In the firing line

Henrietta Bredin goes backstage at the Royal Opera House and finds a stash of weaponry

I am standing outside a heavily reinforced metal door somewhere in the furthest flung recesses of the labyrinthine corridor-tangle backstage at the Royal Opera House. A painted shield has the word Armoury picked out on it in gold lettering and next to a no smoking warning is a sign saying ‘No trespassing. Violators will be shot. Survivors will be shot again’. The door swings ponderously open to reveal the possessor of this somewhat macabre sense of humour, chief armourer Rob Barham. He is not a small man and his lair seems to fit around him like a tortoise shell, leaving him the minimum of space in which to manoeuvre. Built-in shelves bristle with tiny models of Napoleonic cavalry, replica pistols and revolvers hang from the walls, a slithering bundle of spears is propped up in a corner, row upon row of books and specialist magazines carry titles ranging from Women Warlords and Prussian Line Infantry 1792–1815 to Mastering the Samurai Sword and Arms and Armour of the English Civil Wars. Around a corner, under a neck-crickingly low ceiling, his two colleagues Kate Bebbington and Zoe Kreuger are busy punching holes into thick straps of leather to make sword belts.

There are only two other theatres in the UK with working armouries, the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company (think of all those history plays). At the Royal Opera House, Barham and his team have to provide the most extraordinary range of kit, from ceremonial tribal daggers for Aida to lightweight rapiers for the dancers in Romeo and Juliet; from longbows for William Tell to authentic-looking firearms for Puccini’s La fanciulla del West, whose heroine, Minnie, learns the hard way that you can’t get a man with a gun.