GLP Creos makes theatre debut at Almeida

Theatre lighting designer Howard Hudson leaned heavily on GLP’s X5 LED range when animating the Almeida Theatre’s stage production of The Line of Beauty, a portrait of Thatcher's Britain at its most divisive time. The challenge for Hudson was working with a white, minimal set, above a mirrored floor and telling an episodic story. This required a flexible lighting approach within the boutique London theatre, and GLP delivered.

Hudson adopted eight each of the impression X5 Compact and X5 Bar 1000 battens, but the real surprise was the application of three powerful Creos wash lights with 18 x 40W RGBL LEDs, arranged in three rows of six pixels each. The cohesion of colour palette and intensity control across the X5 Series was one of the real features, Hudson said. “The lighting had to do a lot of work in terms of the changing locations. In a minimal environment, you never quite know how the lighting is going to behave in the space. And so, we needed lots of angle and zoom options. As soon as we started turning lights on, we knew it was going to work well.”

Hudson was working with GLP’s X5 platform for the first time. “The X5 Compact lights overhead were the perfect fixture for this scale of space, with only 350 seats, and so many scene changes to maintain the flow. They were used to dot around the rig and also played a larger part in lighting the scenes. They are great fixtures in that their zoom range is so huge, from a tiny dot to a very wide wash.”

Hudson particularly praised the extended colour palette. “When we needed a saturated colour, for instance, at a party in the countryside that required ‘80s style blue and a bold red look, they were incredibly rich.”

He was likewise impressed with the X5 Bar 1000 battens. “They were fantastic. Really beautiful lights. Downstage, there was a corridor and we rigged eight of those above it to produce a sheet of light downstage. Having a bar fixture and wash fixture with the same chips definitely creates a good mix.”

Any leap of faith in specifying Creos more than paid dividends. “It’s such an interesting light,” Hudson observed. “I’ve used impression FR10 in the past and these were like a thicker version, offering a slightly wider look. As we had such a rectangular design, we used them as a top wash light for much of the show. The way they fitted structurally into the set, a rectangular light on a rectangular set, it gave me a new way of thinking. And it worked extremely well. The colour mixing was fantastic.”

Finally, he described the work of his programmer, Fraser Craig, as “absolutely brilliant,” adding, “For both of us, it was really interesting to work with new types of fixtures like the Creos.”

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