After suffering the loss of his sheep, Gabriel Oak is forced to travel to find new means of work. On his travels he finds himself in Weatherbury where he saves a farm from a fire. He asks the Mistress of the farm for work and he subsequently becomes the Shepherd on this farm.

​

Bathsheba Everdene is only just becoming used to managing her farm and becomes acquainted with her neighbour Mr Boldwood. Boldwood makes it his aim to woo Bathsheba into submission of his marriage proposal but is turned down. Bathsheba finds love in Sergeant Frank Troy, who himself appears to have secrets.

​

This show for me was a wonderful experience as it encompassed many exciting scenes including storms and barn fires. The tale takes place in bulk on a farm and thus allowed for many warm scenes out in the open, but allowed for candle lit scenes within barns at night. For me as a designer I had the pleasure of working with a director who knew what he wanted, and was happy for me to make it possible in whatever way I could. One such idea being that Barry desired a trough of water down stage right which he wanted to see the reflections of on the actors faces as they interacted with it. This was a challenge to find the right solution however, with the right angles and a few tiny mirrors we achieved this beautifully. It really was smoke and mirrors.

​

For this production we went to a single-man-operator for both sound and lighting. We did this through Qlab and programmed a series of OSC (Open Sound Control) which communicated with the lighting desk from Qlab. Studio3lx also provided supplementary 

lighting equipment for this production, including moving lights and LED pars. On top of that we also provided out ETC Programming Wing to control the lighting for this show.