We sat down for an exclusive interview with James Christensen, stage manager for The Double Act performing at the Arcola Theatre until 22nd February 2025. Tickets here.

The Double Act involves supernatural elements and a decaying seaside setting. How do you coordinate the technical aspects to ensure smooth execution of these atmospheric effects?

It does indeed! When we were building this piece in the rehearsal room, the director and cast were constantly exploring how the ‘outside’ of our characters’ worlds would manifest in the unfolding action. Mark’s play is intentionally claustrophobic: one indoor setting, one continuous time period. But the emotional dynamics and tensions explored through the actors are mirrored by stormy weather, supernatural occurences in the house, a monstrous presence. These needed to have a strong relationship with what the actors were playing with, so that they could both live in the same theatrical universe.

So a lot of my work was to document and describe the meaning or moods that were being uncovered by the actors and director – without all those technical elements present – and feed that back to the sound, lighting and design teams so that they could complement it with their own work. That way everything works in concert with everything else and we get a nice coherent theatrical world for the audience to live in.

Now that we’re in tech, things get a little more surgical, a little more precise. The designers, director and I are hard at work getting the rhythm of every lightning-strike, crashing wave, spooky rustle and flickering light juuuuust right so that they have maximum impact and give the actors lots to go on. I’ve also got fun little cue-lights to time practical effects in line with those same rhythms. That’s a lot of fun for me, cos I’m really in the driver’s seat.

What strategies do you use to maintain effective communication between the cast, crew, and creative team during a production with complex emotional shifts?

One little trick I think is useful on my end, when making sure everyone’s on the same page with what’s needed in any given moment, is to phrase things in terms of rules, or theatrical logic. The director, designers, production manager, cast etc. will talk about emotion. That’s their thing. But if I can feed notes back that give us a common internal logic, that then anchors the emotional work going on elsewhere. For example: ‘X actor may want to leave the room, but he is somehow trapped’, or ‘Y actor is the only character who can hear the ethereal music’. Then each designer can bring their own creative and emotional intuition to bear on that idea, but we all stay in the same world.

With a confined space like Arcola’s Studio 1, how do you manage set transitions and backstage logistics while preserving the production’s tension?

Well usefully enough our set does not change at all. So that makes set transitions particularly easy. However! While I’m stuck up the back of the theatre in a tiny box, pushing various and sundry buttons at appointed times, the actors are backstage and they’re on their own.

Our smashing Assistant Stage Manager has put together a props table, with clearly-labelled spaces to collect each item they need to carry on. They’ve also got what’s called a ‘show relay’ backstage, where microphones feed back audio from on-stage so they can hear what’s happening and get ready for their entrances. If they need to enter at a special moment that is based on physical action and not a spoken line, I have a little green cue-light I can turn on that tells them to go, go, go.

They are but puppets, and I their all-powerful puppet master. All shall bow to the system, for the system is all.

But I haven’t let it go to my head or anything…

What has been the most challenging aspect of preparing for this production, and how have you approached problem-solving in rehearsals?

70% of theatre work is problem-solving. As you try to throw up ideas into a space and make them live, the reality of that exercise throws various bits of detritus in your way. Mark has a mad-cap, uncontainable imagination, and he certainly threw a flurry of challenges at us straight off the bat (occasionally – one felt in fits of paranoid fancy – intentionally). Storm-winds lash at the house; objects spontaneously and mysteriously move; dangerous weapons were intended to make surprising sound effects. But these were the fun bits.

Perhaps the challenge that reared its head most regularly was the confined nature of the set. We had to create a plausible living room in the Arcola’s unique space – with audience seating from above and from each side. Making sure the actors had room to play around while encircled by furniture and mess was a fractious endeavour.

But the cast were game. Nigel Betts, one of our actors, said early in the rehearsal process: ‘use the problem’. And that was an attitude that was common amongst the cast. Get blocked by a sofa? Let the character be frustrated by this and change course. That ethos helps a lot when you’re managing logistics.

How do you support the actors’ process, especially when working on a play that delves into psychological themes and heightened theatricality?

This is a really interesting question for this piece, particularly as it pertains to the psychological focus of the play. Each character says or does things that are deeply unpleasant, and that most would find beyond the pale; it’s kinda the whole dilemma that the show is trying to explore. Something we agreed upon early was that every actor should have the freedom to advocate for their character: to fight for what that character believes about themselves and the world – even if it’s a thousand miles away from what anyone in the room actually thinks. That’s just good practice when you’re doing psychological realism. Otherwise there’s not much crisis or conflict, and nobody learns much about anything other than what we all think about stuff. So it was an implicit rule of the room. We were gonna explore stuff that was crass, or nasty, but that this was just honest engagement with the substance of the piece, and not a reflection of personal malice. So part of what I can do day-to-day is try to maintain that freedom and cohesion.

Otherwise it’s about basic rehearsal and performance infrastructure: warm-up time, fight calls to run choreographed sequences and reiterate our staging, occasional snacks. And hitting those buttons at the right time. I really cannot stress this enough. No actor wants to be in the midst of a grand, heightened theatrical sequence and have the lights suddenly go wild for no reason.

Which definitely wouldn’t happen in a Preview performance or anything, that would be crazy… (Woops)