Want a career in technical theatre? Here are tips on the route forwards

Over the years I’ve spoken at lots of them, lit shows for many of them, and have a regular annual ‘guest slot’ at one of them, but I didn’t actually go to drama school. My route was instead through the sort of ‘unofficial’ drama school of the day, the lighting team of the National Youth Theatre of Great Britain, then doing a ‘proper’ degree (computer science, since you ask, most of it now horribly outdated) at the behest of my academic parents.

However, I ended up spending most of my time in the theatres on or around campus, then the ‘school of life’ of actually doing shows, particularly two years of going around the world with the English Shakespeare Company.

Every week in a different city, sometimes in a different country, is a fantastic opportunity to learn about so many things, from the feel of different places to the diversity of theatre architecture, to the about five minutes you have to get a (usually tired, having just finished someone else’s get-out) crew on-side to get your show in.

‘Times have certainly changed – the range of skills required in any of the technical fields has increased exponentially’

There is a generation of theatre practitioners who grew up on the job, in many cases in theatres where the previous generation of practitioners were happy to hand their skills down, who’d wonder why you’d ever need to go to drama school to learn what we do.

But that isn’t necessarily true now. Times have certainly changed. The range of skills required in any of the technical fields has increased exponentially: just to take lighting as an example, you used to plug a light into a dimmer and then turn it on; now, you’ll have to rig it, plug it into power and data, address it, chose from one of many modes and then quite possibly get involved in configuring a network infrastructure to make it work. It’s more complicated. And that rep theatre where you used to get the hand-me-down knowledge? It has quite possibly closed. Instead, very often you’ll become freelance, turning up job to job with the expectation that you’ll arrive knowing what you’re doing.

So, you need somewhere to learn. This might, or might not, be a drama school; maybe it’s an apprenticeship with a technical supplier.

If you think that drama school is the right route for you, there are many to choose from, so how do you choose? Go look, is the obvious starting point. Get a feel for the location – do you want to step out into the buzz of the city or the calm of a quieter campus? Talk to people while you’re there, staff and students. What do their answers seem to tell you? What do the pauses between their answers, the subtext in their words, tell you? How stable does it feel? New staff might be good – fresh opinions, points of view, experiences are always welcome. On the other hand, a new head tutor every year for the past three years could suggest some kind of turmoil – but what if the latest one is the one who’ll stick around and be brilliant? Don’t be afraid to do your research on the staff, or to ask them about this.

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