Interior design
Stage Design
Wednesday, 29 April 2009
Posted by Niki Fulton at 21:12 PM in Interior design
We are thrilled to have a special guest Graham Michael write about the world of theatre set design. Graham is a freelance stage manager and photographer who has worked with many of the best known directors, actors and theatre companies in Britain.
"I’ve just worked on a major production of Shakespeare’s King Lear, with Pete Postlethwaite in the lead role.
I think stage design for Shakespeare productions can be one of the most difficult tasks for a designer. It’s a common misconception that everyone dresses in doublet and hose and struts around in a castle. Shakespeare’s text lends itself to any time period, and any setting.
I once worked on a production of Hamlet, designed by the excellent Es Devlin - the set consisted of a long polished black wooden floor containing various trapdoors which revealed a grave, a white hot tub bath, and roaring flame pits. The ghost of Hamlet’s father was dressed in a crisp white Kendo Warrior Suit, towering almost 3 metres in height on stilts!
Es also designed a recent promenade production of Macbeth. The centrepiece of this set was a solid acid-green wall with 3 doors in. No grey stone walls to be seen here. It was set not in a Scottish Castle, but in a seedy office in Africa.
The audience experience in theatre is steered by the entire artistic vision - acting, costume, design, lighting, sound and direction. We create a world where everything is geared to work well with its counterparts.
With King Lear, designer Giles Cadle and director Rupert Goold created a bleak late 1970s/early 1980s feel to the show. The set consisting of an weed-strewn concrete football terrace. The set did not change throughout the show, but if the text tells the audience we are in the middle of a rain-soaked heath or a small ante-room off a large hall - we are indeed there.
One of the things I most enjoyed about Lear was the audience’s fascination with the set. Bleak, grey, speckled concrete and corrugated steel walls, plus a small section of Dover Cliffs may sound quite dull - but during every interval when I came on to mop up the water (oh yes - we had live rainfall for twenty minutes for the storm scene...) audience members would come up and touch the set and check if it was real concrete and chalk cliffs. Some of them even ask how we poured concrete within a theatre building. Of course it isn’t - the kerbstones on the steps are painted and textured plywood and the cliffs are carved polystyrene. But the illusion is tremendous.
A recent production of Frank McGuinness’ play Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me had a concrete breeze block back wall. To this day, it’s the best theatre set paint job I’ve ever seen. I sat throughout wondering how they managed to build such a high wall with in the 2 days they would have had to get the set in. Well they didn’t. It’s sections of 8x4 plywood. The scenic painter would mix all kinds of weird chemicals into the paint like some kind of apothecary. When questioned by the production manager what chemical was stinking the theatre out one evening, he simply replied “it’s better you don’t know…”
Many thanks to Graham for his fascinating insight into set design and for kindly supplying the photographs.
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