Living

Living spans more than 50 years and over 70 scenes. Each sits on a specific day, and at one point montages across several years. The date had to be present in every scene, instantly clear, and it could never pull focus from the action.

The set was built entirely from OSB: the floor, the furniture, three large walls, all of it the same raw board. Anything I made would live against that wood, never on a clean screen.

The answer came out of the wood itself. Instead of placing the date onto the board, I made it look as though it had been cut into the surface. Letting the highlights and shadows make up the shape.

Because the scenes change so often, the date is almost always in motion. Each one rolls over into the next, a little like the cards on an old split-flap clock — clear, easy to read, and giving the whole room a steady sense of time moving forward.

Later in the play, the date breaks apart and loses its legibility entirely. Because it had been part of the show’s language for so long, that collapse read as deliberate — the story’s time coming apart, rather than a glitch on stage.

I also let the date age with the years it was counting. The show divides at the millennium, and so does the way the dates are made.

Analogue — before 2000

Analogue to their core. They carry film grain, their highlights halo and bloom, and their colour fringes the way light does through old glass.

Digital — after 2000

Built from pixels, lit colder and bluer, their edges sharpened by the hard, precise fringing of a screen.

Each date ends up looking like the decade it belongs to. The way it is made and the year it marks become the same thing.

[To fill: how it landed. An outcome, and if you have one, a single real line, a review, or a remark from the director or a collaborator about the way time sat in the room. One true sentence will do more here than a paragraph of summary.]