A follow spot is a lamp with a person behind it whose whole job is to keep the light on one actor as they move. Box two's lamp comes on at a quarter past eleven every night with nobody in the box. It picks up at the stage left wing, at the height of a person, and follows, at walking pace, across the stage to the trap door at centre, and the trap is bolted, and the light goes down into it, and goes out.
I am the chief electrician at a theatre with two follow spot boxes at the back of the circle, and box two is the one I have stopped rostering.
The spots.
A big lamp on a stand, in a box with a window, with a seat behind it for an operator. The operator picks up an actor when the DSM says go and keeps the light on them wherever they go. It is a skill, and a good operator is worth having, and a bad one is the thing the audience remembers.
Box two's lamp comes on at a quarter past eleven every night, on its own, with the box locked and empty, and the lamp is not powered, because I isolated it.
The pickup.
The stage left wing, downstage. The lamp irises open on the black masking at the height of a head. Then it moves. Across the stage, at the pace of somebody walking with purpose, not hurrying, along the line an actor takes from that wing to centre. Steady. No wobble, which is the thing you cannot teach.
At centre it stops on the trap. The trap is a door in the stage floor, bolted from underneath, not used since the pantomime. The beam holds on the trap for a second and then it tilts down, into it, through the floor, the way a spot follows somebody going down a staircase, and when the beam is at the angle that would be pointing at the understage, it irises shut.
What has been checked.
The lamp. Isolated. It comes on. The lamp has been taken out of the box and put in the store and the box has been empty, and the light has come from the box's window at a quarter past eleven anyway, the right colour, the right size, and done the pickup and the cross and the trap.
The stage, at a quarter past eleven, by me. The circle of light comes onto the masking beside me at the height of my head. I have stepped into it. It does not stop for me. It goes past me, across the stage, at walking pace, on something at the height of a head that I cannot see, and I have walked beside it, and the air inside the circle is colder than the air outside it, and it goes down the trap.
The trap, from underneath. Bolted. The understage is a low room of dust and old flats and the trap is in the ceiling of it, and at a quarter past eleven the beam comes through the closed trap, the way light does not, and lands on the floor of the understage, and holds there, on a spot on the floor, and goes out.
The spot on the floor.
I marked it. Then I asked the archive for anything about the trap, and she had it.
The pantomime, 1970s. A comic, going down the trap for a gag, the star trap, the kind that drops you fast, and the trap had dropped him and the mattress underneath had been moved by somebody for a reason nobody ever gave, and he had landed on the floor, on the spot I marked, and the follow spot operator in box two, who was following him, had kept the light on the trap for a long time after he went down, because nobody had told her he was not coming back up.
She had followed him all the way. It was the last thing she did in the building. She had gone down from the box, the archive said, and not come back, not that night and not after, and had died a few years later, young, and the archive said it quietly, as if that were a thing the theatre had done to her.
What is done about it.
The trap is bolted and the pantomime does not use it now, and box two is not rostered, and the lamp in the store comes on at a quarter past eleven, in the store, and lights the wall.
What I do.
I run the lighting.
I put the lamp back in box two. I sit behind it. At a quarter past eleven when it comes on, I put my hands on it, on the handles, where an operator's hands go, and I follow.
I do not steer it. It goes where it goes. But my hands are on it and I keep it smooth, and when it reaches the trap I hold the pickup, the way you do at the end of a cross, and when it tilts down into the trap I say, into the headset, spot two, he's down, which is the thing an operator says to the desk so the desk knows the pickup is over, and which she never said, because nobody at the desk that night was in a state to hear it.
The beam holds a second longer than it did. Then it goes out. And the lamp, under my hands, is warm, and the seat behind it, when I get up, is warm where I was not sitting, on the left side, where a small person would sit, and the archive told me she was small.