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  • Lighting Boris Godunov with Andrei Tarkovsky
  • Robert Bryan (bio)

It is early spring in 1983, and I am lighting a revival of another of the myriad productions that the Royal Opera at Covent Garden has at its disposal. A very excited production manager comes to the production desk and whispers in my ear (rather loudly), "We have Andrei Tarkovsky to direct Boris Godunov next season." I was familiar with the name Tarkovsky, but my filmic experience had been shaped almost exclusively by Hollywood and British cinema, particularly as a young boy in the Second World War. Russian film had passed me by—something to be remedied.

However, sometime after this, Andrei Tarkovsky and the set designer Nicholas Dvigubsky duly arrived in London to begin the tortuous process of designing Boris Godunov. As a film director, Andrei was clearly a very visual being, and Nicholas, as a painter, was equally visual. Unfortunately, their visions did not always coincide, resulting in a lot of heated Russian expletives. I was not party to all of this, but the word came down from our model room that "all was not going swimmingly"! They did eventually arrive at a solution which, by and large, still stands today as a monument to their perspicacity and originality (fig. 1).

Simply put, the set is a huge, fortresslike structure with a central ramp, high sidewall arched ramparts, a central arch, and adjoining ramparts. The very large central ramp is covered in what appears to be burnished copper. The latter is the most dominant in terms of color, since the remainder of the set is, quite naturally, very muted in tone, with a lot of gray and black in the surround. Separating the ramp from the rest of the surround are two wells, stage left and right, formed from lifts sunk down to the basement in the Royal Opera House. (For those of you interested in theater history, direct-current motors used in submarines in the First World War powered these lifts.) Upstage of the ramp is a linking walkway that runs along the back and down the sides, with downstage stairs giving access to walkways along the top of the ramparts. An initial wrapround cyclorama was cut early on in the design process—much to my relief, because I felt that the cyclorama diminished the scale of the set and moreover would have been extremely difficult to light!

Andrei and Nicholas returned in September, and we had a month in which to rehearse and get the show ready for an opening on October 31: a really short time [End Page 122] to realize all the things required by the opera. After the first model showing to all relevant parties, Andrei and I met several times the following week, principally for me to get some of his ideas so that on the first Sunday technical we had something from which to start. As a repertoire house, the Royal Opera has a different show on every weekday, and so Boris was realized over several Sundays, but that first Sunday was absolutely crucial for me to get "into the mind" of Andrei so that subsequent Sundays were not wasted, particularly in the matter of time.


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Figure 1.

Pimen's Cell, Boris Godunov, Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London, UK; 1983. Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, designed by Nicolas Dvigoubsky, and lighting designed by Robert Bryan. Photo credit: Clive Barda/ArenaPAL.

The basic lighting rig of the Royal Opera in 1983 was, in present-day terms, rather primitive. No moving lights, no basic color-change units, no "intelligent" yokes for hanging units. Therefore focusing and rigging were very labor intensive, and one had to be very careful indeed just how much equipment was used and refocused for each show. With a two- to three-hour turnaround each afternoon for that day's show, time was very tight. Keeping these restrictions in mind, we decided to hang five-kilowatt Fresnel units upstage of the central arch and three rows of ADB "light curtains" downstage. We had, in addition to these, the standard five batten (X-ray) bars with a mixture of two-kilowatt Fresnels, PAR 64s, and...

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