Maxilux lights Shakespeare Live!
- Details
UK - Maxilux, the Coventry manufacturer of innovative LED lighting, proved itself to be a star player in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s BAFTA-nominated show, Shakespeare Live! From the RSC, broadcast live from Stratford-upon-Avon on 23 April 2016.
Shakespeare Live! From the RSC was broadcast on BBC2 and marked the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. The production celebrated the playwright’s legacy and his enduring influence on all performance art forms from opera to jazz, dance to musicals.
Hosted by David Tennant and Catherine Tate, who were joined by Benedict Cumberbatch, Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, Helen Mirren, Meera Syal, David Suchet, Rufus Wainwright, Tim Minchin, Gregory Porter, Joseph Fiennes, English National Opera, The Royal Ballet and Akala, this event took place in the presence of Their Royal Highnesses the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall.
The prestigious BAFTA award ceremony took place on Sunday 14 May 2017 and the Best Live Event category was won by ITV’s The Queen’s 90th Birthday Celebrations.
Maxilux managing director, Richard Cockayne, said: "Shakespeare Live! From the RSC was the largest, most challenging brief we've been given by the RSC to date.
"We worked with the RSC's lighting department for over three months, planning and developing prototypes before installing high performance strips of embedded stage floor lighting, just one detail of the show's enormous and complex design vision. A one-off, live production, there was absolutely no margin for error. Durability and reliability over the two-hour performance were key.
“We are privileged to be working alongside some of the best lighting professionals in the world and working with experts in the RSC's lighting department is hugely rewarding.”
RSC’s head of lighting, Vince Herbert, said: "It's actually hard to think of any production in the past few years in which we haven't used even the smallest Maxilux component to meet a production requirement or solve a lighting issue."
Last year’s ground-breaking, high-tech production of The Tempest featured highly complex Maxilux LED lighting; so too, the RSC’s recent production of Hamlet set in West Africa. The current production of Julius Caesar also includes dramatically sweeping strips of LED tape, each embedded with 1,630 bulbs, allowing a lighting technician to operate floor to ceiling columns of intense coloured lights via a touch-screen computer programme.
Maxilux also created a coloured lighting installation for The RSC's permanent exhibition, The Play's the Thing, which opened at its Swan Theatre in Autumn 2016 and celebrates 100 years of theatre-making in Stratford-upon-Avon.
(Jim Evans)
