stage – “was a Heath Robinson contraption when the theatre opened; now it's the most advanced in the world”. Its teething troubles were notorious, but John Moffat's team reconfigured the mechanical system when he arrived in the 90s and now Guy and Dave have completed its upgrade while its running is monitored, tested and improved day in, day out. The drum can be split while it turns so that, for instance, in The Wind in the Willows, Mole's home could rise and twist into view, then turn and sink to be replaced by Ratty's. In The Life of Galileo, the whole structure – 15 metres in diameter – turns 180 degrees in 34 seconds. His Dark Materials, the two-play adaptation of Philip Pullman's trilogy staged in 2003 and 2004, tested the possibilities to the limit with its numerous locations and magical transformations but (after a difficult beginning when the opening had to be postponed) it worked like a dream. And it is all controlled by programmes on two computers operated by someone in constant touch with stage management above.

The power-flying system is made up of 127 hoists each with a motor. Something called a “cyclo” controls the speed of each hoist – some of the original ones, now replaced, were date-stamped within weeks of the moon-landing – and the whole lot is controlled by a matrix reached by a vertical cat ladder. Even fewer people venture up here; actually a cat would think twice. The old system is still in place, the matrix a deliberate nest of hair-like wires. The new one is neater. Guy and Dave are genuinely enthusiastic about this extraordinary piece of electronic engineering. The early version, very advanced for 30 years ago, was pretty spectacular, with scenery able to travel, says Dave, “over a 30 metre drop at two metres a second and stop within three millimetres of the stage”. The new one is even more precise, even more reliable.

It's a truism that theatre is a collaborative business. John Moffat says that one of the things he likes about his job is that theatre is less hierarchical than industry. A manager he needs to work closely with is Rob Barnard, in his third year as Head of Stage Facilities (a new job under the Nicholas Hytner/Nick Starr regime) but with 29 NT years under his belt.

Rob began as a sound technician and now oversees sound, stage and lighting requirements for the stage. Lighting and sound equipment are being gradually upgraded and replaced – the Lyttelton and Cottesloe are already complete – over a number of years. He is particularly proud of two new state-of-the art sound studios where music is made and sound effects stored on computer. But storage of a more mundane nature is also important and, with the help of his teams, he has rationalised the logging of equipment of all kinds, from a lantern or a microphone to a chain hoist, so that new items are not bought unnecessarily. Two mezzanine floors will be built into a scene dock to house it all. Soon there will be a comprehensive data base so that a designer can see at a glance if something he or she needs is available before searching further afield.

Video is increasingly important to a modern theatre, both in stage design and for historical purposes. Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia, designed by William Dudley, reached an apotheosis in its use in 2002, but every production is filmed for the archive, whatever its design. Rob describes how the old fixed-camera process is being modernised so that two-camera filming and close-ups will soon be possible.

While the building is never at rest, its hitherto most ephemeral aspect – the productions themselves – will be perfectly captured for ever.

© Heather Neill, September 2006

Heather Neill is a freelance journalist and theatre writer