A quick change booth is a curtained box in the wings where an actor is stripped and redressed in forty seconds by a dresser who has practised it a hundred times. Ours is struck at the end of every run. It is standing every morning, curtains hung, a chair and a rail inside it, and on the rail the costumes from the show that closed, pressed, in running order, and the crew camera shows the curtain move at a quarter past eight every night, and nobody go in.
I am the wardrobe mistress at a producing theatre and the quick change booth in the stage left wing is the thing I strike last and find first.
The booth.
A frame of scaffold with black curtains, a chair, a rail, a small light, in the wing, where an actor comes off in one costume and goes back on in another, and the time between is however many seconds the script gives, and the dresser inside the booth has the second costume open and ready and the first one is off and on the floor and the second is on and done up and the actor is gone, and the dresser picks up the first one and hangs it.
It is struck at the end of every run. Every scaffold pole down, every curtain folded, the chair back in the store.
It is standing every morning.
What is on the rail.
Costumes. From the show that closed in 2019, which I dressed, which had the fastest change I have ever built, forty seconds, a full evening dress to a nightgown and back, twice a night. The dresses are in the store, on the rack, in their bags, and they are also on the rail in the booth, every morning, pressed, hung in running order, with the nightgown open at the back the way I taught the dresser to leave it, and when I go to the store the bags are on the rack and the bags are empty.
I carry the dresses back to the store. In the morning they are on the rail.
What has been checked.
The crew camera in the wing. The booth is not there at the end of the night. At about a quarter past eight, which was the time of the first change in that show, the camera shows the booth. Not built. There. The curtains hung, the light on. The curtain on the stage side moves the way it moves when a dresser inside pulls it back to be ready. Forty seconds. The curtain moves the way it moves when it is let go. The light stays on till the second change, at about half past nine, and then goes off, and the booth is there in the morning.
The booth, by me, inside it, at a quarter past eight. The chair. The rail. The dresses. The light. And at a quarter past eight, the curtain on the stage side pulled back beside me by nobody, and the cold that came in, and the nightgown on the rail moving, lifted off its hanger, held open the way you hold it for somebody to step into, held for forty seconds in the air in front of me, and hung back up.
Nobody stepped into it.
Who.
The dresser on that show. A girl, twenty, on her first job, who had done the forty second change so well that the actress had thanked her from the stage on the last night, which does not happen. She had been on a bicycle on the way home from the last night, and it was a cyclist's death, the ordinary kind, at a junction, and the company had been told at the get out the next morning, and we had struck the booth, and I had folded the curtains, and I had not been able to say anything to anybody.
She is doing the change. Every night, at a quarter past eight and half past nine, forty seconds each, for an actress who is in a television series now and does not know.
What is done about it.
The booth is on the wing camera every night and the stage manager has it on the show report as a set piece not struck, and the stage manager has been told it is struck, and has looked in the morning and found it standing, and has stopped putting it on the report.
What I do.
I run wardrobe.
I have stopped carrying the dresses back. They live on the rail now. I press them, on a Monday, which is the day I would have pressed them in the run, and I check the hooks, and I leave the nightgown open at the back.
And at a quarter past eight I stand in the booth with her. I do not do the change. She does it. But a forty second change on that show was a two dresser change, one for the dress and one for the hair, and I was the second dresser, and I stand where I stood, and when the curtain pulls back I count. Under my breath. The way I did. Ten, twenty, thirty, and at thirty five the nightgown goes back on its hanger, and I say, done, go, which is what I said, and the curtain lets go.
She was never told she had done it well by anybody except an actress on a stage. I say it now. Every night, after the second change, when the light goes off, I say, that was clean, well done, and the light comes back on for a second, and goes off, and I take that as a young dresser who does not know how to be thanked and would rather get on.