Custom SEE WHAT I SEE faux ‘neon’ for Royal Shakespeare Company

Neon Ultra® SEE WHAT I SEE for RSC

Having been recommended by the production team at Donwar Warehouse, the Royal Shakespeare Company and their production team approached Carousel Lights to ask us to being SEE WHAT I SEE to life as a replica neon sign for their production Fat Ham.

Fat Ham – What’s it about?

James Ijames’ Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Fat Ham, is a sharp, hilarious, and deeply humane reworking of Hamlet that swaps the Danish court for a Southern Black family barbecue. Juicy, a soft-spoken queer college kid, is haunted by the ghost of his macho, murdered father demanding revenge on his swaggering uncle Rev, who’s now married to Juicy’s mother.

Instead of brooding about daggers and destiny, Juicy wrestles with inherited trauma, masculinity, queerness, and whether violence is really the legacy he wants to claim, all while the cookout simmers with comedy, music, and emotional truth. The play uses Shakespeare’s bones but rejects his fatalism, asking—loudly and joyfully—whether breaking cycles might be braver than avenging them, and whether choosing tenderness in a world that glorifies toughness can be its own radical act.

SEE WHAT I SEE – How the sign was made

Our client already had a very clear idea of how they wanted the illuminated stage prop to look, and sent clear drawing of the design of the text. Our job was to then consider the best product and production method to achieve this objectives – and it was clear that our famous Neon Ultra® product would be well suited to the task.

Neon Ultra® was the product we had in fact used for Clyde’s Diner at Donmar Warehouse, as well as us having supplied it to various Music, TV and Theatre productions over the years.

All of the letters were cut from solid opal acrylic, with the strokewidth of all of the text being 20mm. each letter was approx. 450mm (h) and when laid out as it was to appear on stage, the overall width of SEE WHAT I SEE was 4,240mm (w).

The opal acrylic had internal 6500K illumination, and once given a bevelled face, gave the impression of traditional glass neon signage. Each section of lettering had 2000mm of white cable exiting, so that the client could fix and assemble the lettering together on-site.

All the necessary parts were supplied, including LED drivers and neon tube support stands with nickel wire, again adding to the effect of neon signage.