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Lighting Designer for Kursk, by Bryony Lavery

"Kursk" was produced by Sound&Fury following a ten-month period of research and development. The production centres on the events that led to an on board explosion on the Russian submarine, Kursk, during naval manoeuvres in the Barents Sea in 2000. Schmidt and designer, Jon Bausor, took part in the entire R&D phase which developed key aspects of the piece. Following this period, the company commissioned playwright Bryony Lavery to produce an original script for the final production. Schmidt and Bausor’s principal research interest focused on the creation of an immersive and ‘authentic’ environment for the play and they spent time at the Royal Navy’s training centre in Plymouth to understand further this environment. They were able also to test audience responses at a series of sketch performances. Unusually, the lighting for "Kursk" used only architectural light fittings built into the set, rather than specialist theatre lighting instruments, controlled by a lighting operator visible to the audience and incorporated into the production’s scenography. These approaches significantly shaped the audiences experience of the production’s immersive environment as well as being instrumental in the structuring of Bryony Lavery’s script. While the strategies of incorporating the light sources and the operator into the scenography have been adopted previously, their combined use as part of the dramaturgy in a representational drama offered new insights into the application of ideas such as ‘authenticity’ and ‘representation’ to theatre lighting. Subsequently, Schmidt delivered a paper entitled “Light and Representation” for the Expanding Scenography conference at the Hochschule der Künste Zürich, 2009, that also informed an exhibit he created on the lighting design for Kursk, commissioned by the Society of British Theatre Designers and shown at the Prague Quadrennial Design Festival, and subsequently at the V&A Museum, London, both 2010. The exhibit included the findings presented in Zurich.