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Howard Hudson chooses Chauvet for “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812”

Lighting designer Howard Hudson created the lighting for a recent production of the musical “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812”, staged at London’s Donmar Warehouse theatre. The electro pop opera, composed by David Malloy, is based on a seventy-page sliver of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”.

“The show is real a collage of different styles of music, which meant palette-wise we were able to go from a more restrained classical look to moments of intense colour that reflected the more electric, contemporary moments in the score”, explains Hudson. “So, whilst the show was predominantly relatively desaturated - dropping at times right down to moments of simple candlelight, there were other moments when we had sections of intense neon green, or bright saturated pink in block colour, or solid red for the opera.”

Three Maverick Silens 2X Profile fixtures from Chauvet Professional were used for backlight, high side light and wall scrapes. Given the Donmar’s relatively small size (251 seats), every fixture in a rig there “has to work very hard”, notes Hudson. “The Maverick Silens 2X Profile offered us a really sophisticated quality of light within a compact unit”, he continues. “The colour mixing was very even, offering a great selection of tints through to deep saturated colours with the brightness we’re all used to today. The frost selection provided everything we needed for a hard-working fixture on a busy musical. The zoom range gave us a beautiful clean beam of light to cut through the rest of the rig.”

Another key feature that Hudson appreciated was the fixture’s quiet operation. “As with any space the size of the Donmar, the noise of the rig can become a real issue”, he says. “We were able to put the Silens fixtures in their ultra-quiet mode. Even the usual more subtle sounds such as lenses moving within the lights or shutters coming in and out was removed. It was as if they were not there.”

Collaborating with director Tim Sheader and scenic designer Leslie Travers, Hudson also adapted his lighting to account for the theatre’s thrust stage. “When you have the audience around the three sides, you have to think much more sculpturally”, he says, adding that “the actors become more three-dimensional in a way”.

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