Rob has had not one but two books on the go over the last few years. As well as helping with Richard Pilbrow’s A Sense of Theatre, he has been working with fellow lighting designer Emma Chapman on a book called Theatre Lighting Design: Conversations on the Art, Craft and Life.
It is a simple premise: conversations with fourteen lighting designers (plus a group chat with members of the team who’ve looked after the lighting of the musical Billy Elliot since its debut), talking about their working lives in lighting: where the ideas come from, how they consider light, how they talk to directors and designers, the tools they prefer, the things they struggle with, the things they love. Each conversation is fascinating in its own right. They’re more fascinating still when taken together, particularly where different designers disagree with each other!
It is quite a cast list of designers: Neil Austin, Natasha Chivers, Jon Clark, Paule Constable, Rick Fisher, Richard Howell, Howard Hudson, Jessica Hung Han Yun, Mark Jonathan, Amy Mae, Ben Ormerod, Bruno Poet, Jackie Shemesh and Johanna Town.
The book is published by Bloomsbury/Methuen, and though it won’t reach bookshops until July 25th, it is available for pre-order now