Acting & Theatre Production students at London’s prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art rigged a dynamic and impressive scene change using an Electro Kabuki drop in a recent performance of Oscar’s Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.
The play calls for a scene change between Act 1, based in the Piccadilly rooms of character Algernon Moncrief and Act 2, set in the garden of the Manor House in Woolton belonging to character Jack Worthing (a.k.a. Earnest). In this lively and engaging production, the creative team came up with an innovative and memorable idea to mark the transition.
With Electro Kabuki dropper modules rigged to the grid high above the production in a cargo net configuration, several hundred flower heads were dropped to the stage, bang on cue with accompanying sound effects, as the actor playing Miss Prism took her seat at the garden table. Marked by appreciative gasps, the audience was left in no doubt that the setting of the play had shifted.
Cargo net applications are just one of many Electro Kabuki configurations that can be deployed for staged drops and theatrical reveals, and are often used for balloons, artificial snowflakes or poppy petals. Members of the Electro Kabuki team were invited to the RADA performance as VIP guests. They have huge experience of all sorts of kabuki drops and concluded that this was the first known instance of dropping full flower heads.
The entire production of The Importance of Being Earnest was a resounding success, with the only disappointment being that its run in RADA’s Jerwood Vanbrugh Theatre was cut short due to the coronavirus threat escalating at the time.
