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Carpentry
 

 
 

Carpentry

Down in the basement of the Birmingham Rep, you can find the workshop presided over by carpenter Alan Bennett. Alan makes almost all of the properties needed in productions at the Rep. He also makes swords and armour. He has worked at the Rep for a decade or more and his skill and knowledge are formidable. Like everyone else at the theatre, Alan has to work under considerable time pressure. It takes quite a long time to make a single piece of furniture, and in The Crucible, Alan had to make several examples of period furniture: high backed chairs, simple long benches, three legged stools, and two large tables with fat legs that had to be turned on a lathe in the workshop.

Of course, the audience shouldn’t really be focusing on the furniture, but carefully used and carefully made, it does help subtly to heighten the audience’s sense of the period in which the play is set, and to hint at the nature of the people who use it. The designs were inspired by furniture in the actual home of Rebecca Nurse, an old woman who was accused of witchcraft during the Salem witch hunts in 1692. Producer Jenny King and photographer Andy Philips made a trip to Salem Village in Massachusetts as part of the research for the play.

Alan’s work is strong, solid and heavy, but with subtle hints of ornamentation. Everything in Salem, whether it be in private houses (the attic bedroom of the Reverend Parris, the living room of the Proctors) or a public space such as the ante-room to the Salem courthouse in Act 3, is made first and foremost to be plain and functional rather than decorative. There is beauty in its simplicity.

 

From Birmingham Repetory Theatre
The Crucible
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