Each year, CAST bestows the winner of the Lighting Design category with an educational wysiwyg license, and announces that this year's winner is University of Oklahoma student, Leahe Knott, who scooped the prize for her work on Peter Oswald's translation of Friedrich Schiller's play, Mary Stuart. In a review of the production for the University's Routes website, Laurel Dix noted, "The purity and subtlety of Leahe Knott's lighting draws out each brilliant bit of colour from Lloyd Cracknell's sumptuous costumes."
Knott herself explains: "The story of Mary Stuart is very much based on religion and the division of the two queens, and so our whole concept for the show was that they would be the mirror image of each other.
"The challenge was to use lighting to create the different environments. For example, Mary is a prisoner, but she isn't in an actual prison, she's locked in the basement of the house. I wanted to make her environment seem warm yet also very isolated, because she was stuck there and hadn't seen sunshine for a long time, so I tried to achieve a candlelit ambience.
"At one point we made it rain onstage, so I had to figure out how to light the rain properly, and also how to shape the people as well as the rain. I really wanted to get the English grey sky feel, but it's Mary's first time outside in 15 years, and when Elizabeth comes in the rain stops, the grey starts creeping out and gives way to sunshine, so to capture that was one of my favourite moments.
"I've never had the chance to use wysiwyg before, so I'm really excited to try it out now. I really like rendering and showing people how a scene will look. With lighting, directors kind of have to trust you and go with what you say - they don't really get to see any sketches or anything - whereas scenic designers have a means to share their ideas a little better. I think wysiwyg is a way for lighting designers to do this as well."
(Jim Evans)
