Theater machen*

In the first couple of weeks of 2025, my place of work has transitioned from the Opera House to the Ballhof. As I described in the post about the Ballhof Café, the Ballhof is a building in the touristy area of Hannover run by Staatstheater Hannover, which comprises two relatively small theatre stages (Ballhof Eins and Ballhof Zwei) and of course the theatre Café. While the scale on which these stages operate is considerably smaller than that of the Opera, the rate of change there is if anything even greater. In the week that I have been there, 9 (nine!) different productions were scheduled to be performed on these two stages (as it happened, three of those were cancelled due to an illness in the cast, but I’ll gloss over that…). I managed to watch four of them. I’m not yet at the point where I can sit down an enjoy a play in German yet, but I can at least follow the broad strokes of what’s being said. Beyond my ‘debut’ on the Opera stage, working on the production of Satyagraha, I’ve said little about the productions I’ve been working on over the past months, so I thought I’d take the opportunity now to redress that omission, describing the opera, ballet and theatre I have witnessed from all angles, front and backstage.

The first play I saw at the Ballhof was called ‘Hier Spricht die Polizei’. The play is literally a transcript of things said in interviews by police about the pressures of working in the police force in Hannover (possibly Niedersachsen, I wasn’t completely sure) – I bolted on the skirting board of the office in which the play was set. The play reminded the audience of the human ‘behind the badge’.
The following evening I saw a German translation of the play Prima Facie, the one-woman play by Australian playwright Suzie Miller that brought Jodie Comer all her accolades on Broadway. Main character is a defence lawyer, who comes to doubt her whole vocation when she finds herself reporting a colleague for a crime she was accustomed to defending. I watched this sitting at the sound desk, watching as the pre-set lighting cues flicked by with the tap of a button. The advantage of sitting there was that I could also see the script to help me to pick up a bit more of the dialogue (that feels the right word even though one actor is delivering it).
The other two plays at the Ballhof were ‘Betonklotz 2000’ (concrete block 2000) and Blutbuch (Blood book).
Betonklotz centred on the young inhabitants of a real concrete block in Hannover. Much like with the Barbican, it was a lofty building intended to uphold lofty principles about community living and harmony of commerce, culture and leisure. The parallel with the Barbican falters when you consider that today this concrete block has fallen into disrepair and is largely unoccupied (as I understand it). Clearly this architectural failure didn’t deter future ambitious projects (see earlier post called ‘Schulduggery’).
Blutbuch I actually only saw the beginning of, so I have no idea what it has to do with blood or books. It started in the familiar surroundings of the Ballhof café. Where the three actors, all in drag, introduced themselves. What I particularly enjoyed about this introduction to the show was that the lead drag Queen, Olympia Bukkakis, is an English speaker (I think Australian, and based in Berlin), and I was able to follow pretty much every word spoken, in between the several quips in English.

The productions I worked on in the Opera House after Satyagraha were as follows: Hokus Pokus, Peer Gynt, Bajazzo, Salome, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (the opera by Britten), Hänsel & Gretel, Chicago, La Boheme, not necessarily in that order as they were always overlapping.
Peer Gynt and Hokus Pokus were the two ballet pieces I’ve been involved in. Peer Gynt is based on the Ibsen play, and included a selection of the incidental music by Grieg, as well as a movement of the piano concerto. It’s basically a bit like a Norwegian Candide, but with more trolls. Hokus Pokus I didn’t really come out of any the wiser. Part of the stage team’s duty for the ballet is to set the floor (tanzboden – I’m actually unsure of the correct terminology in English!). This involved rolling out strips of material across the entire width of the stage (each strip around 18m long and about 1.5m wide). The first layer is a sort of thin spongy material, and the layer on top is plastic (PVC). Enormous quantities of gaffer tape are used fixing the strips together and to the stage floor. Hokus Pokus had a forest of great big trees hanging down from the rails and sitting on massive tree stumps – one of our jobs was to catch the stumps as they were rolled out by the dancers.

Peer Gynt was a production imported from Slovenia, set and all. The Bühnenmeister (leaders of the stage team) had a fun time trying to work out how to put it all back together again. This was the production with the 7m-tall walls at the side of the stage which we simply let fall before deconstructing them. On one evening I was tasked with guiding a platform, dragged by a dancer with antlers (naturally) through a trap door in the wall. Not having had a chance to run this through, I was a bit thrown by the lopsidedness of the platform and had to quickly readjust, with the help of a couple of others!

Chicago and Hänsel & Gretel played to full houses throughout the Christmas period. Chicago was performed in German but with the words of the songs untouched. Musicals can have a habit of jarringly breaking out into song out of nowhere, but breaking out into song in a different language was a bit much to stomach dramaturgically. I had another opportunity to try out my spotlight skills at the premiere. I spotted Billy Flynn in his opening number in my first week in the lighting department.
The long-standing Hänsel & Gretel production is stuff of legend in Hannover. Everyone’s seen it, as it’s been staged every winter for the past fifty years, with set, lighting and direction virtually unchanged. The people working backstage are acutely aware of the age of the production, as the back of the scenery for Hänsel & Gretel’s home is scrawled with messages from the past, signed and dated. My limited involvement in this production amounted to helping set up the lights at the side of the stage and the big box which lit up with spooky eyes for the scene when they’re lost in the woods.
Salome and A Midsummer Night’s Dream took place while I was in the sound department. For Salome we had to set up a microphone right at the back of the stage with a monitor (with a live feed to the conductor’s podium) for the bits where John the Baptist (Jochanaan) sings offstage, and I once had to mop up the blood from the floor from when Salome brings on John the Baptist’s head.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, while having whacky set, including a comic moment when a giant canary drops from the sky onto the stage, when Demetrius injudiciously lets of his shotgun in a fit of anger, the sound department had little to do. We just had to test the backup microphone (not something I enjoyed, never knowing what to say into the microphone!) and setup the conductor video feed.
La Boheme is in four acts, so lots of set changes, and we in lighting had to ensure the lights at the side of the stage were cleared out of the way for the bits of set to come on and off the stage. There was one moment where a colleague and I were caught standing near where the chorus needed to be for their offstage moment. One singer unleashed her inner diva on us, admonishing us for such a grave transgression. When they’d sung their piece, this same singer dismissively swished her hand in the air indicating everyone in the area to clear the way for the chorus! The actual soloists are never guilty of such delusions of grandeur; I’ve always found them to be very courteous, but somehow some singers of the chorus feel more need to parade their status as performers.
Bajazzo is probably the production I’ve had most involvement in, as I’ve worked on it in two departments. When in sound, we had to set up monitors and microphones offstage for an oboe, a drum and a trumpeter – the trumpeter was unglamorously place halfway up a staircase leading to the orchestra pit. We also needed strategically placed monitors on the stage so the singers would be able to follow the conductor without facing him. Two futher monitors were place front of house, from where the chorus make their dramatic entrance, shuffling past the audience in the front seats. Bajazzo was another production on which I got to work the follow spot. Another responsibility of the lighting department is visual effects, whether that’s working a fog machine or pyrotechnics. On one production I was given the big red button to work the pyrotechnics, which were used on three occasions during the show. It’s a singular experience holding a device, armed and ready to cause a massive bang at the touch of a button, knowing that over a thousand people are watching. I was held on a tight leash, with the pyrotechnician clearly worried about my comprehension of his instructions (with good reason!), as head repeated over and over again ‘Don’t press it yet!!’.

Tonight at the Ballhof is ‘Hier Spricht die Polizei’ again and then rehearsals for Moby Dick, followed by an adaptation of Animal Farm. It’s never boring!

*’Theater machen’ literally means ‘making Theatre’ in German, which is a pretty good description of my job here in Germany. Idiomatically, though, it is used to mean ‘to throw a tantrum’.

Yearly Rutsch-ual

In German you don’t say ‘Merry Christmas’, the conventional greeting is Frohe Weihnachten (‘Joyful Holy Night’). The clunky literal translation gives an indication as to the subtly different way in which Christmas is viewed in Germany. Whereas in the UK there is a tendency to revere the day itself, the day of Jesus’s birth, and the day where we open presents, in Germany it’s all about the night before. Christmas day in Germany is simply the first of twelve days of celebration; the pivotal moment is the night before these days begin. It feels like the whole anticipation of these festival days is taken a lot more seriously in Germany. You don’t have to be a regular church-goer to sense the passing of the four Sundays of Advent, as it’s common enough to be wished a pleasant ‘second-third-fourth Sunday of Advent’ at the weekly market or at the local bakery. Windows and front doors all over are adorned with tissue-paper stars as soon as December arrives. And the first Glühwein of the year is a moment as treasured as any other over the Christmas period. It’s true that we have Advent calendars, Christmas songs on the radio from around mid-October(!) and plenty of pubs serving mulled wine here (I am writing this in London), but it is a mark of the Americanisation, the secularisation, of our culture how far removed these festive features all feel from the Nativity, compared to in Germany. Our Advent was marked by our participation in a ‘collective’ Advent calendar, put together by Sophia, Tabea’s sister. She gathered a list of 25+ friends and family to contribute 24 of a homemade gift to be distributed to the other members of the collective. Each day in December we opened a little bag of biscuits or a new Christmas decoration. Our contribution was a Glühwein spice-mix.

Just as with Christmas, the German terminology surrounding New Year betrays a difference in how the time is viewed. New Year’s Eve itself is referred to as ‘Sylvester’. And instead of wishing each other a Happy New Year, the most common greeting is to wish someone ‘einen guten Rutsch’ (literally, a good slide), i.e. wishing that the passage from one year to the next slips by happily – a pleasing analogy! The inadequacy of ‘Happy New Year’ is that it is used indiscriminately for the anticipation of a new year and to acknowledge that the transition into a new year has passed. ‘Guten Rutsch’ gives us a separate term for the days leading up to the new year.
In the equivalent days of last year, when people were wishing each other einen guten Rutsch and not yet frohes neues Jahr, I was in limbo. I knew that the move to Germany was approaching, but I didn’t yet know what I would be doing in Germany. I had applied to the Ausbildung, but was awaiting a response to find out whether I had been accepted. It’s a wonder to contemplate how different my situation is now to where it was a year ago. Then, I was busying myself with electrical jobs here and there and continuing the odd bit of tutoring. I had never even seen Hannover’s Opera House, and my German had hardly progressed from when I did my GCSE in 2005. Since then I’ve learned enough German to obtain a new visa from the German Embassy, we’ve found ourselves a new home in a new country. I’ve got to know a few of the 1,000+ new colleagues I now work with at the Staatstheater, making the first steps on the path to a completely new career.

One of the most pleasing things of all is the revival of this blog. Ever since I started the earlier version of this blog as a way of documenting my travels in China, I’ve had the itch to write. It seems that travelling is the only thing thus far that has given me the impetus to consistently share my experiences in writing. Crucial to that impetus is the knowledge that there are people out there interested enough to read what I have to write. And so, thank you to everyone who takes the time to follow my experiences and musings. To every one of you I wish einen guten Rutsch!

Peipzig

With the advent of… erm… Advent, we decided to take advantage of a rare free weekend and hop on a train to visit Tabea’s youngest brother Jonathan and his girlfriend, Lisabet, for a couple of nights in Leipzig. The Christmas markets here start popping up during November, so they were in full swing for our visit to Leipzig, meaning that Christmas shopping was very much on the agenda. Delayed by a mere half an hour, we arrived on the Friday evening at Leipzig’s monumentally huge railway station – it’s the largest in Europe (by floor area)!
We followed the sign to the trams, following Jonathan’s directions about the line and direction we had to take. On our way to the tram we saw another sign to the trams, pointing back the way we came. This brings me to a general point about signs in Germany, particularly on local transport. They are exhaustingly ambiguous, if not completely wrong. They don’t make life easy for the casual traveller. In Hannover’s U-Bahn system there’s a subtle but crucial difference between an arrow that points right and another that points right with a bend in it; misinterpret it and you’ll be on a train going in the opposite direction. The only indication you get of the direction of a train is the destination of that train. If you don’t know in advance the destination of the train you are catching then only a compass will direct you to the correct platform.
Needless to say, we chose the wrong sign ‘to the trams’ and made our way around the circumference of the largest train station in Europe to find the correct tram stop! We were welcomed to a delicious spread of salads and cheeses after we’d been given ‘the tour’.

The next morning, after a breakfast of Brötchen (always a treat), we set off by foot to the centre of town, where it seemed every square metre of open space was occupied by a Christmas market stall. Incidentally, the route took us right past the giraffe enclosure of Leipzig Zoo – very reminiscent of Regent’s Park! As we stepped onto the Marktplatz, heaving with people, we could see countless stalls selling decorative stars, or hand-carved wooden toys; the air was heady with the smell of Glühwein, and drifting through the stalls was the sound of a brass band playing carols. It took us a while to realise that this brass band was playing high up from the balcony of the Rathaus (Town Hall), wrapped up from the cold in traditional Saxon dress.

After scanning a few stalls/shops for presents and lunch options, we took temporary refuge from the crowds in the Zeitgeschichtliches Forum (‘Forum of Contemporary History’), which houses a permanent exhibition on the history of the DDR (East Germany). The exhibition gives a sobering account of opposition to the authoritarian rule imposed on East Germans after the second World War. It also surveys a more quotidian side to East German life with run-of-the-mill products produced by an economy failing to keep pace with the strident march of Western capitalism. To a modern viewer the posters, cars and gadgets looks quaint, but it must be uncanny leap into the past for those in Leipzig who remember those days. I’ve grown up so accustomed to the idea that history museums exhibit times beyond living memory; it must be a strange to witness a time you’ve experienced first hand on display like that. It reminds me of when Dad saw a keyboard, just like the one he had upstairs, on display in the collection of historical musical instruments at the Horniman Museum in London.
We rounded off the trip through the Christmas markets with a ‘Handbrot’ (roll filled with cheese and bits of ham, melted in a woodfire oven, and topped with sour cream and – the healthy bit – a sprinkle of diced pepper), and a trip up to the viewing platform of the tallest tower in Leipzig. This building, nicknamed the Weisheitszahn (wisdom tooth), is immediately adjacent to Lisabet’s workplace, the MDR (Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk), where she plays double bass in the orchestra, and across the Augustusplatz from the Opera House (our rivals!).

We got back to the flat just in time to catch Arsenal’s game against West Ham. Jonathan, like me, follows the goings on in the Premier League a little more than is perhaps healthy; the only trouble is that he supports Liverpool. Still, his Sky subscription meant a rare opportunity to catch my team on live TV. And what a game! Seven goals scored before half time, and five of them for Arsenal. It took a couple of rounds of board games to wind down from all the football excitement.

Most of the remaining time in Leipzig was set aside to meet up with Johannes, a musician friend of Tabea’s. They played a lot together early on in Tabea’s career (if you’re interested there are two albums featuring both of them available on Spotify, just search Tabea Debus and you’ll find them. Upon a Ground and Tr!josonaten both feature Johannes). Johannes has gone on to take a position as Organist at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig. Now this is not just any old church organist role, since the Thomaskirche is the church in Germany that is today most closely associated with the life of JS Bach himself. That is because the Thomaskirche is what gave its name to the role that Bach would occupy for the majority of his working life: Thomaskantor. Johannes very kindly offered to give us a tour of the different organs in the Thomaskirche, improvising little snippets to demonstrate the effects of various combinations of stops. And yes, he did at one point ‘pull out all the stops’!
We joined Johannes at his regular haunt across the road from the church where he was greeted by every member of staff who caught sight of him as a dear, old friend. The Austrian-style restaurant was a bit fancier than what we’re used to, but we took this as a moment to splash out a bit, given we had just been treated to such an exclusive Thomaskirche experience.

No inter-city trip in Germany would be complete without a train anecdote, and this was no exception. We arrived at Leipzig’s Hauptbahnhof with plenty of time to spare because the DB (Deutsche Bahn) App had informed us that our train would be exceptionally busy and we wanted to be sure of a seat. With characteristically nebulous signage, the platform displays informed us that we had to walk half a mile up the platform – maybe they thought they could make up a couple of minutes if the train stopped early?! After we’d trekked all that way, only then was there an announcement informing us of a change of platform. Fortunately it was only the adjacent platform, so we didn’t have to walk all the way back again. In fact, the displays of the two platforms were simultaneously telling us that the other platform was the one we needed for our journey. Finally our train arrived, but as it approached, it dawned on us that it was coming in too fast to stop in time. Doing a half walk/half run we hurried back to the beginning of the platform, not wanting to lose our hard-won advantage from turning up early. No sooner had that train come to a halt than another train arrived on the other platform. Passengers looked to each other in bemusement, hoping someone would have a clue what was going on. Eventually a announcement went up. The second train was the one we wanted, because the first train had a problem, forcing everyone to change; and so the scrum for seats commenced. DB trains do not require passengers to make a seat reservation, but that is available to passengers for a fee. Those reservations are supposed to be displayed above the seats so we know which are available, but that system wasn’t working. This meant that several unassuming passengers were being ousted from their seats by others with a reservation. We received a stay of execution because my seat was only booked from a later station, from which point I had to make do with sitting on a step. The ‘fun’ continued when we made an unscheduled stop just outside Hannover because the radio system on the train was down. After all that, it was scarcely believable that we were only 20 minutes late – it felt a lot more. But that shouldn’t detract from a very enjoyable weekend of markets and organ pipes (peips!) in the capital of Saxony.

Two-lift Feat

If I’m a little slack with my WhatsApp message (see previous post), my email correspondence is hardly much better. A couple of weeks ago an Azubi-related email remained untouched in my inbox over the weekend with the subject heading ‘Steigerschulung 1. Lehrjahr’. I paid it little heed; it was sent to several people, and I didn’t really get what Steigerschulung meant. If I’d given it a moment’s thought I would have clocked that 1. Lehrjahr (first study year, i.e. first-year Azubis) was very much pertaining to me and probably required my attention. I did however gather that something was going on the next day when messaged circulated on a WhatsApp group, organising a pickup point the following morning. My confused response was followed almost immediately by a phone call from fellow Azubi, Lukas, telling me to check my emails. Sure enough, there was that email, gathering dust in my inbox, still in bold typeface, yet to be acknowledged as ‘read’. The email informed us that we had at the last minute been booked onto a training day, and we had to ask our respective departments if we could be allowed the day off to accommodate this.

Through a combination of Lukas’ call, the email, and consultation with Tabea, it transpired that ‘Steigerschulung’ meant training in the use of vehicles with lifts on them. A couple of these lifts are used on the stage of the Opera House. In certain cases the rails above the stage are used to hang walls. They are so big that it’s not practical to lay them down every time they’re taken down. Instead, walls tend to be stored upright at the sides of the stage when they’re not used. As such, someone needs to be stood at the top of a wall in order to attach it to the rail. This is where the lift comes in. They are referred to by their brand-name ‘Genie’, which caused me significant confusion when I was first introduced to them by the stage team! One such wall was the one used for the production of Richard Strauss’ Salome. The steel-framed wall, painted gold, was stored in two parts, as it was too high up to store in one piece. When the two pieces were bolted together the whole thing weighed three and a half tonnes! That is too much for one of the rails, so the weight has to be shared between two. It took most of the stage team pushing all at once to shift these walls on and off the stage on its set of wheels. The day’s training ahead would allow us to go up on a genie and attach walls to rails.

The day’s training began at 8 in the northern outskirts of Hannover, which was a bit of a strain, given by then I was well-accustomed to the late starts in Ton (sound department). I happened to catch the same bus as fellow Azubi, Zhuoyi. The address guided us towards an industrial park, and our training site was the very last building along a row of featureless buildings. There was no mistaking it, what with all the brightly-coloured cherry pickers parked around the back – the training company’s (Liftkontor) main line of business appeared to be hiring out ‘Hebebühne’ (literally ‘lifting platforms’) including Genies like the ones we use at the Opera. The receptionist pointed us upstairs to the teaching room, which overlooked a warehouse full with Hebebühne of all shapes and sizes. There we were eventually joined by a group of four or five guys who were on an Ausbildung at some kind of air-conditioning installation company, and another guy who had done the course before but needed a refresher for insurance reasons. We were then talked at about Hebebühne for the next four or so hours.

We did get free drinks and a lunch of currywurst mit pommes for our troubles. I remember very little of those hours, but somehow I’d just about managed to take in enough to pass the multiple-choice test after lunch! The teaching included a couple of instructional videos on the importance of properly securing your Hebebühne before using it. That included a sobering interview with a guy who had come crashing down from a cherry picker when the soft ground gave way to the supports holding the vehicle upright. He woke up from a coma with a long list of gruesome injuries. Just the sort of thing you like to hear about just before trying it for yourself! The test I would not have passed but for the leniency of the instructor. He let me use the Google translator function on my phone and even sat with me through the last couple of questions to hurry me to the end, giving fairly heavy hints about what answers he would give if he were in my position!

So with all that out the way it was time to be fitted with our harnesses and helmets. That seemed overkill for the Genies we were about to try out. Naturally, no such precaution is taken by the stage team at the Opera. The instructor took our group round to a smaller warehouse, and there he selected a couple of Genies for us, demonstrating how the controls work. Everyone in the group was required to compete two simple tasks. The first was to raise the Genie to its full height and then push out the platform extension so we could reach out and touch a chain. Then, at height, we had to back the Genie away slowly before returning to ground level. The second task was a slalom, weaving between cones laid out along the middle of the warehouse. Once you got a hold of the slightly counterintuitive controls, this was a piece of cake. Each of us were ticked off a list as we completed the two tasks.

I was under the impression from the introduction to our day that we’d probably finish a bit earlier than the eight hours stipulated in the joining instructions I’d neglected to read when we were first sent them. But our day was not through. With everyone proving their capabilities we were taken out into the car park. But there were no cars around. Only an array of cherry pickers parked unassumingly around the perimeter. We were shown to a nice red one. Our instructor opened up the bonnet, revealing a load of heavy-duty machinery and a massive engine. On the other side were the controls. One volunteer had a quick go at lifting and extending the arm of the cherry picker. Then he asked, ‘who wants to have a go?’. Lukas and Ole, the other of the four of us representing the Staatstheater leaped at the opportunity to live out the dream of their inner five-year-old! So they took their place on the platform of the cherry picker, clipping their harnesses into the guard rail. Our instructor was not the micro-managing kind, he was happy to continue explaining features of the cherry picker while Lukas and Ole proceeded to prod at the buttons to see what would happen.

As the instructor continued to talk to us, his back turned to the pair of boys trying out a new and expensive toy, edging the machine jerkily out of its parking space, a thought occurred to me: I’ve seen this before; in fact, anyone who has watched an episode of a classic sitcom like ‘Only Fools and Horses’, Some Mother Do ‘ave ’em’ or ‘Fawlty Towers’ will have seen this before. I know what’s supposed to happen: The instructor, calm as you like, continues his lesson while the hapless newbies lose control of their vehicle as its movements become ever more erratic. Perhaps the cherry picker ploughs through the car park fence, or Ole and Lukas get caught 30m hanging by their harness because they lost their footing.
I struggled to suppress a laugh as these scenarios flew through my mind.

Then came mine and Zhuoyi’s turn. We were the last to try it out. The instructor suggested we raise our platform as high as it will possibly go, to ‘dial it up to eleven’, as it were! We drove out to the middle of the car park, and then tried all the different buttons, unfurling and stretching the neck of the crane to its fullest extent. I don’t generally suffer from a fear of heights, but I have to admit it gave me the heebie jeebies when we were high enough to overlook the top of the warehouse and the arm of our Hebebühne was no longer visible because it was underneath us. It was a bit of a relief to set foot again on solid ground. Lukas and Ole looked on enviously seeing the height we reached, so convinced the instructor to allow them one final go.

And with that we packed off home, another step closer to completing our Ausbildung.

Havin’ a Ballhof

One aspect of the Ausbildung I am not enjoying is the occasional influx of unwarranted messages from the various WhatsApp groups I’ve been obliged to join. Unsurprisingly the worst culprit is the Berufschule group, largely owing to the fact it has the most members, but also because of its greater emphasis on socialising rather than work. It may include useful information to do with our course, but I wouldn’t know, reluctant as I am to trawl through the memes for scraps of relevant information. Adding to my reluctance to engage with these groups is the language hurdle. For me it takes more than a cursory glance to follow what’s being said, and even then I’m not sure whether I’ve got the wrong end of the stick. How I’ve taken skim-reading for granted!

The other groups are all Azubi related. There’s one for all the Veranstaltungstechniker, another for our year group, and recently a new one has been started called ‘Ballhof Café’. Ballhof is the name of the smaller of the three venues under the Staatstheater Hannover umbrella, all of which I will get a chance to work in at some point. Ballhof is in the Old Town and comprises of two relatively small stages and a café, run by Silke. Silke came to visit us at one of our weekly Azubi meetings to tell us about the regular open mic evenings she organises at the café. She has struck a mutually beneficial arrangement with the Ausbildung scheme, whereby the Azubis volunteer to help with setting up the sound and light for these events. We get invaluable experience working in a smaller space with more responsibility, and she doesn’t have to shell out for professionals who actually know what they’re doing!

It definitely sounded like something I wanted to get involved in, but I doubted whether I would be much use, not being able to understand everything. That doubt was enough to put me off engaging much with the group – and anyone who has participated in a WhatsApp group with me in the past will know that I need little excuse to take a back seat! A few weeks later I was shamed into a response because Emil, who had signed up for one of these evenings, asked at our weekly meeting what was putting us off from putting our hands up too. I took to the WhatsApp group and finally signalled my willingness to take part, with strong reservations about whether I’d be of any use, what with the language and all. His response in the group was swift: “Great! I’ll be at the café tomorrow from 4:30. See you there!” Now I had only intended to say that I was in principle willing to take part at some point, I didn’t think I’d be there the very next day! I checked with the sound department who had no problem with me getting a bit of hands on experience.

I parked up my bike just a few minutes before Emil arrived to let us into the unoccupied theatre café. It seemed ridiculous to me that just hours later I would be acting as a roadie in this alien place, with equipment I’d never used before, and people I’d never met before, playing music I’d never heard before! Everything was new. We set up the two microphones (if three wanted to sing at once, the third would have to just have to sing loudly!) and the monitor speakers, as well as preparing leads for the amplifiers to be provided by the performers. The speakers for the microphones were already in place at the back of the stage. This arrangement is present a significant risk of feedback, and our main objective in setting up the sound desk was to reduce risk as much as possible. Emil showed me how to go through the levels, suppressing the frequencies prone to feedback in that space. I was desperately hanging onto every word I could, as this all would have been challenging enough to absorb in English.

From the minute we started there was no hanging about. Various acts started showing up for their sound checks right up until curtain-up. The first group to show up was a band of 14(ish)-year-olds with their biggest fans in tow – their parents, complete with branded hoodies proudly bearing the unpronounceable name of their band! Their set included American Idiot by Greenday and other favourites of the punk rock genre. Managing the balance in a space as small as that with a drum kit playing at full volume was no small task. Emil did admirably, even having to fend off unhelpful suggestions from the mother of the singer that his mic needed to be twice as loud! Thankfully the subsequent acts were somewhat longer in the tooth and, dare I say it, more talented too. There was a band of fifty-somethings that played, among other things, Wicked Game by Chris Isaak (you’ll recognise it – I had to look up what it was called), which required us to go heavy on the reverb. There was a stand-up comic, a pianist/singer-songwriter, a guitarist/singer-songwriter, and a fun trio of older men from different countries, who played songs in German, Spanish and Yiddish.

There was a mini crisis with the guitarist, whose semi-acoustic guitar wasn’t behaving, setting off Emil’s nerves – I was too baffled by the whole occasion to get nervous! Emil’s solution was to use the second mic to pick up the guitar, rather than going through the amp, which introduced a new complication, as the mics were so close there was too much bleed between them. The best we could do was to direct the mics away from each other as much as possible. But that was about as hairy as things got with Emil at the helm. His virtuoso moment came when one singer was introducing the next song, which was about the sea. Quick as a flash, Emil ramped up the blue and green stage lighting, replacing the warm lighting with a fresh seascape. I wonder if anyone in the audience appreciated this moment of flair – the technicians equivalent of a flashy solo!

Silke seemed happy with our work, making a point of thanking us at the end of the evening, and she said it was the biggest audience she had ever had for an open mic night. We were also sustained throughout the evening by free soft drinks from behind the bar. Even though my contribution towards the success of the evening was paltry, I couldn’t help feeling a swell of pride simply from being a part of it.

Blockenspiel

Tabea recently returned from another stint of performing in the UK. It’s an irony of our new living situation that she now has far more opportunities to travel back to my homeland than I do. The regular trips across the Channel are partly due to the UK-based contacts accumulated over a decade living in London, but also because of Tabea’s continued membership of the recorder quartet Palisander. They perform a wide range of repertoire to all sorts of audiences across the country, and even across Europe, from cutting-edge new compositions (including by their own member Miriam) right back to the renaissance – the heyday of the recorder’s prestige. The instruments that those very earliest pieces were written for are a different breed to the baroque style that is likely to come to mind when one conjures the image of a ‘normal’ recorder. And for that earlier repertoire the quartet has their own recorder consort, consisting of 8 instruments of varying sizes.

Tabea needs a renaissance recorder consort for her teaching at the conservatoire in Hannover, and fortunately the early music department possesses such a specimen commissioned specially back in 2004, made by recorder maker Adrian Brown, who is based in Holland. As is only natural working with a natural material to minutely precise specifications, the wood can alter over time, requiring the instruments to be ‘revoiced’. And no-one is better qualified to make those subtle adjustments than the maker him-/herself. That is why Tabea needed to drop by Holland on her way back from London last week – to pick up the conservatoire’s freshly revoiced recorder consort from Adrian Brown. As I happened to have a couple of days off, I was enlisted to drive up to Münster to meet Tabea, from where we’d head to Adrian’s home and workshop the next day just across the border.

Driving that way it was remarkable how abrupt the change of scenery was as we passed from one country to the next. Suddenly the built-up rows of small businesses and houses made from red brick were replaced by green farmland; the road markings were all different, and instead of a cramped cycle lane painted on the side of the road there was a spacious, airy side road set aside for cyclists, mopeds and tractors; and the roads were often prettily lined with trees, bringing to mind those studies on perspective you might see in Van Gogh’s paintings, where an avenue of trees shrinks into the distance towards a singular point on the canvas. We parked up at the sleepy, strangely British-looking town of Bredevoord. The cobbled streets curved around pubs and bookshops, and even the faint drizzle made us feel like we’d arrived at the stepping stone between England and Germany.

We were met at the door by Adrian Brown himself, where he was keen to show Tabea the result of his work on the recorders he had first crafted twenty years ago. The workshop was lined with all sorts of fine-tuning tools and lathe machines. Once the business side of things was done, Adrian invited us to lunch in his home upstairs with his wife, Susanna, also a recorder-player. We were treated to a simple but delicious spread of soup, bread cheese and ham. And we were treated a cup of tea, which, given the location, could only have been made by someone who has also suffered from that peculiarly British ‘Arthur Dent’ syndrome: the quest for a good cup of tea when one is far from home – it tasted just right!

This is not my first experience of enjoying the generous hospitality of someone who makes recorders (Blockflöte in German) for a living. Earlier this year, during the Easter break, Tabea finally had the time available to pay a visit to Sebastian Meyer. Despite already owning around 50 recorders, she was in great need of at least one more! Sebastian took up his trade from his father Ernst Meyer, of whose recorders Tabea is a proud owner of 6. The Meyer family business used to operate from a workshop in Paris, but now Sebastian is based in the mountains of Switzerland, about an hour’s drive from Zurich. This remote location was the main reason it had been difficult for Tabea to pin down a date for the visit. Seeing as this workshop was in such an idyllic setting, we decided to make a holiday of it, and booked ourselves a few nights’ stay at an Airbnb ‘hut’ situated on a family farm, but Sebastian offered to put us up for our first night in Switzerland.

In the end, his mother-in-law happened to be there and there wasn’t a bed for us, so he put us up in the local guest house, which had plenty of rooms available, as the unseasonably warm weather had brought the ski season to an early close. The guesthouse was something of a revelation. Run by an elderly couple who spoke Swiss German only – Tabea understood only a little more than I could! – the centuries-old, low-ceilinged hotel had the feeling of stepping into a time-capsule. It wasn’t just the age of the building, which certainly added to the charm, but the service brought you back to a time when hospitality was a vocation rather than a business.

Sebastian, no doubt eager for future custom from Tabea, also treated us to a meal at a nearby Chinese restaurant. Not having ever earnt, or spent, all that much money, I’ve not experienced before being schmoozed. I have to admit I quite liked it! Not that Sebastian came across as insincere at all. On the contrary he came across as genuinely impassioned, almost obsessed, by his work – a quality I imagine is common to a lot of people who enter into such niche line of work, whose chief reward is the satisfaction of a job well done.

Back in Holland and replete from our wholesome meal, we packed up the consort in their specially-made set of cloth pouches and set off on the Autobahn back to Hannover.

On the Spot

I’ve had just two days back in the stage team at the Opera. After the weeks of Berufschule I was all geared up for a return to action. I’d missed the hubbub of set-changes, premieres and just the general day-to-day unpredictability of life at an Opera House. On Saturday, this mood was somewhat punctured when it became clear that there was hardly anything for us to do. The starkly minimal set for Richard Strauss’s Salome was already in place by the time our shift started, and the minimalism of the production left us twiddling our thumbs throughout the performance – I spent much of it sat in the lighting gallery, following the opera’s libretto on my phone along with the performance. All the work came right at the end of the shift, when we were required to take down the set ready for the next day’s shift to take over.

Sunday’s shift was similarly sparse. The difference was that Fabian, a member of the lighting department, saw us (me and another Azubi, Zhuoyi) at a loose end and decided to enlist our help for that evening’s staging of Verdi’s Requiem. This is not the first time we’ve been asked to help out other departments; it was in our very first week we were roped in to help the carpentry team with lugging around new cupboards designed to store the orchestra’s percussion instruments. On another occasion we were taken up to the top of the building with a few buckets; our task was to bail out the water that had collected in the air control system for the machinery above the stage. All small tasks, which you would never have thought would be part of keeping an Opera House running.

I imagined that’s the sort of thing we had in store for us in the lighting department on Sunday. We regularly see them on the stage changing around lights set up on the lighting bars above the stage. I imagined we would just be an extra pair of hands to shift around lighting equipment. Fine by me, especially on such a quiet day!
But we didn’t have to carry anything, instead we were taken right up into the gods overlooking the stage, where all the spotlights were set up. We were given a quick overview of how the lights work. The spotlights are enormous – at least a metre long – and they must have been decades old. A white dial on the side controlled the shutters, effectively acting as a dimmer. Half way down the light is a selection of levers sticking out, which are there to change the size and shape projected onto the stage. And to ensure that you’ve got the light pointing roughly the right direction when the shutters are opened, the light is mounted with crosshairs, just like you’d see on a sniper rifle, but set to the side as it would be a strain to look over the top of them.

Above each light was a light box where the cues for that light would be printed out and displayed. It included helpful pointers like ‘old guy, in black, comes through the tunnel holding a picture’ for those uninitiated with the intricacies of that particular production, at the number of the cue for the start and the end of that spot.
It wasn’t too much of a strain working out how it all worked despite the explanation being in German. We got a chance to try out all the levers and follow a couple of people who happened to be walking around the stage.
We were allocated a time to report back during the show so we could see these cues put into action.

As that time approached I wondered to myself: had I just assumed that we’d be watching? I missed the bit where it was explained exactly what our role would be. This doubt nagged at me. The first job was to find the lighting office. I’d been there a couple of times before – it was just through a door leading off the stage on the left side (I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned before that ‘stage left’ means exactly the opposite to what it would on a British stage!). The trouble is there was a performance going on at the time, and waltzing across the stage at that moment would have been a bad idea. Now could I remember how to access that area via the backstage? The clock was ticking! We took the backstage lift down to the basement level. We just about managed between us to choose the right door and make it to the staircase we needed.

We retraced the steps we’d made earlier that afternoon to the spotlight studio, remembering to ease the door shut slowly, as there was a performance going on with its audience just below us. There were just the three of us up there, me, Zhuoyi, and the member of the lighting team who had shown us around earlier. She told us to grab ourselves a set of headphones. “But aren’t those for the lighting operator?” – I asked to myself, realising at the same moment what the answer must be. We were the lighting operators!

The nerves kicked in a bit and I spent the next several minutes practising following around the singers on the stage looking through the crosshairs (with the shutters down, of course!). My target, the tenor dressed in white, was pointed out to me. I wasn’t mentally prepared for this! On our headphones we heard the lighting cues being given: “Achtung 302…” then a pause… “Go”. My cue was 400; I had plenty of time yet. “Achtung 304…, 305…, 306…, 400…” “Eh?! That’s me! I hadn’t realised the numbers jump to the next hundred when we move into a new scene.
I hovered my hand over the shutter control waiting for my “Go”, with the tenor in my sights. With my hands clamped to the handles of the light I traced every move that singer made, never having seen any of this happen before, waiting for the cue to relieve me from my duty.
“Can you do something about the size of the spot? It’s massive” A new voice interjected to shake me from my concentration. Which lever was it that changed the size?? I hesitated, while trying to make sure my tenor remained illuminated. It must be this lever; I’ll try this one… Phew!
“Merci” Whoever that was at the end of the line, he was satisfied.

I had one more cue (602) before I was done, for which I needed to change the filter. I had to keep an spot on the bass dressed in black. When the cue came this time, the singer was largely bathed in light already. Had I definitely opened the shutters? I couldn’t see my spot. It was only when he drifted to a new part of the stage that I was reassured that my light was actually doing something.
By the time our final cue came, all three of us were working a spotlight. There was a moment of satisfying synchronicity when we closed our shutters exactly together.n

Fabian had arrived by the end. He asked if we’d had fun and then added, “For your first time that was not bad at all.” I’ll take that!

Schul-duggery

Today I can breathe a sigh of relief. I’ve made it through my first stint of Berufschule (vocational school). It’s a humbling experience walking into a classroom of strangers,* on average around 15 years younger than you, and picking out your seat amongst them. It’s more humbling still that you are embarrassed to speak because it will reveal your shortcomings in the language and there’s a real chance you won’t be able to understand the subsequent response. But it really took the biscuit when my first interaction with the teacher was him chastising me for having had the audacity to arrive at school without a laptop, but only a notebook and pen to take notes. It’s a salutary lesson on the relentless march of technological progress that when I was last at school I didn’t own a laptop, a smartphone, and I’d never even heard of an app! My classmates would have considered such a condition of destitution tantamount to child abuse! It turns out that we had been informed of the requirement for a laptop via a paragraph within the link of an email forwarded to us by the Ausbildung coordinator of the Staatstheater at about the time I was trying to apply for a German visa. Needless to say, I wasn’t the only one there to have overlooked this detail.

You have to question the wisdom of requiring young adults to sit in front of a computer all day with full access to the internet while a teacher is trying to explain the correct name for a plug on a particular type of audio device. Sat near the back of the room I had a great view of the screens accessing various gaming portals. By the end of the two weeks about half of them spent most of the time on Minecraft, occasionally drifting in and out of the lesson to maintain the pretence that they were paying attention.

A full day at the school is a bit of a slog. We start at 8am and get a 20 minute break after each 1hr30 of lesson time. On Thursdays we followed this pattern all the way through to 4:05. I felt sorry for myself setting off on my bike in the twilight at 7am, but others coming from outside Hannover had to start their journeys at around 5am! Knowing what you do from reading this blog about German trains, it won’t surprise you to learn that late arrivals were commonplace – oversleeping was also a regular occurrence. Fortunately the days weren’t all like that, as we could start late and finish early on Tuesdays and Fridays.

We had a few teachers introducing us to a range of aspects of the work of a Veranstaltungstechniker. One, who happens to be the father of one of the stage people at the Opera, took us through the key equipment for rigging at events. Another focused on the properties of different microphones, as well as a bit of trigonometry. A third droned through all the audio equipment at the school and the different types of plugs they use, and one more taught us about standard Scheinwerfer (spotlights) and their different properties.

The location of the school is bleak, dystopian even. It’s just a vast carpark’s length from the Ikea we went to a few weeks ago. I say dystopian because the whole area is imbued with that sense of unfulfilled ambition when grand building projects lose their sense of purpose. It is no mystery where this sense comes from, as Hannover played host to the world expedition, Expo 2000, and this mass of concrete and glass was its venue (I read that this area, the Messegelände, is the world’s largest such exhibition venue!). It was no doubt impressive when it was all shiny and new, with some 20 million visitors from around the world. The problem for Hannover, and the organisers, was that they had planned for twice as many. The expo area was designed, extraordinarily, by Albert Speer, son of the more notorious architect to go by that name. The buildings that remain are concert/conference halls, car showrooms, soulless training centres (like ours) or they have completely fallen into disuse in the intervening 24 years (longer ago than when most of my classmates were born!).

More pertinently to me, the school is also a lot further from home than the Opera House. The daily 15min cycle became 40 to get to school, and took the best part of an hour by tram. I felt a bit stretched cycling that distance there and back for five days in a row, especially along with an energy-sapping day of struggling to follow lesson after lesson in German. I took it a bit easier the second week, though I had little choice in the matter… Heading back last Tuesday, I noticed the left pedal of my bike didn’t feel quite right. I stopped to check the problem but couldn’t see any signs of damage so I continued. Moments later the pedal fell with a clatter to the floor. After years of heavy use, and perhaps a little rust, the pedal had snapped clean off! Luckily you’re allowed to take bikes on the tram because otherwise I would have been forced to scoot my bike the 9km home. In a typically Debus-like show of no-nonsense enterprise Kilian (Tabea’s brother, who happens to be something of a cycling enthusiast) dropped by last weekend with a spare set of pedals and the tools to change them over.

Back to the curriculum, as well as the technical stuff we had lessons in German, Politics and English on our timetable. All were mystery to me in their own way. In the two German classes we had, the teacher gave a long explanation of how the German is assessed and a lengthy summary of the events that had led to her becoming an German teacher at a Berufsschule in Hannover. The second lesson we watched two clips of police representatives talking to the press, and that was followed by a discussion of who presented themselves better. I suppose it was a lesson in German in so much as it’s teaching how to use language effectively.
Politics was not so much concerned with elections and government as with the politics of a workplace; we were shown the documents relating to our rights as Azubis (apprentices). This is my loose interpretation of what was going on; the vast majority went way over my head. But at least there was English, where I ought to be able to excel! In the first English lesson, I’m not sure a single word of English was spoken. The class was simply tasked with introducing itself …in German – I didn’t even get a break in English! The next lesson we were given a test to do. Somehow I only managed 93%, which tragically was not even top of the class.

This weekend I’ll be glad to be back with the stage team at the Opera. It’s Strauss’s Salome on Saturday and Verdi’s Messi da Requiem on Sunday. In my absence, the Opera has really hit its stride!

Cookie Crook

One of the more famous names associated with Hannover is that of Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz. Leibniz was born in Leipzig, but ended up spending much of his career in and around Hannover in the service of the House of Brunswick, progenitors of Britain’s House of Hanover. Quite the polymath, he is known for his work on the development of calculus – bringing him into conflict with Isaac Newton over the primacy of their ideas – as well as for his optimistic philosophical writing – it was he who coined the much ridiculed (by Voltaire in Candide) phrase ‘the best of all possible worlds’. But the name Leibniz is perhaps most widely known for the biscuits that bear his name produced by Hannover-based food company Bahlsen, whose headquarters happen to be just around the corner from our flat. The stately building in a sort of pockmarked stone that gives it the appearance of a grey cork is adorned above the entrance with a copper-green statue group holding a giant, gilded Leibniz biscuit.

This particular cookie has crumbled far more interestingly than most in its lifetime. It was created specially for the building, which opened in 1911 – around the same time that the building we live in was built. Sensationally, around 100 years on from the time it was hung, the 20-kilo biscuit vanished overnight. A ransom note was duly sent to Bahlsen and the local paper, with a peculiar set of demands. The note included a photo of someone dressed up as the Sesame Street character, the Cookie Monster, holding the much-treasured symbol of Bahlsen’s success. The writer threatened that if Bahlsen did not send a consignment of chocolate biscuits to a particular children’s hospital (incidentally I pass this very hospital on my bike on the way to my Berufschule!) and make a €1,000 donation to an animal shelter, the gold-plated confection would be deposited with Oscar the Grouch in his trash can (they really committed fully to the Sesame Street theme!).

Bahlsen, making the most of this PR coup, responded by offering to donate 52,000 packs of biscuits to 52 different social concerns, which would be chosen by lottery – the number 52 is a reference to the number of indentations around the edge of a Leibniz biscuit. Apparently, the thieves were appeased, because on 5 February 2013, just 15 days after it went missing, the Keks was found tied with a red ribbon around the neck of a bronze horse statue in front of Hannover’s Leibniz University.

To this day, the identity of biscuit bandits responsible for this crumbly conundrum remains unknown. A mural behind the Bahlsen building points to the most likely suspect…

Bat-yagraha

Last Friday I had my first experience working on a show night at the Opera House, and a premiere at that. It was the first performance of a new production of the Philip Glass 1979 opera Satyagraha, a three-act minimalist opera all in Sanskrit. The decision to open the Opera’s season with this obscure work says everything you need to know about the Hannover audience’s willingness to be challenged with daring programming. We had already experienced this inclination to promote less-heralded pieces when we came to visit Hannover at the beginning of this year. Then they were showing Lear, a modern German opera based on Shakespeare’s play by Aribert Reimann (I’d never heard of him either; and I discover in looking up his name that he passed away earlier this year, about a month after that visit). I have to confess, it’s going to take a bit of time and work before I can claim a Hannoverian relish for daring new opera. I’ve only ever seen a handful of operas of any sort, let alone the ones sung in an ancient Indian language!

Working backstage building the set is a curious way to get to know an opera, particularly when you haven’t a hope of understanding a single word that’s being sung! You find yourself trying to derive narrative sense out of the disparate bits of set and props, an overheard instruction from the director, or the out-of-context explosions of light being rehearsed by the light and video departments. What’s more, the order in which we saw different parts of this production bore no relation to the order in which they were supposed to occur, and other bits we would never see because they didn’t concern the stage department.

As I mentioned in a previous post, the set centres around a circular revolving stage on a tilt. At various parts of the show this stage is to be covered by a ‘carpet’ of green grass and plants, at another point the grass and plants are purple. There’s another bit during the opera where the stage is bare except for five (what look like) dentist chairs lined up around the edge of the revolving stage. Another point the stage is bare, but scattered around the edge are the sorts of things you’d expect to see at a landfill site. Sometimes the green grass has cuddly-toy animals spread around it; the landfill set has a trolley next to it full of those big bottles you get with water dispensers in offices. The three walls that line the stage are basically enormous projector screens. At one point you can see the surface of the moon projected there, at other moments you have an other-worldly sunset, and sometimes the screens are plastered with words to do with environment, like ‘sustainability’ (in English). Try to make sense of all that!

The rehearsals tend to take place in English, except when instructions from the American director to the German chorus need translating. This ought to have been an advantage, but listening in on the instructions did nothing to enlighten me as to why there were thirty singers on a circular strip of purple grass holding a stuffed giraffe, or why Mahatma Gandhi is sitting on a square platform 20ft in the air holding a glowing ball. Oh, did I not mention that the main character is Gandhi??! – For the record, Krishna was there too – And the identity of the other soloists remains a mystery to me even now.
You might well ask, ‘why didn’t you just Google the opera?’. My response would be ‘I did.’ I encourage all readers to have a brief skim of the Wikipedia page for Philip Glass’s Satyagraha and decide for themselves whether they can draw any meaningful parallels between the details I have described above and the ‘plot’ described there. For those whose life is too short: Suffice it to say the titles of the three acts are ‘Leo Tolstoy’, ‘Rabindranath Tagore’ and ‘Martin Luther King Jr’.

I feel compelled to stress at this point that this is no comment on the merits of this opera or Hannover’s production, rather how baffling the whole thing is from the point of view of the stage team. Sat in the audience for the premiere were Tabea and my sister Maddy, who has the special privilege of being the first (of many, I hope!) to stay with us here in Hannover; they came away from the theatre looking very satisfied with the evening’s entertainment – a look that would be difficult to fake given the 3-hour running time!

The only section of the play that I did get to watch on the night was the very start, to which I was treated a completely unique vantage point. I was tasked with stationing myself with a radio on the second gallery, where the lighting is set, overlooking the stage. The opera began with Gandhi and two other characters descending from above the stage suspended on square platforms. I was there in the unlikely event that one of the singers got the jitters from sitting so high up. From where I stood I could look down on the singers and the stage below them, I could see a corner of the orchestra pit, and even right down to below the stage, where the chorus were preparing to enter from underneath the stage. It was quite the introduction to work duty on show night.

The stage team’s part in the opera was to set the stage in the intervals between the three acts. In the first interval we had to roll up the green carpet and then line the edge of the revolving stage with surprisingly heavy blocks of ‘landfill’, and in the second we gathered up the landfill material, swept the stage and set up the dentist chairs. There was one more set change (Umbau), in which we had to lay down the purple carpet and set down all the purple plants in the right places. This last change took place mid-act, which meant we were against the clock (90 seconds to be precise!), and we had to do it without the help of the noisy trolleys that we had used in the intervals.

It is lucky that the first set change was not against the clock because in the first act we were hit by an unexpected delay. At the back of the stage there is a goods lift, which is used to transport sets to and from the basement storage, but also from the street level so that things can be easily delivered to the stage by lorry. Next to the door to the lift there is a notice reminding people to watch out for pigeons, because they have been known to sneak into the Opera through this door. On premiere night we didn’t have to watch out for pigeons but instead, flapping all over the stage, we were visited by a bat. The audience came expecting one opera, but on top of Satyagraha they were treated to another: Die Fledermaus!

In fact, this bat had been spotted a number of times in the build-up to the first opera night of the season, but it was still there somewhere by the time the curtain went up. The landfill stuff had to be brought up to the stage in two loads and just as the second load was ready to be unloaded the bat, dazed and confused, flapped straight into the lift. Thinking quickly, one of our team swiftly closed the door again, shutting the bat off the stage, but also half of the set for the second act! And so, while the audience had snuck off to enjoy their interval drinks, half of the stage team was waiting around for the landfill to arrive so we could complete the set change; the other half was peering through the window of the goods lift willing the disorientated bat to find its way through the gap in the other side of the lift towards freedom! Eventually, the bat obliged and we were able to complete our set change just in time for the show to continue.