Textual analysis

Choosing the right image is often the most difficult part of putting the marketing materials together – and the most fun. The image has to strike a balance between capturing people’s attention and giving a flavour of the show, so we’re looking for something striking but not misleading.

The first thing I do is read the script and get a feel for the imagery within the piece. It’s good to know at this stage whether the director has a particular approach in mind, or even just a colour that says something about the production. This can be quite difficult when you are selecting images for a show in 12 months time, as the director’s mind will be focussed on more immediate projects.

We need an image that will work just as well on the page of a brochure as it will on one of the huge poster sites you may have seen around the city. We also need to consider whether it will lose any impact through being backlit – block colours and sharp lines work best for this.

Theatre is about live performance and connecting with other people – audience and actors alike – so I prefer to use images of people for our productions. Sometimes this will be a member of the cast, on other occasions it will be an image sourced from a book or a photo library or the internet. We also prefer to have one image that stays with a production, so there is a continuity in our marketing materials from when the production is first announced to when it is finally staged. This means spending hours in libraries, bookshops and online before each season is made public.

With Iphigenia, Anna and I started off being much clearer about what we didn’t want than what we did (often the case). We didn’t want the image to imply that the production would be a classical interpretation – we needed to convey the edge and modernity that has been lent by Edna O’Brien’s re-working of this timeless story. So our first thoughts were ‘anything but a mask.’

Initially, I was looking for something that conveyed Iphigenia’s innocence; something that captured that moment before she realises that family love is being distorted into public duty. Anna described this as ‘the sadness in a remembered image of a young girl looking back at you over her shoulder – the last time ever you saw her.’ We could see that image in our minds, but couldn’t find it. Had the play been cast at this point (9 months before rehearsal) we would have arranged a photo shoot with the actor playing Iphigenia. In the end, I think I put virtually all of Anna’s words into an internet search engine and came up with various shots that would have been great for shampoo ads, but not for Iphigenia. Start again.

Anna’s early thoughts on the look and feel of the production threw up some very helpful ‘key words’ to start thinking afresh about the right image. Metal, feathers and sand. The metal and sand reminded me of some fabulous pictures I’d seen of the Burning Man festival in the USA, where groups of artists create huge sculptures in the desert. The theme of the 2000 festival had been ‘The Body.’ There were three fantastic faces – one made of grass, one of driftwood and one of copper. As soon as I found the copper face, I felt sure we had our image. And yes, it was a mask.

Ironically, some of the elements that first attracted me to the image - the desert sun’s patterns on the metal; the cobalt sky’s contrast with the copper tones - have been lost in the design and print process. Why?

The negative reasons refer back to the point made earlier about needing an image that works as well on a brochure page as it does on a large poster. First, although it would be fine for small leaflets, the image was not of high enough resolution to be reproduced to a large scale – it became ‘pixelated’ or broken up. Secondly, although creating a metallic effect on the small-scale image wasn’t a problem, no printing press was able to produce a large poster with the metallic blocking we wanted – it would have to be done by hand, which would be very expensive.

The positive reasons are about sticking to our original desire not to have an image that just said ‘Greek drama = mask.’ Instead, by cutting into a section of the original we retained the human features (eyes, nose and mouth) and created a textured monochrome background to a metallic title: the copper spelling out Iphigenia’s name. In doing so, our intention was to reflect not only the epic, tragic and classical aspects of Euripides’ story but also the edgy lyricism of Edna O’Brien’s adaptation. What do you think?

Angela Galvin
Marketing and Development Director, Sheffield Theatres

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