hen it comes to Greek tragedy, few families have a history quite as troubled as the House of Atreus. Murder begets murder, revenge demands retribution, and the consequences ripple through generations. In Simon Stone’s interpretation of Aeschylus’ The Oresteia , this ancient cycle of violence unfolds not in a distant mythical kingdom but inside a contemporary glass house, where domestic life and devastating brutality sit uncomfortably close together. The production, staged at London’s Bridge Theatre, placed this fragile-looking home at the centre of the action. Its two storeys revolved throughout the performance, offering the audience constantly shifting perspectives on the characters and their progressively fractured relationships. Behind the glass, the drama played out What TiMax brought was simplicity. It never overcomplicated what we were trying to achieve and the support was wonderful W with a dramatic intimacy; outside, the audience watched as rooms, people and perspectives moved in and out of view. Sound designer Peter Rice was presented with a constantly changing architecture that offered up challenges arguably as significant as any of the production’s more visceral moments. How do you keep a character’s voice anchored to a room when that room is rotating? How do you preserve the audience’s sense of where a conversation is taking place when the physical environment is in perpetual motion? BUILT AROUND MOVEMENT Stone has developed a reputation for reimagining classic texts through a contemporary lens, stripping away the distance between historical drama and modern life. His work tends to place familiar human relationships under an unforgiving spotlight, using recognisable transparent walls exposed the characters’ private lives, while its rotation continually changed the audience’s view of the unfolding drama. The ambitious set design inevitably created an unusual acoustic problem. The house was effectively soundproof, meaning the natural relationship between the performers and the auditorium could not be relied upon to carry their voices. Meanwhile, the changing orientation of the rooms meant that a conventional approach to sound reinforcement risked making voices appear to drift unnaturally as the scenery moved. The production needed a sound system capable of maintaining a convincing sense of place, preserving the intimacy of the performances and ensuring that the audience could follow the story even when its visual focus shifted at speed. Rice identified these demanding requirements before rehearsals began. “With the rotation of the two-storey house, I knew there’d be a need for some sense of location and vertical imaging, so my first choice to achieve that was TiMax, as it allows you to have Z-axis as part of the algorithm.” His solution was to make the rooms, rather than the individual performers, the primary reference points for the tracking system. If the sound followed each actor independently, their voices could appear to travel continuously around the auditorium as they moved within a room. That might be appropriate for a performer crossing a conventional stage, but it would undermine the illusion of watching people inhabit a coherent physical space. Instead, Rice wanted a voice to remain perceptually stable within its room, allowing the audience to register an actor’s arrival or departure without being distracted by unnecessary movement in the sound image. TiMax TrackerD4 tags were therefore fitted to the house structure itself, with the performers assigned to room groups. As the house rotated, the system could track the changing position of each room and maintain the corresponding vocal image. An actor could move across the room without their voice appearing to move with them, while the room itself carried the sound as it travelled. With action unfolding across two levels, the audience needed to also distinguish between rooms on the ground floor and those above. TiMax’s ability to incorporate Z-axis positioning into its spatial calculations allowed Rice to build that sense of height into the design, helping the sound reflect the layered environment on stage. The end result was a soundscape designed around the audience’s perception of the house, keeping the action intelligible while supporting the production’s unsettling sense of proximity. environments to make extraordinary events feel unsettlingly plausible. His approach to The Oresteia was no exception. Instead of presenting the ancient Greek trilogy as a succession of monumental, mythological tableaux, the production brought its violence and power struggles into a family-home-style environment that audiences could immediately recognise. The glass structure was key to this; its
SOUND AROUND THE SET TiMax SoundHub received inputs from the mixing console before distributing audio to 121 amplifier channels and approximately 150 loudspeakers. An LCR (left, centre, right) configuration of overhead drops worked alongside a traditional left-right system comprising four d&b V10P loudspeakers and a further pair positioned upstage. Fifteen front fills were integrated into the stage fascia, while foldback was installed in the ceiling of every room. Together, these elements helped create the close, cinematic vocal presentation that Rice wanted for the production, supporting what he describes as the desired effect of ‘auditory voyeurism’. That intimacy was particularly important given the glass house’s relationship with the audience. The production invited spectators to look into private spaces, observing conversations and confrontations that might otherwise have remained hidden. The sound needed to reinforce that sensation of being close enough to overhear events, without sacrificing clarity across the auditorium. Rice initially planned to position the main LCR speakers along the proscenium line, aligned with the front fills and left-right system. This would have made time alignment more
Powered by FlippingBook