Platform Papers 49: The Lighting Designer: What is ‘good lighting’?

This is the second instalment of the Professional, an occasional series of Platform Papers that asks our senior artists to tell their story.

Nigel Levings, today a much-honoured, internationally renowned lighting designer, upholds his role as a pioneer of his profession. Levings describes his beginnings as apprentice ‘electrician’ at Melbourne’s Princess Theatre in the 1960s and the opportunities soon offered by the budding art theatres opening in the new wave. Since then he has lit operas and dramas in every centre of the world, won a host of awards, and is as much in demand as ever. And yet, he says, the best of his work goes unnoticed.

‘Lighting designers,’ he writes, ‘stand at the gateway between the external world of the stage action and the internal worlds of our audience.’ So what does this work entail? The demands are extraordinary. You need to read his account to believe it.