Meet Me By The Stranger

"The Stranger is a statue in a small Yorkshire town, her exact story unknown. The way she stands and stares forlorn at the pub opposite always has people speculating – she’s looking beyond at the sea for her lost love; she’s glaring in the pub for her alcoholic partner; she’s checking if there’s a queue for the old chippy. On one night six people meet at The Stranger. Recently divorced Charlie and Jamie. Temperamental Jem and Rory. Young lovers Bailey and Jordan. Each meet for a different purpose. Each leaves with a different solution."

Meet Me By The Stranger  was a show taken to the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe festival by Voice Break Productions.  For myself, it was one of the fastest tech turnarounds I have ever experienced. After joining the production at a very late stage, following the original designer no longer being available for the project, I had just 4 days to completely design both the lighting and sound for the fringe show, as well as devise a hardware solution that would allow me to run an EOS lighting file, my preferred software of choice, on an Edinburgh Fringe lighting rig. I initially programmed all of the lighting states remotely on my laptop, utilising a 3D model of the venue that I constructed to see how the lights would look on-stage. My laptop was then used to replace the in-house venue's lighting console, removing the need to reprogram the show in the 90-minute tech and dress run on the day of the first performance. The sound was then run via a QLab file that I created. Whilst I kept the tech quite simple overall (the script didn't really call for anything more complicated), the experience of getting a show set up for the Edinburgh Fringe, having never been to fringe before, served as a good test of my technical knowledge, and I'm very happy to say that my solution was effective!