Last week I went on a backstage tour of the theatre in St Gallen with a group I’m in – it was absolutely fascinating. There’s been a theatre in town since the mid-1800s, but the building of today is modern, ie it opened its doors in 1968, with the most recent renovation a year or two ago.
Our tour started in the foyer, which I’ve seen many times – but never so empty!
The auditorium seats something over 700 people, and has the advantage that there are no ‘bad seats’, so theatre-goers are guaranteed a good view wherever they are. No pillars here! The photo below was taken from the stage, which has the orchestra pit in the usual place.
The stage was being set for a Swiss classic, Der Besuch der alten Dame, a 1956 comedy by playwright Friedrich Dürrenmat. We watched the stagehands as they worked to prepare the set – much of it involved tape measures and millimetre precision as they slid panels together. From there, we went offstage to the right, where properties were waiting to be put in place.
Next stop was one of the property stores. The dimensions here were hard to grasp. These drawers (third pic above) have a capacity of 700kg and can be lowered and opened, or slid onto the stage to make building the set easier and quicker. Items were grouped according to the different productions, and the lift here was two storeys high to enable everything to be shifted in and out.
More storage space, and the joinery and scenery departments came next. Stage sets can be made and altered in-house. Some properties seemed very random, like the one-armed statue…
Make-up and costumes followed, then rehearsal rooms, then the staff cantine. By this time, we were moving up the ‘tower’ part of the building (see very top photo), and our last stop was the roof terrace, where the views over the adjacent park and the town were swathed in milky winter sunshine. I for one was glad to rest my legs after all that stair-climbing…
The cream building in the middle pic above is the Tonhalle (concert hall), equally imposing but very different. A tour there would be interesting too…
On the blog next week: news about my brand-new psychological suspense novel – cover image included. Publication: end of this month!
linda huber 