Thrust stage

A thrust is a stage that projects forward into the room so that the audience surrounds it on three sides. The reason to build one is proximity: more people are close to the speaker, and the room reads as a conversation rather than a lecture.

What it costs is every assumption built around a front-facing stage. Front light has to come from three directions instead of one, and a presenter who turns to address one side goes into shadow on another unless the rig covers all of it. Loudspeakers can no longer sit at the sides of a proscenium throwing in one direction, because a third of the audience is now behind that line. Cameras lose their safe position, since every angle has an audience behind it.

Scenery and screens are the harder problem. Anything upstage is now visible to only part of the room, which means content has to be repeated on side screens or the main screen has to be lifted above the thrust, and a scenic wall that reads beautifully from the centre reads as an edge from the sides.

A runway — a narrow thrust down the centre of a room — carries all the same consequences in a smaller form, and is worth drawing properly rather than adding at the last planning meeting.

Corporate event production — owned inventory, our own crew, and a site survey before anything is specified.

• Proscenium The frame a stage is viewed through — a wall with an opening in it, which decides what the audience can see and gives everything else somewhere to hide.
• Sightlines What each seat can actually see — the thing that decides stage height, screen height and where a camera platform may stand, and the thing a flat floor ruins.
• Stage deck The modular platform a stage is built from — four feet by eight in most of the country, with the height set by the legs rather than by the deck.