For some time we'd felt that the entrance to our theatre was not really exciting or magical enough. In fact, I'd always thought it looked more like the entrance to a sports facility or a community centre.
The building was designed to be unobtrusive. A consultant described the portico in a report a few years ago as 'hiding under a baseball cap', which I felt was about right.
So we wanted to bring some more magic to it - make coming to the theatre more like a night out somewhere exciting, rather than visiting a sports centre. Not that visiting a sports centre isn't exciting... you know what I mean.
Originally, the entrance to our building looked like this. This was how it was left by the builders. It's pretty uninspiring, but it did good service for 10 years. The real problem is that it doesn't tell you what the building does. It could be anything - even, in fact, a Maltings.
This was how the frontage looked in 2008. The white sign was put up around 2001 as part of a revamp. But I thought it wasn't particularly successful, although it was certainly a step up from the original. The white background was unrelated to the dark building, and looked uncomfortable.
In 2009, we painted most of the garden-shed like exterior a heritage green, to make it feel a bit more interesting. We had no real budget for this - but it had to be done.
We painted the white sign background black, removed the star logo from above the i in Maltings, and painted the existing letters an off-white colour. We also painted the black pillars red. A bit more elegant. My father and I did the painting. Thanks Dad! The whole thing cost around £60 - the cost of the paint.
Around a year later, we felt that we should upgrade a bit further. We'd changed the trading name of the theatre from The Maltings Theatre & Arts Centre to The Maltings Theatre & Cinema, to better reflect the artistic programming of the venue. So the old lettered sign, which had done good service, had to be changed. Again, though, we had no money... as usual! So we had to be very inventive.
I wanted to have something that gave the feeling of this:
But of course we couldn't afford that. Lights seemed to be the key though. Once again, we couldn't afford the cost of having an electrician fit an expensive custom-made marquee. In fact, we couldn't even afford the marquee! Then I remembered that we'd used some great open air festoon lighting for the Sideshow Festival in Berwick in August. I did some research, and we bought a 100 metres of exterior festoon lighting for £110. Then our technician Jimmy and I just tacked it up under the roof.
So this is what the exterior looked like on day one.
Initially, I wanted us to put mirror tiles on the whole back wall of the entrance, where the clock is in the photo. Jimmy and I drove all over Berwick and found that nobody sold mirror tiles anymore. Too seventies. So we just got on with putting up the lights. It took about seven hours to tack them all up. Jimmy did a great job of making sure they were all lined up nicely. Finally, our then Technical Manager Neil wired the lights into one of the old arc-sodium fittings, after removing the old pair of lights (you just see the old lights on the roof just inside each of the red pillars in the photo above).
That afternoon I realised that we didn't need mirror tiles to create the reflection we wanted. We just needed a reflective surface. So we got the guys from Fantasy prints to cut and install some black perspex. This was the most expensive bit - £300. But it was worth every penny. Here's the guys installing it. Note the new festoon lighting tacked up onto the ceiling.
Thanks Fantasy Prints! You can see the new lettering in the background - all the letters are made of wood and bought online from PoshGraffiti for around £10 a pop. This was the cheapest possible option - and they were perfect.
At dusk, we turned the lights on for the first time - and it looked sensational. All for a total of around £610 and two days work. I reckon that's pretty good value for money for the result.
But when it's completely dark, the lights look even better. The reflection effect in the black perspex is superb.
We're still not completely finished. We need to re-gloss the lower part of the back wall of the entrance, where the 'Theatre & Cinema' letters are. But it's now just the magical and exciting entrance we wanted. Many thanks to my team for all their help.
