Roger Waters The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking 1984

Production Design: Gerald Scarfe and Roger Waters
Set Design and effects: Mark Fisher and Jonathan Park
Lighting Design: Marc Brickman
Associate lighting design: Abigail Rosen
Production Director: Robbie Williams
Production Manager: David Russell
Tour Manager: Peter Jackson
Tour Co-ordinator: Andrew Zweck
Hotelmeister puppet: Paul Wright
Painted scenery: Kimpton Walker
Tumbler trusses: Peter Kemp Engineering

Mark Fisher writes:
"The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking", Roger Waters’ first solo album after the break up of Pink Floyd, is a difficult piece of work to explain.  The storyline is an episodic dream about a man’s encounter with a female hitchhiker.  The consequent outpouring of guilt, fear, rage and lust suggests something of the unresolved angst that drives ‘The Wall’.  But whilst The Wall was a monumental elevation of personal angst to universal significance, both the metaphors and the music of Pros & Cons are more domestic in scale.  In retrospect, the most remarkable dream image is one in which “There were Arabs with Knives, At the foot of the bed”, a prescient anticipation of the Islamic bogeymen of the 21C.

The stage set was art directed by Gerald Scarfe, who also created the provocative, mysoginistic album cover.  It featured a very large rear projection screen (30m wide x 9m high) set upstage of the band above a ‘chicken run’ that concealed all the backline technicians.  Three 18Kw 35mm cine projectors (similar to the ones that were used to project on the front of the cardboard wall in The Wall arena shows) were rigged behind the stage to create a single image.  Scarfe created new animation for this very wide format screen, some of it featuring a colourful rabid dog called “Reg” (or is it “Rog”?).  He also created a jolly German hotelmeister puppet, that rose up from behind the chicken run to welcome the dreaming hero and his hitchhiking consort to Konnigsburg.

Downstage of the screen, three ‘tumbler-trusses’ deployed painted scenery with open areas through which the screen projections could be viewed.  When it was in view, the scenery created the basic elements of a motel room – a picture window, a table and a TV.  The scenery delivered a sense of location for the more claustrophobic scenes.  Tumbler trusses were used to roll the scenery in and out, because the low headroom in many old arenas meant that there was not room to fly painted flats it in a conventional theatrical manner.  It also provided a form of instant packaging; once rolled up, the scenery was hot to trot.  The 12m long trusses were built to the maximum interior length of a semi-trailer.  This lead to some road-blocking moments when the trusses were swung across the width of 51st Street to get them onto the loading dock of Radio City Music Hall.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pros_and_Cons_of_Hitch_Hiking

Between 1976 and 1983 Mark Fisher and Jonathan Park collaborated on a number of projects.  In 1984 they formalized their working relationship as the Fisher Park Partnership.  Their partnership was dissolved in 1994.