KEY POINTS:
It's a shame the Royal Shakespeare Company stood on ceremony and refused Aotea Centre's offer to mike this week's season in that barn of a venue, the ASB Theatre. Just because the bard did without electronic assistance all those years ago doesn't mean he wouldn't have embraced it with open arms if it had been around in his day.
With opera singers having difficulty filling this dead void with sound, most of us would have forgiven these strolling players if they'd clipped a little microphone to their lapels. Many would have appreciated it.
People like poor old Paul Holmes who confessed to nodding off in his circle seat on opening night, so tired he became from straining to hear what was going on. I sympathise. From my mid-stalls seat I found the strain of listening for each word, and then having to translate it into modern English, exhausting.
Of course the venue, being the contrary dog it is, meant that others had totally different experiences. Metro magazine reviewer Simon Wilson even complained about it being too noisy. He wrote that because the production had been designed for a theatre half the size, "the whole cast compensated by over-projecting their voices. The loudness is not necessary ... "
He was a few seats away from me and didn't appear to have his iPod installed at the time. But before booking to have my ears syringed, I had a word with theatre chief executive Greg Innes.
He happened to be sitting directly behind Mr Holmes and concedes "yes, you had to concentrate, no question about that. But it was opening night and the actors were still getting used to it." He says that later in the week he had a scout in the back of the gallery "and it was as clear as a bell".
Ah yes, but was he in one of the hall's few good spots?
Encouragingly, the ASB Theatre's acoustics are due for an upgrade when the complex closes down for up to two years from the end of 2008 for the rebuilding of the faulty underground carpark. In the "disruption budget" there's up to $1 million for an electronic reverberation system to be installed in the Civic Theatre to create an acoustic suitable for opera for the two years the ASB is closed.
When the Aotea Centre is ready to re-open, the new reverberation system will be moved to the ASB Theatre to replace the long abandoned, flawed system that the hall opened with in 1990. That's the plan anyway, though it still needs political approval.
Acoustician Chris Day, whose company resigned from the troubled Aotea project in the 1980s when the council decided to go "electronic", says an alternative would be to return to the "natural" solution and raise the roof up to five metres.
This would increase the volume and the reverberation. In addition, he would suspend large reflector panels from the side walls or the ceiling, to bounce early sounds into the dead centre of the hall where I was seated.
Shakespeare, he says, would sound so much better. These early reflections also improve the sound of music, which is what some of us, who have found sweet spots near the walls or under the balconies of this hall, have already found by chance.
But at present, these side reflections only travel a few metres before getting lost in the vast space. As for raising the roof, Mr Day concedes this would be expensive, but says this is no longer the only solution. Twenty years ago he and partner Harold Marshall opposed plans for an electronic reverberation system, and their opposition was proved correct by the disaster that unfolded. "But electronic reverberation systems have come on hugely since then," he says, "and are now a possibility."
Marshall Day Acoustics recently won an international competition to design the acoustics for the City of Paris's new concert hall, and Mr Day says it would be wonderful if the Aotea acoustics were fixed. Mr Innes agrees. He says with plans afoot for a complete refurbishment of the theatre, he is sure the opportunity will be taken to improving the acoustics for spoken word as well.
To think, by the time of the 2010 re-opening and just 20 years late, we might get the true multi-purpose theatre we were promised.
