Finn Ross: " Lucy Kirkwood ’s play explores the changing relationship between China and America through the eyes of a photographer who took one of the iconic "Tank Man" photographs in Tiannimen Square in 1989.
The set is a rotating white cube, like a phot cube from the 70's, made up of multiple sliding panels creating doors, widows, openings, rooms, fish stall, appartments, strip clubs, newspaper offices and many other locations.
The video design is a series of photographs, as if taken by the shows protagonist, mapped on to this cube. The images move us from location to location and across continents and forwards and backwards in time within the frame work of a strip of film being continually wound through a camera.
All of the photographs are composites of existing pictures sourced legaly through the internet. They were croped, scaled, distored, belended etc to make the door in a picture fit the door in the set etc so it appears as if the image just happens to have happily been made for the set. There are over 1000 photographs in the show.
Due to lack of budget we could not afford a system that accuratly maped the cube so we had to map the revolve by old fashioned timing of a stop watch and good cueing. This lead us to find an interesting effect of the video swirling around the cube when the timing was wrong. We found oursevels exaturating this effect at times to give a particuarly halucinegic effect. Happy Accidents!
Won Best New Play, Best Director, Best Set Design, Best Lighting Design (including Video) and Best Sound Design for 2014 Olivier Awards.