On the Fly

Perry’s Blog

On The Fly

Hands On has a reputation for snow and ice effects, which are achieved in a variety of ways: plastic snow, paper snow, foam and cellulose-derived being some of the more familiar ones. Way back in the old days, before any of us had two green credentials to rub together, it was even acceptable to use sodium chloride scattered around the countryside. Nobody paid attention to potential environmental damage that could have been occurring, although of course nowadays we are all much more careful.

Today I was speaking to a colleague of mine, a well-known prop man, who relayed a story to me about his days in theatre.

It was a panto, and the snow effect was being very simplistically achieved by one of the fly-men, standing on the fly control platform and sprinkling shredded paper past the window of the set at the appropriate cue: five minutes before the finale.

Commonly, fly-men are very busy during pantomimes, but this particular show had very few flying cues. Therefore, during the run of the show, he got into the habit of turning up for the half-hour call, showing his face, and then disappearing to spend the rest of the show (including the interval) propping up the bar at a local tavern.

Every night, five minutes before his cue, he would head back to the theatre, climb to his control position, wait for the prompt and sprinkle the newspaper in as “snow-like” a fashion as he could.

But one evening, after one too many drinks in the pub, he looked at his watch rather belatedly and had to run back to the theatre very quickly to get there on time. On his arrival, out of breath, he went to the box that usually contained the snow, only to discover the newspaper (that was normally shredded into snowflakes by the assistant stage manager) was still in its newsprint form. In his inebriated state, and in a moment of stupidity, he ripped the paper apart as best he could – and threw the (still readable) newspaper on to the stage.

Needless to say, the theatre management was not pleased with these antics, and called for the theatre doctor to legally confirm the fly-man’s state of inebriation – whereupon he was promptly sacked.