BP News

I didn't know the theatre was there

We are now past the shortest day and by now most of you visiting the theatre will have noticed that the theatre is no longer a dark building in the corner of the car park.

It was decided by the committee to use some of the Stephen Howard Homes sponsorship money to raise the profile of the theatre in a real practical way. This will hopefully stop anyone from saying in the future 'I didn't know the theatre was there'

To start with we have replaced the two security lights on either side of the building that suffered from damage a while ago. These are on daylight sensors and keep us secure all through the night. Also we have fitted a new daylight flood over the loading dock door to provide good light not only for stage access, but for audience arrival to the studio as well. We have added more path lights to the side of the theatre and up the ramp access to the right of the theatre. Unfortunately, the original design of lights was no longer available, so much research led me to the chosen design as the closest available, I hope you agree that they are close enough not to jar next to each other. The design was a bit of a challenge as the outside of the theatre has expanded very close to the limits of its borders. This causes a few headaches for a lighting design for the theatre facade.

I believe a building should sit in the landscape, not be just an illuminated box plonked on the land. To this end I installed four lamps to illuminate two feature trees each side of the theatre to frame the building, these will come into their own as the leaves grow and change through the season. At the moment they highlight the sculptural aspect of the trees. In addition we have illuminated areas of the slate roof to give some scale to the building.

We have added three small wall lights to the lower front approach to make it welcoming and add interest to the brick facia.

With little space at the front and trying to eliminate annoying glare in the eyes from floodlights we have chosen to light the front wall which houses the three display cabinets with uplighters to light the walls and add texture to the frontage.

We have chosen to illuminate the main frontage with signlights and emphasise the name. We will be adding an additional sign on the left side of the building where the magnetic board is situated. This will light the whole of the patio area.

There will be some 'fine tuning' as time goes on, but hopefully with our new bright posters and continuing promotional work from everyone we can say 'here we are'

We must thank Jim Watts for doing all the groundwork and Kevin Barbour Electrical for the installation.