West Road Concert Hall i.e. not a theatre. Turning it into a theatre considered non-trivial. If you're (a student) doing this for the first time, it's easy to get off piste; this page attempts to document some of the common pitfalls.
Don't panic! And make sure you know where your towel is.
Comments and suggestions regarding the contents of this page to webmaster@charliejonas.co.uk please.
Hire orders should be confirmed long before Christmas, as should booking Duncan. It is imperative that this is done in plenty of good time.
Duncan is great. He was Technical Manager of the ADC Theatre between 1992 and 1994 and now works as a freelance technician. He is a very useful person as he knows (a) a lot of technical theatre history and (b) how things happen in the real world, especially with respect to rigging, structures, power/distro, general lampie-ing and so on. He also owns the 'Pig Shed' which is the home of all sorts of random useful technical things (along with plenty of random non-useful things). If you need a particular bit of theatrical kit and it's really expensive/difficult to hire, Duncan will probably have it or be able to get it for you.
Duncan is pretty much the only person who WRCH will let rig top points, chain hoists and truss in their venue. Suffice to say that if you want to put on a theatre gig at West Road then you'll need him on your side. He is really nice and seems to enjoy coming back to help out the students. His contact details are available on request.
Duncan is also a serious sparkie (he has two degrees in electrical engineering), particularly when it comes to stuff that can't just be found in the Big Brown Book and which requires actual science be done. At one point he could be found wiring up the electrical cabling in an experimental research reactor in Oxfordshire.
Seems to be known by pretty much everyone in the industry. If you turn up to an event/festival/gig/site and mention just the name "Duncan" then more often than not they'll know exactly who you mean.
Light Motif own a complete set of custom drapes etc. for theatre-ifying West Road. While you can get standard drapes from just about anybody, it is definitely worth speaking to them and hiring the ones that are the right size. The LM director, Rob Mills, is also a Cantab and ex-Cambridge Theatre person who frequently appears at SoD dinners. He is someone you should introduce yourself to and get to know in advanced.
At some point in the past, WRCH had a matisse Light-Switch II houselight system installed. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. In 2024, for example, the outstations had to be taken apart and probed with a multimeter in order to get them to work properly.
It's basically a 3x8 memory + 6 sequence DMX512 playback system controlled by 14 buttons on outstations in the USL wing and at the control position. Some tips and tricks:
The lights which are controlled are as follows:
It is of absolute vital and critical importance that any and all changes to the West Road house LX rig are documented thoroughly before you make them.
Since time out of mind, the WRCH LX documentation has been wholly and totally inadequate. What woeful documentation they do have is both inaccurate and not internally self-consistent. There is no coherence between the dimmer schedule as supplied, the electrical schedules affixed to the front of the dimmers, the physical labelling on each dimmer MCB and the labelling of sockets in the roof. Moreover they have several different versions of their house showfile which differ in important ways which WRCH themselves seem to fail to understand, while parts of their magic sheet bear no resemblence to the house rig as documented.
To complicate matters further, there are a large number of fixtures in the roof which have been abandoned in place, some plugged in and others unplugged. These do not work and are not intended to work. There are also a number of sockets with grelcos plugged in, but which only supply one lantern which simply serves as an additional trap for the unwary.
Given that WRCH don't seem to know what state their house rig should be in on a good day, it is hopefully clear why you must document changes you make so that they can be undone at the get-out. You need to have documented evidence (probably to an asinine degree) of the state of the West Road rig when you arrive so that you can say "it was like this when we arrived" in the event that you inevitably enter into a dispute. It is also worth testing their rig when you first arrive before you start your get-in, as there is often a requirement to demonstrate a complete working system before you leave. In past years we've been snookered by problems (e.g. faulty TRIACs) which we suspect were faults that preceded our arrival.
If you fail to do this and don't put things back in the correct (for some value of correct) way then you will have to answer to the technical custodian, which can be like listening to a recitation of Vogon poetry. In 2024, it was confirmed that the magic sheet on their showfile (which one? lol) is the canonical source of truth for their rig. Take from this what you will.
WRCH has a mixtures of some ETC dimmers and some Strand LD24 dimmers. There is no LX power patch in the same way as the ADC; all the 15A socket outlets around the stage and gantries are hardwired into the dimmers. To make this more exciting, the dimmers themselves are numbered/channeled/addressed in a byzantine way. Don't change them otherwise West Road will get cross at you (or, at least, if you do, make sure you put them back again afterwards). The ETC dimmer does support non-dim bypass so can be used to supply hardpower. Do not use the 'non-dim' mode on the Strand dimmers to power your LEDs, intelligent fixtures or moving lights - it tops out at about 95% and its electrical waveform is likely distinctly non-sinusoidal, so risk damaging fixtures. If you do need to access the Strand dimmer menu function then the 'MUX INPUT', 'PRESET' and 'LEVEL' buttons must be held down simultaneously for a few seconds in order to unlock the control panel.
Other than certain hardwired dimmer circuits which can be configured as hardpower circuits as mentioned above, there is no LX hardpower at all and minimal local/technical power in the venue. There is a 63A/3ph CEEform socket in the roof on the far USL wall and also another one in the same place but at floor-level. Either one can be used to power your chain hoist motors and/or lighting fixtures, depending on how you want to rig it. Duncan owns the requisite distro (63A/3ph plug to 3x Socapex outlets + 1x 32A/3ph CEEform outlet) although it's a bit of a bodgy thing. You're much better off hiring your own (see below). Typically you'll want to use Soca to feed your truss/LX bars, where they can be fanned out to your choice of 15A, 16A, powerCON or TRUE1 - obviously make sure you hire the correct type for your rig.
There is a blue single-phase 16A socket at the back of the auditorium next to the control point which may be of use for followspots or something like that. There are also plenty of 13A sockets locally there too.
In the roof there is a 13A double socket on the USR wall below a set of XLR patch panels. Traditionally this is what we used to use to power hired DMX splitters that we placed up there. There is also a 13A double socket in the dimmer plant room which powers the house DMX splitters.
An additional 63A/3ph CEEform socket and two additional 63A/1ph CEEform sockets can be found immediately adjacent to the dimmers in the plant room. Given there is no power patch in the venue however, I fail to see how these could be of much use. There are two cable holes with sliding covers above the door from the plant room to the roof gantries which you could feasibly use to run a really long 63A cable through to feed some distro in the roof if you wanted, but I'd recommend using the upstage one in the roof instead.
At the time of writing, I believe each CEEform socket is protected by its own independent 30mA type-AC RCD which is installed locally to the outlet itself. Obviously powering your entire LED intelligent lighting rig off of one single 30mA RCD is not very diverse and highly sub-optimal, not to mention non-compliant with the spirit if not letter of BS 7671 and BS 7909. That being said, we have yet to run into any issues. Perhaps of more concern is the quantity of switch-mode power supplies that a modern rig has saturating the ferromagnetic core of a type-AC RCD, blinding it to potential leakage or fault currents (including someone getting an indirect or high impedance electric shock). Maybe one day we can convince WRCH to remove the 30mA RCDs and replace them with the correct 300mA selective ones instead, but that will have much wider implications for other users of the venue *cough* KingsGate *cough* and is a battle for another day.
Given the above, it is therefore strongly advantageous to hire and connect your own power distro to West Road's CEEform socket outlets. Such distro should feature downstream type-A additional protection rated at no more than 30mA on a per-final circuit basis. Don't forget to hire the correct 63A/3ph lead to hook it up!
There are two DMX sockets up in the roof:
We used to put a DMX splitter/buffer up in the roof somewhere above SR powered via the 13A socket there, with the input fed from the DMX socket on LX1 and the outputs then dropping down to each truss. At some point in 2023 however, WRCH installed a load of new house DMX capability. They now have two splitters and a full DMX patch in the plant room, however in typical West Road style none of this is labelled or documented at all.
To my knowledge, we have never investigated or used the Cat5/Cat6/Ethernet capability of WRCH. That being said, I know that KingsGate are quite network-heavy so it may be worth speaking to them if you wish to use any serious network capabilities.
Getting up into the roof involves going via the HVAC plant room above the rear of the hall and is a little bit sketchy. While I didn't consider them categorically unsafe last time I had cause to use them, the ladders and handrails up there don't really conform to modern safety standards and have been 'grandfathered in'. Some of them are really quite scary while other have actually been condemned by the University and taped off/tagged out; reading between the lines they probably don't want people up there. Moreover the gantries are littered with hazards at both feet and head height which are good at tripping you up so that you then immediately bash your head. Or just tripping you up so that you fall to your death if you're not careful. I suggest wearing gloves and a hard hat (but only one with a chin strap), attaching all your tools with a lanyard and emptying your pockets.
Just make sure you and everyone else act sensibly while up there. Because I'm tall, clumsy and not as confident as someone like Duncan or Balcombe, I sometimes don a harness with a restraint lanyard if I know I'm going to be faffing over the edge with lanterns or strops. Especially as some of the handrails are below my waistline. This isn't required, but sometimes helps put my mind at ease given that some of the ladders very much fall into the "if you lose your footing while stepping sideways then you're dead" category.
Note the under no circumstances should you lean on the mains containment (trunking and/or conduit) or use it as a rail to rig from. Yes the handrails up there are awful and way too low, but the containment is in no way structural (plus it might give you a nasty shock on your way down).
WRCH doesn't have suitable above-stage rigging positions, so you have to create them. The approach that's normally taken is to fly truss off motorised chain hoists. This is why you need someone like Duncan (unless you happen to be competent at this sort of thing, having worked in the industry, and can persuade WRCH to sign off on you).
For technical and logistical reasons which your Chief Rigger should be able to explain, it is strongly advantageous to use Gakflex (steel roundslings) for your top points, double-braked motors for your chain hoists and either metal truss hangers or Gakflex for your truss pickups. This means you don't then have to 'dead off' truss using steel safeties and therefore can bring the truss in mid-week to fix issues if needs be.
WRCH does have an advanced bar that is motorised and controlled from the control point at the rear of the auditorium. It has an SWL of 300kg uniformly distributed.
DO NOT assume you can just take kit from the ADC on the night. They will have their own shows on that week and may need their house kit for those. Furthermore, taking University property without permission is a good way to end up in a meeting without biscuits with the dean of your college.
Make sure you hire (or ask Duncan to bring) at least the following bits of kit:
Things that it's (very) helpful to have, but not a showstopper if you don't: