Text 1: The room beneath the stage, by Elin Pritchard

An original contemporary online feature.

From the stalls, the change between scenes looks like a trick: a drawing room vanishes and, seconds later, a station platform stands in its place. Beneath the stage, the trick is a set of instructions on a bank of screens. At the control desk, Iwan Price watches coloured lines move across the display and checks each one against the stage manager’s call.

The system can shift a wall or lift a platform with a smoothness that would have been impossible when scenery was hauled by hand. But the machines do not decide when to move. Iwan waits for the right word in his headset, then presses a key. “You can’t be half a second late,” he tells me. “The audience may not know why a scene feels wrong, but they’ll feel it.”

In the old days, the crew ran along narrow tracks below the stage, pushing flats into position. Iwan has heard stories of men coming back with splinters in their palms and shirts soaked through. Now the team is smaller, and nobody has to shove a full-sized wall across the floor. Still, he says, the quiet control room can be a lonely place. The crew used to work shoulder to shoulder; now most of his conversations happen through a microphone.

During the evening performance, a platform rises exactly on cue. Iwan does not look at the audience. He watches the screen, listening for the next instruction. When the final scene ends, he closes the system down and smiles. “It’s satisfying,” he says. “You make the impossible look effortless.”

Text 2: Behind the painted cloth, by A Correspondent

An original newspaper feature written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this newspaper feature, written in 1885, a journalist describes a visit to a theatre’s backstage crew.

The first thing one discovers behind the painted cloth is that the play has a second company, without which the actors would have no rooms to enter and no streets upon which to walk. At the sound of a bell, six men take hold of the ropes and draw a painted garden above the stage, while two others carry a wooden bench away at a run.

There is little time for admiration. A door must be set in its frame, a tree rolled into place, and a table cleared before the next speech is finished. The foreman, Mr Bell, keeps one eye on the stage and the other on his crew. He speaks only when he must; a raised hand is enough to send the men in different directions.

The work is hot and close. Lamps burn overhead, ropes rasp through the pulleys, and the men must move quickly without letting the audience see them. One young worker caught his sleeve on a nail last week. He laughed when I asked about it, though Mr Bell told me that every new hand must learn to mind the edges of the scenery.

At the end of the performance, the crew gathered in the passage with tea from a shared pot. Their faces were tired, but they were still arguing cheerfully over the timing of the garden scene. Mr Bell said that the work was hard, “but there is a pleasure in knowing that a hundred people saw the world we made and never once saw us.”

Both of these texts are about people who change the scenery on a theatre stage.