lthough it might be one of the least memorable aspects of going to the theatre, lighting can play a large role in how the audience literally views a performance. The importance of lighting was not lost on the Melbourne Theatre Company, which employed a rather unique facet to the theatre experience.

Electrolight was engaged to design the lighting to the internal and external public areas of the theatre in Southbank. Originally engaged for the project in 2005, the company witnessed a shift in the technologies and products available to lighting designers, most notably with the growth of LED lighting technology.

Initially, Electrolight established a lighting design concept based on what the Melbourne Theatre Company represented. "We considered the Melbourne Theatre Company to be a receiver of light, as opposed to the conjoined Melbourne Recital Centre, which is an emitter of light," Paul Beale says, director at Electrolight.

"The project afforded our practice the opportunity to use LED technology on a large scale for the first time. The creative director of the Melbourne Theatre Company, Simon Phillips, also had a high level of involvement in the interior design of the theatre."

Inside the theatre, a play on words was implemented. Phillips and the architect, Ashton Raggatt McDougall, decided to have quotes from some of the Melbourne Theatre Company's plays inscribed into the walls. This was achieved through a custom font that was generated via a series of holes drilled into the ply wall panels, the holes also serving an important acoustic function.

"It was decided that these perforated panels would need to be back-lit for the text to be sufficiently legible," Beale says. Electrolight looked into various options for achieving the desired effect and found that a LED solution would be the most appropriate due to the long life of the fixtures, colour changing capabilities and relative energy efficiency.

"The resulting design was a single RGB LED fixture per 1,200 mm x 600 mm wall panel, with a fan-shaped light distribution. The fixture was the Space Cannon Athena 300 mm [distributed by Lightmoves]," Beale says.

Electrolight chose these fixtures as a result of extensive research and testing, including a full-scale mock up of the wall panels. Erco spotlights were also used in the foyers and Sill and We-ef fixtures externally.

"The LED lighting was quite straightforward because the fixtures were able to be plugged into a dedicated cat 5 wiring system. This meant that there were no awkward terminations for the contractor to make at the fixtures," Beale says.

The LED fittings feature red, green and blue LED chips which are individually addressable, and through colour mixing at the fixture, a wide range of colours can be created.

Each of the panels is individually addressable via a DMX control protocol, which enables the theatre staff and production lighting designer to program and set the colour of each of the wall panels to suit the current show. For example, Beale says, the walls may turn red in the Macbeth dream sequence or may be coloured different shades of blue for a production of the Blue Room.

Electrolight was also responsible for the lighting design on the exterior of the Melbourne Theatre Company. It used a series of Sill 030 fixtures with 70 watt metal halide lamps.

"The distribution is very narrow in one direction and very wide in the other - a fan shape if you like. The fixtures are on discrete stub poles that protrude from the façade, and hence the fixtures can be positioned in the optimum location to graze light onto the front of the pipes, without casting light onto the building beyond," Beale says.

Although it may seem the project is an intensive drain on electrical resources, sustainability did play a role in Electrolight's design work. It specified the most efficient lamp and luminaire types throughout the project, from the metal halide lighting and the façade, to the IRC type lamps that were used where there is no alternative to tungsten halogen.

Stephanie McDonald

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