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Three plays in rotation · returns queue opens at 18:00 · every seat’s sightline is published

1 min

The oldest lamp in the building

There is one bulb we have never let go out, and one member of staff whose job includes keeping a spare for it.

Every theatre leaves a light burning on the empty stage. Ask why and you will get two answers, usually from the same person and usually in the same breath.

The practical one

A dark stage is a hole. The thrust is 0.9 m above the stalls floor, the vomitories are unlit, and the get-out happens at midnight by people who have been working since six. Somebody walks into the void, once, and after that the building has a ghost light.

The other one

The other answer is that it is for the ghosts — so they can put on their own plays and leave the living alone. Nobody in this building believes that and nobody in this building would ever be the one to switch it off.

Ours

The lamp on our stand is a 40 W pearl on a wire cage, on a stand welded in the workshop in 1974 out of what is almost certainly scaffold tube. Ellis Greaves keeps one spare bulb for it in a drawer in the electrics store and has never had to use it, because it burns at a fraction of its rating and never gets switched off, which is what filaments actually want.

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