Six

A few weeks ago for a show at work I built a platform. I do this sort of thing all the time, and the construction thereof is usually an unremarkable mundanity, but this one was different. Namely, it was 7 metres by three metres wide, by half a metre high, with two step units front and back and over a dozen high-impact casters rolling it smoothly on and off stage. It weighed about as much as a medium-sized car and made the stage decking groan in protest as it went over it. It was a Beast. Observe, in as few photos as I could cram it into from 25 feet overhead, the absurd scale for its purpose: it went into the Embassy Theatre here at Central, which does not actually have 7m of wing space on either side. A third of it was always visible on stage. The designer wanted this. Okay. The materials alone cost £600, with no waste. Fair enough.

The base was a giant, solidly-welded steel truck (pictured below, surrounded by former components of the Beast where they landed during dismantling) of my own design and construction. Wheels were held in place on beefy plates of 6mm steel burnt onto 2" wide corners. Timber elements were clamped and screwed to uprights on the cross-bracing (welded to resemble an L-beam) to hold the steel straight and hold the plywood together. It all coasted smoothly 20mm off the floor, almost silently.

It was topped with 6 4x8'/500mm platforms, all sound-dampened with a thick layer of brown, flame-retardant underfelt (a pile of it after removal is visible in the back of the photo below) and clad with hundreds of 100mm wide strips of luan painted to look like a silvered hardwood floor. It took two days just to pull all the air staples out of the platform tops (you think we were going to let 6 uncut, unglued sheets of 18mm ply go to waste?), every one of which put up a fight. My hands are covered in cuts and scrapes from the work.

 

So why is this so remarkable?  

It was used for 6 performances over 4 days.

Six.