How the audience experiences a play, often without being aware of it, can be powerfully affected by the way sound effects are deployed. Sound Designer, Paul Groothuis, sees his role as using sound to keep the story moving forward. He’s a key member of the creative team working alongside Set Designer Giles Cadle, Lighting Director Paule Constable, Video Projection Designer Thomas Gray and Composer Jonathan Dove.
His
biggest challenge has been to find a variety of different sound textures to characterise different worlds, and appropriate sound effects to punctuate and drive the action on without clashing with the dialogue or drowning it out. Hear how he summons up the chill winds of the frozen North to bring to life the
Northern Lights in rehearsal.
In
His Dark Materials he faces the daunting task of devising distinctive sounds for each of a whole host of fantasy creatures among them witches, angels, cliff ghasts, fighting bears, and spectres. The books provide few clues, so instead he takes his lead from the actor's imagination, as he explains in
Monsters. For Paul and the sound crew it all comes together at the technical rehearsal when he first gets to see how their effects knit together with the acting and the staging. Listen to the way he uses sound to underscore the horror of Lyra’s discovery of the separated daemons in the Bolvangar
Daemon Cage. 
