Emily Malen Interview: "I Just Need Pens!" What Happens When Things Go Wrong
Title
Emily Malen Interview: "I Just Need Pens!" What Happens When Things Go Wrong
Date
17 January 2019
Description
Oral history interview with Emily Malen, Front of House Manager and Access Development for the Theatre Royal since 2005.
What's the story?
Born in Leicester in 1982, Emily Malen came to the Theatre Royal in 2005 through Loughborough University’s Graduate Gateway Scheme.
She was originally placed within the education team, but gradually worked her way up the organisation to become Front of House Manager.
Of her many achievements Emily has also significantly developed the access work at the venue, ensuring the Theatre Royal is genuinely open to everyone.
In this interview, Emily talks about problem-solving in her role, recounting an experience of when the Safety Curtain got stuck prior to a performance of Singin’ in the Rain. You will hear how Emily and colleagues had to improvise to ensure that deaf users in the audience had all the necessary information they needed to know what was going on.
A very serious situation was coped with very efficiently and is now “etched in your memory of some kind of chuckle”
We had Singin’ In The Rain with us many years ago and unfortunately our safety curtain got stuck and what that meant was because you have to present that to the audience prior to a show, it got stuck on the way down and wouldn’t go up and obviously that curtain’s very heavy and very solid and that was interesting because it was the whole… Everyone was in the building and I think me and my manager were just about to walk out the door and then we got a call that “Ooh actually there’s something happening front of house ” because we always check in with our managers, but essentially on any given evening they run the show, but on that night, it was also Sign Language interpreted and it’s quite a chuckle when you tell it because we had deaf members in the audience, which is great. They’re here to access the service with the BSL interpreter. But the interpreter wouldn’t have been lit with a spotlight prior to the show starting and obviously, because the show wasn’t going to start, because it couldn’t because the curtain got stuck down, we had to figure out how we’re going to communicate to a deaf person when the auditorium lights are on that they’ve got to look to someone in a side box, who needs to be lit up, but how would they know to look there if no-one’s telling them?
So me and one of my Front of House assistants, we had our torches and we had asked backstage to light her with a spotlight, so that would be a focus for deaf users to see that she was going to interpret about the show being cancelled. But me and my friend Michael, we actually lay on the floor in front of her in one of the side front boxes (and the audience wouldn’t have known any of this) and we had torches ready just to uplight her face and uplight her hands, just in case to give that extra bit of shine on her should the backstage light not come on. It was all good and it all worked out. She did get lit by the spotlight from backstage, but it’s just that thing where you just realise “Oh my goodness, there’s this just to …” You wouldn’t even have thought about it if the show was happening and everything was norm.
And then obviously going round with bits of paper to get their address details, because some deaf people and hard-of-hearing people can obviously still write sentences down. I also that night learnt the Sign Language sign for “I’m sorry”. I still remember it to this day. It kind of all worked out well in the end, but there was quite a lot of really quick thinking. And I remember also my colleagues, obviously it’s putting it all into context, obviously everyone was dealing with different things in emergency.
To some people, I just was saying to one of my colleagues “I need pens, I need all of your pens” and in context I was saying that because I just needed all the pens I could grab to give every deaf member in the audience, should they need to write something down for me on the paper I was giving out. But if you see a lady running at you going “I just need pens!”, that was quite … I think that’s gone down in history with some of my colleagues. They laugh a lot about that, so I think what happens is, through something that could be quite serious at the time, it then becomes etched in your memory of some kind of chuckle that it’s nice to think about it at the time.
She was originally placed within the education team, but gradually worked her way up the organisation to become Front of House Manager.
Of her many achievements Emily has also significantly developed the access work at the venue, ensuring the Theatre Royal is genuinely open to everyone.
In this interview, Emily talks about problem-solving in her role, recounting an experience of when the Safety Curtain got stuck prior to a performance of Singin’ in the Rain. You will hear how Emily and colleagues had to improvise to ensure that deaf users in the audience had all the necessary information they needed to know what was going on.
A very serious situation was coped with very efficiently and is now “etched in your memory of some kind of chuckle”
We had Singin’ In The Rain with us many years ago and unfortunately our safety curtain got stuck and what that meant was because you have to present that to the audience prior to a show, it got stuck on the way down and wouldn’t go up and obviously that curtain’s very heavy and very solid and that was interesting because it was the whole… Everyone was in the building and I think me and my manager were just about to walk out the door and then we got a call that “Ooh actually there’s something happening front of house ” because we always check in with our managers, but essentially on any given evening they run the show, but on that night, it was also Sign Language interpreted and it’s quite a chuckle when you tell it because we had deaf members in the audience, which is great. They’re here to access the service with the BSL interpreter. But the interpreter wouldn’t have been lit with a spotlight prior to the show starting and obviously, because the show wasn’t going to start, because it couldn’t because the curtain got stuck down, we had to figure out how we’re going to communicate to a deaf person when the auditorium lights are on that they’ve got to look to someone in a side box, who needs to be lit up, but how would they know to look there if no-one’s telling them?
So me and one of my Front of House assistants, we had our torches and we had asked backstage to light her with a spotlight, so that would be a focus for deaf users to see that she was going to interpret about the show being cancelled. But me and my friend Michael, we actually lay on the floor in front of her in one of the side front boxes (and the audience wouldn’t have known any of this) and we had torches ready just to uplight her face and uplight her hands, just in case to give that extra bit of shine on her should the backstage light not come on. It was all good and it all worked out. She did get lit by the spotlight from backstage, but it’s just that thing where you just realise “Oh my goodness, there’s this just to …” You wouldn’t even have thought about it if the show was happening and everything was norm.
And then obviously going round with bits of paper to get their address details, because some deaf people and hard-of-hearing people can obviously still write sentences down. I also that night learnt the Sign Language sign for “I’m sorry”. I still remember it to this day. It kind of all worked out well in the end, but there was quite a lot of really quick thinking. And I remember also my colleagues, obviously it’s putting it all into context, obviously everyone was dealing with different things in emergency.
To some people, I just was saying to one of my colleagues “I need pens, I need all of your pens” and in context I was saying that because I just needed all the pens I could grab to give every deaf member in the audience, should they need to write something down for me on the paper I was giving out. But if you see a lady running at you going “I just need pens!”, that was quite … I think that’s gone down in history with some of my colleagues. They laugh a lot about that, so I think what happens is, through something that could be quite serious at the time, it then becomes etched in your memory of some kind of chuckle that it’s nice to think about it at the time.
Type
Oral interview
Location of item
Theatre Royal & Royal Concert Hall Nottingham
Rights
Theatre Royal & Royal Concert Hall Nottingham
Contributor
Interviewers: Liz MacKenzie & Julia Holmes
Transcriber: David Chilton
Transcriber: David Chilton
