This article has been adapted from a longer article by LSi. You can read the full article here.
Photos: Marc Brenner
Roald Dahl’s The BFG is a heart-warming story of friendship and unexpected collaboration – a theme that, as it transpires, plays out as strongly off-stage as it does on-stage.
A joint production between the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), Chichester Festival Theatre (CFT), Singapore Repertory Theatre, Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay and The Roald Dahl Story Company, it brings the author’s work to life with characteristic whizz-fizzing skill.
Supported by director Daniel Evans, the creative team, including video designer Akhila Krishnan, lighting designer Zoe Spurr, sound designer Carolyn Downing, and sound system designer Steve Atkinson, have enjoyed a journey of genuine creative collaboration.
With puppet design and direction by Toby Olié, set design by Vicki Mortimer and illusions by Chris Fisher, the adaptation by Tom Wells plays brilliantly on shifts in scale, deftly switching between human actors and puppet versions of their characters, voiced live by the same performer. The character of Sophie in human form performs against a towering ‘Big Friendly Giant’ puppet; or in reverse, the BFG (played by John Leader) alongside a tiny Sophie puppet.
Two years in the making, the show opened at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre (RST) in Stratford in November 2025, before transferring to CFT in March and is now travelling on to Singapore. As we’ll discover, the often-rare luxury of time and space afforded to the technical work played an enormous part in helping the creative team tell the story. And across every discipline, it is a collaboration anchored in a shared and ground-breaking use of tracking technology. As it might be said: ‘this is where all dreams is beginning’ . . .
Video design
“I feel quite spoiled by the process,” begins Akhila Krishnan. “Vicki and Daniel have always really supported my work.
I consider Vicki a mentor even though she’s a set designer. Video is a relatively new discipline in theatre and she always gives me a lot of space, generosity, and trust to follow my own process. She did that with the whole creative team on this one.”
While the desire for video was clear from the outset, its exact form remained an open question. “Daniel had an instinct that we would need video for the Journey to Giant Country sequence and then, how do you expand that language? He also had a feeling he would need it for the scale shifts required.”
A series of three workshops followed, using white card puppets and placeholder images. “In the first workshop, we did the Journey to Giant Country because Daniel always knew the show would need that moment, and we needed to know it was going to work,” Krishnan recalls. She credits Mortimer for holding off finalising the set design, viewing the set as a ‘container’ for all departments.
The tracking discussion came early in the proceedings. “We knew lighting needed a followspot system, I knew we were going to use floor projection and Carolyn was very clear that she wanted to locate the sound in the puppets,” says Krishnan. “The really radical thing about the show is that we were able to get time before tech to test that the system would work.”
Aside from the in-house workshops, additional technical R&D was funded elsewhere. Krishnan was the 2024-25 Interdisciplinary Fellow at the RSC, connected to the RSC’s innovation department. With the support of RSC director of innovation Sarah Ellis, she was able to secure R&D money from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), which it was agreed could be used to explore the tracking system that lighting, sound and video could utilise.
This took place in May 2025 at Battersea Arts Centre, the venue mimicking both the footprint and the 9m grid height of the RST.
Multiple suppliers and manufacturers provided systems for evaluation and comparison. “The RSC had difficult experiences in the past, so we knew it needed to be robust as a system for all three venues.”
The team settled on zactrack, supplemented with a Macula system for specific moments. David Stone, system engineer for the tracking and followspot systems, describes the final zactrack setup: “We have 32 active trackers. All the principal cast wear two trackers, in custom harnesses that also house their mic packs. The large puppets also have two trackers hidden in various places, with the small puppets having one each. A couple of set pieces are tracked too for video mapping.”
With the system running in full 3D tracking mode, 11 zactrack Anchors are deployed, the maximum number available with the SMART system.
Krishnan describes two key creative uses of the tracking: masking and trails. “We mask the bigger puppets, especially in Chichester where the roof is low. The taller puppets drift very close to the projector source, which would warp in an ugly way. So, we spot them with a black spot from the front and floor projectors,” she explains.
The localised masking also came into its own for the extensive floor projection. “Normally you push for more projectors in the rig to avoid shadowing, but this wasn’t an option. With the tracking system I had a very localised masking solution.”
The trackers also define the live position and movement of particle trails. “When Sophie gets lifted up in the daydream sequence, for example, particles seemingly explode from her. When the daydream itself closes down and opens up, we use Notch effects to expand and contract the particle field. And in the Journey to Giant Country, particles emit exactly where the BFG is running.”
An additional use of the trackers emerged during R&D, benefitting the actors voicing their puppets from backstage vocal booths. “We discovered the trackers could send information directly to two video cameras, allowing them to follow the action automatically,” says Krishnan. Stage Precision software was used to finesse the process, with programmer Hannah Broman developing a series of cues. “One camera might hold a mid-long shot of the full stage, while the second tracks the BFG puppet in close-up for (BFG actor) John Leader to receive as a feed inside the backstage vocal booth,” Krishnan explains. “It’s what makes the show feel immediate and seamless between the puppets and the humans.”
Lighting design
“It’s nice to sit in an R&D process with creative minds and see where ideas lead – not specifically about lighting, simply creative ideas to make a show,” says LD Zoe Spurr. “Often I come onto a project and the director and designer have established an idea, so then I’m building upon what has already been started. Whereas BFG was blue-sky thinking from the very start for the entire creative team, which made everyone feel a real ownership over the production.”
The first meeting demonstrated the scale of the project, in more ways than one. “Daniel said: ‘How are we going to do this?’ And Toby pulled out this enormous flip chart and laid out different scales of puppets and people, essentially sparking the visual approach for the show.”
CFT’s fixed, low grid posed an immediate question given the near 4m scale of the largest puppet. “The burning question was: ‘How would the large BFG puppet feel underneath the lower grid of CFT?’. By designing the production with a model box of both the RST and CFT, the team could make design choices to suit both spaces, rather than compromising one of them.”
The technical demands of lighting puppets and people high in the air – and also something just centimetres high – led quickly to the question of automated followspots. “We needed something cleverer than standard end-on followspots,” recalls Spurr.
She describes the technical R&D sessions as “a gift”. “We had the BFG’s puppet head on a stick held 3m high, and trackers strapped to plastic bottles to act as the tiny puppets. I so rarely work this in-depth with my production and programming team before the show starts fit up. It was lovely to have their expertise months before the production period began.”
The team tried every orientation of lighting fixtures: over-rigged, under-rigged, diagonal/horizontal/parallel to stage. “Control of the z-axis was critical – lighting something 3m in the air and then something 20cm high demanded precision that not every system or fixture could deliver,” notes Spurr.
The zactrack solution proved extremely capable, supplemented with a Macula followspot system for specific uses.
For Spurr, the benefits of the automated system have been wide-ranging. “Multiple followspots on puppets and people in the air, live switching of sources,” she says, and confirms the system has performed entirely as expected. As David Stone put it on day one: “It’s not magic.” Which, Spurr reflects, is exactly the point.
The tracking capability has provided cross-department benefits: “With tight spots following performers wherever they went, Akhila’s video projection – particularly on the floor – could be preserved. That would have been impossible had we used more general lighting coverage.”
The team determined the need for a second programmer to enable and disable trackers. “Andi Davis, and then Victoria Brennan, who also manages a lot of the effects on the show, manage the trackers. They are a really useful conduit between all departments.”
Reflecting on the whole production Spurr says, above all, it’s been a collective effort. From everyone in the lighting (lead by production electrician Simon Spencer and deputy Matt Coombes) and production departments at the RSC, to the team at CFT, which includes head of lighting Graham Taylor and head of sound Mike Keniger, all were ready to help in every way: “They were heavily involved from the start, really took on the challenge and deeply care for the show. A ‘giant’ thank you to all involved in making this wonderful show!”
Conclusion
The world of The BFG in this production is conjured with incredible detail, wonder and warmth. As Downing reflects: “We very much worked together from day one. Daniel Evans brought us together as a whole group to talk through ideas, because each element is so integral to each other.
We’re all holding hands, sharing the space. We have different needs, but they rely on each other, and sometimes they’re pulling apart and clashing a little bit – we have to figure those things out. It’s felt unique on this production in the way that it’s been done so collaboratively.”
With explorations of the bounds of technology, and the time afforded to enable that collaboration, it’s remarkable what human beans can do.
Credits:
Lighting and zactrack system were supplied by White Light
Photos by Marc Brenner