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| Ultz’s design for Glyndebourne’s 2009 ‘Falstaff’ evoked the 1950s |
Few aspects of theatre stir up feelings quite so much as set design. Remember the outrage that greeted Calixto Bieito’s staging of A Masked Ball at the London Coliseum in 2002, which opened with a row of toilets on stage? Or the response of one critic to the Young Vic’s updated Annie Get Your Gun, who declared a “murderous desire” to shoot the designer? Simply staging Shakespeare in modern dress can raise the blood pressure of some theatregoers.
But while radical designs can set teeth on edge, they can also prove revelatory. For the Maly Drama Theatre’s Gaudeamus, a satire about conscription into the Russian army, the set was peppered with trapdoors, so that new recruits would suddenly disappear beneath the stage. All’s Well That Ends Well, at London’s National Theatre this autumn, blossomed on a gorgeous fairytale design by Rae Smith. In 2000, Jeremy Herbert’s set for the premiere of Sarah Kane’s 4:48 Psychosis used the simple but brilliant device of a giant tilting mirror to reflect the introspective nature of the piece.
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| Simon Annand Rae Smith’s gave the National Theatre’s 2009 ‘All’s Well That Ends Well’ a fairytale setting |
We are in Crowley’s studio, surrounded by piles of books and pots of pencils. On one worktop lies a page of exquisitely drawn dancing girls – Crowley is designing Lloyd Webber’s upcoming sequel to The Phantom of the Opera. But the reason we are here, discussing the nature of the job, is that Crowley is a judge for the Linbury Prize for Stage Design, a biennial award that launches young designers into the theatre world. The 12 finalists work closely with theatre companies; four of them, including one overall winner, receive money and a commission for one of those companies. Crowley welcomes this emphasis on the nitty-gritty.
“The hardest thing for a young designer is to get started,” he says. “Because you can’t get started until you get a job. With this prize you’re judged by practitioners and then you get a job. So it isn’t just all fancy conceptual work.”
But the award, with its accompanying exhibition, also celebrates the significance of stage design. And it prompts the question: what do we look for in design today?
“The traditional box set is almost a dinosaur now.” says Crowley. “Very rarely does the curtain go up and you see the French windows and the drinks cabinet ... A set design can act as a metaphor for the characters’ lives and situation. That’s ultimately what a good piece of stage design does. So it’s an invitation into a world that the playwright is creating and the actors are acting.”
A clever set can convey both the physical and psychological worlds of the play. And apparently innocuous details can completely change perceptions, Crowley suggests. His design for Phèdre at the National Theatre this year was almost empty except for six chairs: “The search for the perfect chair was all I did, for months on end. If you have nothing in the space, the chair is very important. It tells you everything about the social strata, where the people are living and in what period. There is so much information in a chair.”
Anthony Ward, who recently designed Rupert Goold’s hugely successful productions of Enron and Macbeth, emphasises that the set should never hijack the piece: “It’s simplicity you’re looking for. Design should flourish from the centre of the play and the ideas. One doesn’t want to get in the way of the play or the opera.”
“You’re a sculptor in space,” he adds. “Your spatial awareness should be 100 per cent. That’s our complete language in a way: how you divide that space, how one space counterbalances another. It has to be fluid as well.”
Ward points out that designers work closely with directors on the feel, shape and meaning of a drama. Collaborating with Phyllida Lloyd on her coolly restrained 2005 staging of Schiller’s Mary Stuart at the Donmar Warehouse, Ward came up with a beautiful, austere set. His design for Rupert Goold’s 2007 Macbeth, on the other hand, was much more eye-catching, in keeping with Goold’s more flamboyant style. The Macbeth set was a kitchen, but a chilling one, with a hint of the abattoir about it. “The world of the play in Shakespeare has to be epic as well as domestic,” Ward explains. “I felt, you can’t just say it’s a kitchen. It needs to go into some sort of poetic, nightmarish world.”
With a classic work, such as a Shakespeare, the look of the staging can, of course, bring a fresh perspective to a well-known text. Ultz, as the acclaimed British designer is always simply known, points out that the updated set for the Young Vic’s Annie Get Your Gun is part of the show’s affectionately ironic take on the Wild West. “It isn’t really set in the 1940s; it’s set in cowboy nostalgia-land.”
Ultz made his first set models at the age of seven, using an old wind-up gramophone as a base and the lights from his model railway. He has been working for nearly 40 years and his eclectic career takes in new plays, hip-hop musicals and opera (including Glyndebourne’s recent Falstaff). But no matter how visually innovative his work may seem to be, he says that his chief task is to underpin the actor-audience relationship.
“You have a massive responsibility in how you take an audience into the beginning of a show and what characters you might want them to be involved with,” he says. “You have to be aware of blind spots and the energy of the place and you have to care about the sound of it.”
Stage design is at its most infuriating when it ignores such basic rules, at its most inspiring when it finds new ways of embracing them. In the past few decades we have seen (and sometimes endured) the impact of expressionism, minimalism and postmodernism on design. At present there is great enthusiasm for site-specific productions, for “found spaces” (such as disused warehouses) and for the “immersive” work of companies such as Punchdrunk, which completely surround the audience with the world of the play.
But Ultz suggests that new trends should be embraced with caution. “Pina Bausch’s work, for instance, developed through a process. But you’d find designers taking the external trappings of it and using it. I can say, ‘I had a wonderful time in that show.’ But I can’t copy the result. I have to find a process that will produce something as interesting in its own way.
“We set Falstaff in that funny era after the war ... you had the leftover austerity but a feeling of new life. I drew on my childhood memories of the early 1950s, where we would go to the public hall to get National Health cod liver oil and orange juice. It was a chance to bring that world back to life.”
One of the most noticeable changes in recent years, of course, has been the impact of increasingly sophisticated technology. In the Menier Chocolate Factory’s 2005 production of Sunday in the Park with George, for instance, we could watch a Seurat painting unfold, dot by dot, on a blank canvas, thanks to ingenious projections. And in the National Theatre’s production of War Horse (now in London’s West End) the constantly changing projections are not just a backdrop but a crucial part of the storytelling.
“One of the questions was, ‘How do you put the first world war on stage?’” says the War Horse designer Rae Smith. “Film does it by location but in a big space like the Olivier you could easily throw loads of stuff in it and you still wouldn’t notice. And to me the most poignant way of connecting to the war is through letters, diaries or drawings.”
Smith and her colleagues came up with a 25m-wide irregular projection strip, like a torn piece of paper, which runs round the back of the set. On this they project drawings done by one of the characters. The change in quality of those drawings, from soft sepia sketches of Devon landscapes to bleak, violent imagery of the battlefield, conveys the traumatic journey of the story. It is an inspired design, one that manages to be both epic and intimate. It plays a dynamic part in the fabric of the show but it still throws the focus on to the actors and the magnificent equine puppets. And that, for Bob Crowley, remains the designer’s touchstone, no matter how complex the set:
“It’s still about people in a space,” he says. “In the end, a set only works when somebody walks across it.”
The Linbury Prize Exhibition, National Theatre, London, to November 29. www.nationaltheatre.org.uk. The overall winner is Aleš Valášek. Other designers who win a commission this year are Samal Blak, Jean Chan and Ruth Sutcliffe
