Sawdust, Scrap Timber and Late-Night Paint: Inside The Yard's Set-Building Crew

It is 9.40am on a Tuesday in November 2026, and the workshop behind The Yard in Hackney Wick already smells of rain, PVA and coffee. A radio is playing something tinny and optimistic. There is a pile of reclaimed timber in the corner, a half-painted flat leaning against the wall, and a set designer called Rosa Fielding standing in the middle of it all, holding a tape measure like it has personally offended her.

The production is The Salt House, a new play opening at The Yard on 21 November. On paper, it is a two-act drama about a family running a pub on a disappearing coastline. In practice, it is a set that has to become a pub garden, a shoreline and a memory inside 90 minutes, in a venue where the backstage corridor is barely wider than a fridge. Fielding has £2,400 for materials and a crew of four. She is not complaining. Much.

The workshop where nothing is wasted

‘You start with what you’ve got,’ Fielding says. ‘Not what you want. What you’ve got.’ What they have got is a stack of timber from a Dalston shopfit that closed in September, three tins of paint mixed from leftovers, a roll of heavy-duty cardboard that once wrapped a sofa, and a scaffold tower borrowed from a theatre in Bow. The flat that will become the pub’s back wall is made from plywood that has already been a counter, a coffin and, briefly, a ramp for a skateboarding show.

Production manager Ellie Tran keeps the budget on a clipboard that looks like it has survived several floods. ‘We’re not doing this because we’re heroes,’ she says. ‘We’re doing it because the money isn’t there and the work still has to happen. The trick is to be honest about that, not pretend the shoestring is a aesthetic.’

The crew is paid. That matters. Tran is clear that no unpaid interns are lifting flats or making paint runs at midnight. ‘We pay London Living Wage, and we build the schedule around that,’ she says. ‘If we can’t afford the labour, we cut the design. We don’t cut the people.’

A set is a series of arguments you can stand on

The Salt House set looks, at first, like a collection of wooden boxes. That is the point. Fielding has designed a modular system of hinged flats and low decks that can be reconfigured by the cast in full view of the audience. The pub garden becomes the beach. The beach becomes the pub’s cellar. A door frame is carried on like a confession.

‘Fringe design is often described as inventive because there’s no money,’ Fielding says. ‘But constraint is a real design tool. You have to decide what the story actually needs, not what would look nice on a Pinterest board.’

The arguments are part of the process. On Tuesday morning, Fielding and director Jamal Okoye spend 25 minutes disagreeing about a hinge. Okoye wants the wall to swing open like a trapdoor. Fielding wants it to slide. The stage manager, Bea Hollis, wants it to do neither because the wing space is 1.2 metres and the cast have a quick change involving a wet coat and a fake seagull.

They settle on a fold. It is not glamorous. It works.

The geometry of a cramped backstage

The Yard’s backstage is a corridor, a cupboard and a prayer. The stage is about six metres wide. The wing space is tight enough that the crew have measured every exit in gaffer tape. The set has to be built so that five actors can move it, quietly, in the dark, without taking out a lighting bar.

Hollis walks me through the ‘squeak map’ — a sheet of paper covered in annotations about which caster needs oiling and which flat has a tendency to groan when it is dragged across the floor. ‘The audience should hear the play, not the set,’ she says. ‘But sometimes the set is part of the play. You have to choose.’

The crew test the fold at 2pm. It sticks. Danny Okafor, the set builder, lies on his back underneath it with a torch in his mouth, adjusting a bolt. He emerges with sawdust in his hair and a grin. ‘That’s the job,’ he says. ‘You solve a problem you didn’t know you had, and then you solve the next one.’

Borrowed tools and shared skills

The build is not just Fielding, Tran, Okafor and Hollis. A neighbour lends a mitre saw. A scenic artist from a theatre in Islington drops by to show a trainee how to mix a glaze that looks like salt. Two members of the cast spend the afternoon sanding, which is either community spirit or a contractual obligation, depending on who you ask. A local carpenter fixes a wonky hinge for the price of a sandwich and a chat about the ridiculousness of Arts Council application forms.

This is the quiet radicalism of Hackney’s backstage community: skills are shared because scarcity makes hoarding stupid. Tran runs a WhatsApp group for production managers across the borough. Fielding has a standing arrangement with a designer in Dalston to swap paint and flats. When a venue in Homerton needed a fake tree in October, The Yard’s crew sent over a branch and a bucket. Nobody invoiced anybody.

‘It’s not a network in the LinkedIn sense,’ Fielding says. ‘It’s a web of favours. You have to be careful with it, because favours run out. But it’s how work gets made.’

What the audience never sees

On opening night, the audience will see a pub garden that becomes a shoreline. They will see a door that folds into a table. They will see a lighting state that makes cardboard look like weather. They will not see the two days spent arguing about a hinge, the paint run to a hardware shop on Mare Street, or Okafor lying under the set with a torch in his mouth.

That is the bargain of fringe theatre. The magic is real, but it is made of labour. The Salt House set will be struck after the final performance. The timber will go back into the workshop. The hinges will be reused. The paint will be mixed into something else. The crew will start the next build, probably with less money and more optimism than is sensible.

‘People say fringe is scrappy,’ Tran says, packing up her clipboard. ‘I prefer “resourceful”. Scrappy sounds like you didn’t plan. We plan constantly. We just plan around the fact that the money isn’t there.’

As I leave, the radio is still playing. Fielding is measuring something again. Okafor is sweeping up. The set is not finished, but it is standing. In Hackney, that counts as a kind of opening night.