Backstage Heritage at PLASA 2016: The Story of the National Theatre's Lightboard

	Lightboard at the National Theatre 1976

Forty years ago this October, the new National Theatre building opened on London's South Bank. Housing three theatres, production workshops, rehearsal rooms, and more, the building also contained a wave of pioneering new entertainment technology -- including the seminal Lightboard lighting console.

Specified for the National by lighting designer and theatre consultant Richard Pilbrow and his partner at Theatre Projects Consultants, Dick Brett, Lightboard was intended as a tool allowing lighting designers to create light on stage free from the constraints of other control systems of the day, particularly with the ability to easily mix and balance groups of channels and create complex overlapping fades, and to take advantage of the other new technologies included in the National's lighting rigs, including color changers, moving lights, and projectors -- the control for all of which was integrated into the console.

Lightboard also had to accommodate both the unprecedented scale of the National's lighting rigs (with almost 800 dimmers in the larger Olivier Theatre), and its repertoire performance schedule which would see a different show on each stage every day.

Achieving all of that with the computer technology of the time was only borderline possible -- ultimately achieved by some cunning engineering work by Rank Strand's development team, who this year are nominated for PLASA's Gottelier Award for their work on Lightboard and the consoles which preceded and followed it.

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the National Theatre's opening and so Lightboard's debut, the recent recovery of an original Lightboard by the Backstage Heritage Collection, and the development team's Gottelier Nomination, this year's PLASA Show will host a talk entitled "Inventing The Future: The Story of the National Theatre's Lightboard," given by Rob Halliday, lighting designer, programmer, author of LSi's "Classic Gear" page and founder member of the Backstage Heritage Collection -- the talk a follow-up to the talk about the history of memory lighting control he gave at the National Museum of Computing in Bletchley in 2015.

"I've long had a fascination with the National's Lightboard, because of the enormous advance it made in lighting control, and because some of the functionality it offered, despite seeming incredibly useful and still talked about warmly by lighting designers who used it, has been lost in the generations of control systems since and can't be found in any current control systems," explains Halliday. "My admiration for it has only increased since meeting and talking to the people who created it and discovering how making this all work with the technology of the day actually really was only just possible!"

"Inventing The Future: The Story of the National Theatre's Lightboard" takes place on the opening day of the 2016 PLASA Show, Sunday, September 18, 2016, at 2:00pm, with Halliday joined by members of the original Strand development team, users of the console when it was in action at the National -- and even Lightboard itself!

Further information about the talk can be found at the PLASA Show website, http://plasashow.com/seminars2016.aspx.

Further information about Lightboard can be found via the Backstage Heritage Collection website, which continues to expand its collection of on-line product and show history: http://www.theatrecrafts.com/pages/home/archive/equipment/detail/?id=6027.