| Which practitioners/designers have had the greatest influence upon your work, and why? |
The director and designer Philip Prowse was the greatest influence for me. He was at the Cititizen's Theatre in Glasgow, my home town, for thirty years from 1969. As a school pupil I went to productions there and the quality of the visual was stunning. Prowse is probably the greatest influence on many designers of my generation as he is the master of false perspective and can make a tiny stage seem enormous. When I left art school in Glasgow, I was first employed as a costume maker at the Citizen’s Theatre for two years and got to see how he worked. |
| Last time you worked with Sheffield Theatres’ was in the Crucible Studio on How To Disappear Completely And Never Be Found, a small black box with versatile seating. The Lyceum Theatre built in 1897, and designed by the famous theatre architect W.G.R. Sprague, has an elegant Proscenium Arch stage and seats approximately 1,100 audience members; what do you have to take into consideration when designing for such a space and what are the rewards and challenges? |
The biggest challenge in designing for a traditional Proscenium Arch theatre is getting things into sight line (A line of sight, especially one between a spectator and the spectacle in a theatre or stadium). In older theatres there is only a very small "golden triangle" at the centre of the stage which is visible to all members of the audience. As The Elephant Man is touring to several of those kind of theatres, this has been quite a challenge. |
| What was your initial approach to the text? |
I don't think I have an "approach" to the text!!!! I like to believe that the text approaches me! My job is to increase the life of the text and not detract from it. |
| What themes or ideas have influenced/inspired your design for The Elephant Man? |
My research took me into fairgrounds, railway stations and churches as well as bone mutilation, all of which I hope are somehow reflected in the set. |
| Can you describe the relationship between the designer and director, and your process of working together? |
| I feel that the relationship between director and designer is crucial. Hopefully we support one another. I regard the director as the "hot-line" to the text and if I can throw some ideas at them which we can then run with and develop its very satisfying - a case of greater than the sum of two parts. |
| The Elephant Man set has been described as a very “mobile space”, how has this been achieved/explored? |
| We have tried to produce a simple composite set that always has the idea of a fairground attraction with the Elephant Man at its centre. |
| To what extent are the costumes accurate representations of the period? |
| This is a true story so you can't completely escape from 19th century costumes but I have tried to simplify silhouettes and use fabric and colour coding for the various groups. There are a lot of natural linens for the "lower orders" and the fairground people and I took the hand stitched face mask that Merrick wore as inspiration for this. There is an element of insects in the "voyeurs" with a lot of shiny black. Society and the aristocracy have reds and purples. |
| Why did you choose to have a rake stage, and what is the effect that this creates? |
| In any proscenium arch theatre there is a tendency for the energy from the stage to stop at the proscenium arch if the stage is completely flat. Most of these older stages already have a rake to compensate for this (there is one at the Lyceum) Using a rake helps bring the stage to the audience and the audience to the stage. |
