When Stage Designers Step out of the Backdrop

When lockdown began, in March 2020, the stage designer Andu Dumitrescu, together with the director Radu Nica, was rehearsing Pool (No Water), by Mark Ravenhill, at the Hungarian State Theatre in Cluj. Then everything changed. The theatre suddenly filled with padlocked doors. And yet opening night still had to go ahead. The rehearsals moved from the stage to Zoom and the actors’ flats. Rehearsals were held with each actor in turn, at every possible hour of the day. Everyone juggled their schedules so as not to disturb family members or interrupt their children’s online lessons. A solution was arrived at whereby the actors would film themselves at home on their phones. That is, with each of them in a different setting, with different lighting, a different sound, leaving the stage designer Andu Dumitrescu the task of finding a way to bring them all together. The set became xclusively virtual. Clearly, the concept and form were now wholly different from what was originally intended. It began to resemble an arthouse film in which the role of the stage designer was indispensable. It was he who chose the framing, he who chose the individual shots and angles, he who created the background for the recordings made exclusively on phones. And he who would edit the material employing an array of different video effects.