Bruno Poet: shaping light, story and the space between 

From theatre and opera to live music and vast-scale ceremonies, Bruno Poet’s work has illuminated an extraordinary range of performances. His credits span productions including Frankenstein, Macbeth, Miss Saigon, Tina, Don Giovanni and Akhnaten and work with artists such as Björk, Sigur Rós, Alicia Keys and Pet Shop Boys.  

Yet, for all the technology now available to a lighting designer, Poet’s approach remains rooted in some enduring principles: understand the story, understand the space, decide where the audience should look, and recognise that darkness and silence can be every bit as important as light. 

We spoke to Bruno about creating images with light, why angles matter, the nervous moment when an imagined design finally meets a performer, and the tools he chooses to help turn an idea into something an audience can feel. 

When you walk into an empty space for the first time, what are you actually looking for? 

I think you’re nearly always walking into a space with some sense of what the show is about. So, you’re thinking: how does the show fit into this space? Is there a set, and how does that fit? Where are the lighting positions? Where are the angles you might need to light the show? 

It’s never completely blank paper because quite often you’ve already got a sense of what the show is before you walk into the space. It’s really about imagining how you might put lights into that space to enhance and work with the show. 

Sometimes, of course, you do see the space before anything is designed or before you know very much about it. Then you’re looking at whether you’ve got the freedom to do whatever you want or whether there are going to be restrictions. Once you start conceiving the show, you can think about how you work around those restrictions. 

You’ve described lighting as something that exists for the eye and the heart in that moment. What can light do to an audience emotionally that perhaps nothing else in a production can? 

It can do so many things. 

On a live show, in one sense, it’s like the camera in a film. When you watch a film, somebody has made choices about where you’re looking. When you’re watching a live show with your own eyes, hopefully the lighting is helping to shape the performance and tell the audience where to look. 

Quite often you’re making the wide shot and the tight shot at the same time. You’re highlighting the action in the middle while also trying to create an environment around it. 

There’s that physical focusing and shaping of the stage, but then, of course, there’s the mood and dynamism that lighting can contribute. 

With music, you’re trying to make the lighting connect with the energy and feel of the music, whether it’s fast or slow, energetic or languid. 

With a play, quite often you’re bringing a sense of mood, time of day or atmosphere. A conversation between actors on a bright, sunny afternoon might feel very different from exactly the same conversation in moonlight, on a rainy grey day, or sitting with a candle on a table. 

There’s a huge amount lighting can do to enhance the words or the story that’s being told. 

There are images from your Macbeth that demonstrate that beautifully. There’s an extraordinary sense of shape and atmosphere to them. 

One of the reasons I liked that so much is that I used very few lights. Quite often it was one single light sculpting and shaping the stage. 

We had a white floor, which meant the shadows were very, very clear. We could use a single direction of light to make very clean shadows and then fill it with a little light. You could make really striking images, and you got a very nice, soft bounce back off the floor. 

That was really pleasing on that show. 

Do you think there is a recognisable “Bruno Poet look”? 

I think I’d probably like it if somebody said there was, but I’m not sure I could define what it is! 

There are things I like. As I’ve just described, I like things to be quite clean. I like a very clean direction of light shaping the stage and shaping people. I think the choice of angles is crucial. 

I’m probably very particular and fairly sparse about colour choice as well. I like colour, but I don’t tend to have lots of colour happening at the same time. If I’m using one single strong colour, I’ll generally balance it with fairly neutral colours from other directions. 

I think careful colour choice is important to me. 

And clarity of storytelling. I like to be able to see the people we need to see and see their eyes clearly. That isn’t necessarily about putting them in a followspot; it’s about building a picture around the performance. 

You’ve lit everything from Frankenstein and Macbeth to Björk, Sigur Rós, Alicia Keys and Pet Shop Boys. Does your fundamental approach change between theatre and concerts? 

In a way, it’s just the same. 

What’s interesting about all of it is that whenever you take on a new project, initially it feels quite daunting. There’s a lot happening. It might be a big ceremony, a whole list of songs, a complicated play or a musical. 

Ultimately, you solve it by breaking it down into manageable bits. 

You have to have an overarching vision for the whole thing, but then you think about the detail in smaller chunks. I’m probably applying the same techniques to concerts as I am to theatre and opera. 

A lot of it is about how you hold the performers onstage in a way that enhances what they’re doing and connects them to the audience. 

Opera must offer some particularly interesting possibilities for that. 

Opera is interesting because it’s such a weird, bonkers, abstract art form. In a way, there’s a certain amount of freedom to make big, dramatic stage pictures. Quite often the production designs are really out there and interesting, which lets you do some exciting things. 

One difference between theatre and concerts is that theatre, opera and musicals normally have quite a lot of scenery. You’re lighting a scenic world. 

A lot of the time with a concert, the lights themselves are the scenery, so you’re creating the architecture through beams and through haze. 

That’s exciting, although in a way it can also be a little disappointing, because physical scenery and the ways you can light it can give you many more options than just masses of beams in the air. 

Is there a moment when you know you’ve got a lighting design right? 

To some extent, yes. Although I don’t think a designer is ever completely satisfied. There’s always another thing you could change or another thing you could do. But obviously you have to know when to stop – or you have to stop because it’s opening night and the show is done. 

I go through a certain process. 

I start by imagining a rig and thinking about the play or the show, breaking down the music or the script and imagining in my mind what the lighting might be. I’m thinking about where people are onstage and the set. Then I’ll watch rehearsals, and quite often I’m imagining those pictures in the rehearsal room. 

Then you get into the theatre and start turning the lights on – and you start questioning everything. 

You think, “Oh God, is this thing I imagined going to be the thing I thought it was going to be? Is it going to work?” 

That’s where you have to hold your nerve. 

The next step is when you put the cast or performers onstage in the lights. Then you can say, “Okay, that bit works. This doesn’t work. Why doesn’t it work?” 

And, of course, it’s a collaboration. You’re talking to the director and the rest of the creative team and working on how the whole thing fits together. 

You have to go in with a clear idea in your mind of what each moment might look like, but you also have to be open to seeing what is in front of you and reacting to it. 

So much of lighting is problem solving. A light doesn’t stop where you wanted it to stop; it carries on and hits an annoying white surface behind. Performers move somewhere different. You’re constantly responding to what is actually there. 

And presumably seeing the show with an audience changes things again? 

Absolutely. For me, there’s a really important moment when I watch it without screens in front of me, without a headset, without talking to the programmers. I just sit in the audience and watch it with everybody else. 

You get a sense of seeing it through their eyes, and that’s when you really understand how well it works – or doesn’t work. 

It can also give you very clear ideas about what you need to change. 

That’s one of the joys of theatre and musicals because you normally have a week or so of previews. You watch the show with the audience and then come in the next day and make changes. That’s not just lighting; sometimes the whole show changes. 

We’re making a live piece of performance or a live work of art. Until you see it with the audience, you don’t really know what it is. 

So, part of the skill is learning to see what the audience is actually seeing rather than what you intended them to see? 

Exactly. 

Are they following the story? Can they see everything in the way they need to? Are they being distracted by somebody standing in an upstage corner who is weirdly bright and pulling focus from where you actually want them to look? 

Quite often lighting is about where the darkness is as much as where the light is. You’re often hiding things you don’t want people to see – transitions, scene changes, mechanisms, helicopters coming down from the sky. 

Sometimes it’s about learning to see what everybody else is seeing rather than seeing what you imagined and assuming that it’s okay. 

Sometimes producers help you see that. I’ve had plenty of conversations with people like Cameron Mackintosh where you’re given a note and initially think, “What does that mean?” Then you understand that he’s looking at it from an audience point of view. He hasn’t heard all the conversations you’ve had, and that incredibly clever thing you think you’re doing doesn’t actually come across. 

Then you have to work out how to solve it. 

That’s one of the joys of the job, really – the people you get to work with. 

Technology gives a lighting designer extraordinary possibilities compared with when you started. Has it made lighting design better? 

I think it’s made lighting design more complicated. It’s certainly given us more options. 

Sometimes one single light in the right place is actually what you want. 

What technology has given us is a huge amount of flexibility to change things on the fly. There are much bigger expectations now from directors and bands that you’ll be able to change something instantly during rehearsals. 

Thirty-five years ago, if you wanted to change the colour of a light during a rehearsal, you might have been sending somebody up a ladder to put a piece of colour in front of it. Now we can do that instantly. 

Lighting can be more expressive and support productions in different ways, but I think the essence of how you put a lighting design together hasn’t changed. 

Light still works in certain ways. And when you’re doing a live show, unlike film, all the lights that are going to create every look during the evening have to exist together in one rig. You can’t simply move a light around between camera shots. 

The principles of how you approach the show and the ideas behind it are very similar to how they were before all this technology. What technology has done is allow us to realise those ideas in much more varied and intriguing ways. 

Does having that much flexibility ever become a danger? 

Yes. You need to be able to react to what is in front of you, but you also need to keep the overall arc of the show in the back of your mind. 

If everything is simply a gut reaction to the thing immediately in front of you, you can end up with quite a messy, disjointed design over the course of an evening. And that applies to music as much as theatre. 

We’ve got these incredible tools, but we have to be quite refined about how we choose to use them. 

What do you want manufacturers designing those tools to understand? 

The technology has got so good recently. 

I used to bang on about things like dimming curves, even colour across the beam and different qualities of frost. There was always that problem with LED fixtures where you couldn’t necessarily get the nice warm colours you wanted. Now, with the range of colour-mixing systems available, we’re in an incredibly good position in terms of the options available to us. 

Something I frequently mention is quiet lights. I think that’s really important. 

And again, it applies to music as much as theatre. You want musicians, actors and the sound mixer to be able to rely on a relatively silent venue. Quiet bits are really important, just as shadow is really important to lighting. 

You don’t want to hear a constant background hum from thousands of fans. 

When I’m choosing lights, sometimes how quiet a fixture is can be as important as its light output. I know I can get bright lights. So if I can get one that is also quiet, those are the ones I’ll tend to favour. 

You’ve used Robe T1 Profiles and RoboSpot systems extensively. What has worked for you there? 

I’ve used T1s on a number of shows, and they’re great. That sort of LED engine means you can really tune the colours in the way that you want to. 

And they’re quiet as well. 

With followspots, in more recent years and in slightly bigger venues, we’ve moved onto iForte LTXs because the spots were so far away that we needed the extra punch. 

The LTX has become my workhorse for followspot on pretty much everything. I’ve used them on stadium-scale shows such as the Winter Olympics, but also in West End theatres. They’ve been really great units. 

I’ve used them with the LightMaster side handle, with an operator touching the light, which is probably my preferred way of doing it. But I also really like the way the RoboSpot system gives the operator full control. I tend to let the spot operators control things like dimmer and iris, and that works really well for me. 

It’s definitely been my followspot choice since it came out. 

The Olympic-scale work really demonstrates the extremes these fixtures can be asked to handle. How did you approach that? 

The Olympics was an almost entirely Robe rig. We had LTXs as followspots, but LTXs were also the workhorse profiles on the job. 

It was an incredibly long throw. I think no light was closer to the stage than about 70 metres and some were around 110 metres away. 

Particularly with the colour palettes I wanted to use for that show, they did an absolutely fantastic job. 

We were very directional with the lighting on that show. The plan was to keep it very theatre- or opera-like, with simple directions of light – sidelight, for example – and make quite bold statements. 

For a show of that scale, that combination worked really, really well. 

At the other end of the scale, are there smaller fixtures that have become useful tools for you? 

I’ve used the LEDBeam 150 a lot. It’s an older light now, but they’re tiny, so you can fit loads of them into tricky corners. They’re relatively inexpensive and they have a huge zoom range. 

They’re really handy for smaller shows because you know what you’re getting with them. But these days I’d choose something with a lime colour chip because the colour options are so much better.  

I’ve seen some of the newer range at PLASA and they looked really promising. But you can’t really tell until you actually put something onto a show and use it properly. 

Finally, what does the “Robe Difference” mean to you? 

I think Robe is constantly pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with lights. 

They work across a wide variety of markets and they’re trying to solve problems across all of those markets, which is really interesting. There’s a very big range, so there’s something for everyone within the Robe family of lights. 

And I do think Robe innovates. 

The interchangeable light engine is good, and the fact that you can choose between high colour fidelity and high intensity in some of the fixtures gives you flexibility and a real variety of choice. 

For me, that combination of innovation, range and the ability to choose the right tool for what you’re trying to achieve is important. 

Ultimately, for Poet, lighting design remains less about how many possibilities a fixture can offer than knowing which possibilities to use. Technology may have transformed the speed, flexibility and scale of the designer’s palette, but the fundamental questions remain remarkably consistent: What does the audience need to see? What do they need to feel? Where should the light come from – and, just as importantly, where should there be darkness? 

It is in those choices that the technology disappears and the story takes over.