Caryl Churchill

I wanted the audience to feel the warmth and nostalgia of the first scene with slow transitions easing into the discomforting nature of the events that unfold. This play and its characters feel eerily familiar. When it expands to an anarchic, surrealist world we, as the audience, are taken with it through the objects and references to which we relate. It was important to me that the set and costumes reflect this.

Although the units sit in the ‘bunker’ throughout I don’t want the audience to feel the expansive sterility of the space until the final scene when Joan returns from the river. I was interested in the scale of the actors in relation to the space. During the first scene the characters feel safe and cozy in the intimate space of the bedroom. This moves to helplessness in the expansive, bare, cement corridor in the last scene. The moving units are elevated and the actors move into the space within them. It isn’t until the final scene that they walk on the stage floor through ankle deep water.

With the costumes it was important again, that we feel a familiarity. Warfare is chosen by a few and affects many. When developing the characters I thought about my family who were present in Germany during World War 2. Being Mennonite, they were pacifists but were forced to help the army in order to survive. This choice is continually presented to people when faced with the panic of war; either you are with them or against them.

We see Harper at the beginning of the war, her husband being one of the rebels or military instigating the first attempts at stifling the “enemy”. She tries desperately to maintain the illusion of a safe environment for her niece, Joan. We then see Joan, grown up, working in a hat factory. Again, I wanted the audience to relate with her and Todd’s situation. The parade is in stark contrast to the atmosphere. Hundreds of prisoners ascend from a staircase downstage of the acting area. First we see their hats, followed by bright orange issued jumpsuits as they walk towards their extermination.

By the end of the show I want the audience to feel the wariness and fragility of these characters. The war became chaotic and anarchic with little warning and those surviving cope with what they find. Harper, now aged and homeless, wears all of her possessions. Todd, still wears his clothes from the factory and Joan is left with a sundress and men’s boots.

J.M. Barrie

The design team, in collaboration with David Bell, tried to imagine the world of Peter Pan through the lives of Victorian children. At the time, there was great social divide. Many children were forced into labor, suffered from malnutrition and poor supervision. Thousands of children from Africa, India and Asia immigrated and joined the children’s labor force.

We imagined a world that pulled inspiration from the objects familiar to children of the era. The characters of Nana and the Crocodile emerged from the porcelain dolls and tin toys. They became the bridge between what was austere Victorian London and the fantasy world of Neverland. Our research began with a series of photographs of children playing on the beach. The dusty shore came through with the set design, by Marianna Csaszar, consisting of a boardwalk in a beach surround. That idea translated into the colour palette having the world of Neverland in washed out, bleached hues while the contrasting world of home was anchored in rich, saturated jewel tones.

“To die will be an awfully big adventure” Peter Pan.

The team viewed this play as an optimistic interpretation of death; the lost boys having left their home and gone to Neverland.

Our lost boys wore a conglomerate of clothing pieced together from which they would have been familiar; bloomers, jackets and items from their homeland. Wendy and her brothers stay in their nightclothes from their travels. Through Wendy we see a transformation, a maturity that is required of her to take on the role as mother. For this she hikes up her shirt, fastening it behind her and giving the silhouette of a mother hen.

The pirates are inspired by bathers of the period. Having spent years on and off the dusty shore they take on the leisurewear of that locale. Hook, in contrast, closely resembles Mr. Darling and has a heavy cloak that demands authority. His hook is made from the bird’s head of a walking stick that belonged to Mr. Darling.

Harold Pinter

“There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is
true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and
false.” Harold Pinter

Pinter’s The Birthday Party exposes the illusions that we rely on daily; the illusion of political democracy, social security and emotional stability. These issues have hardly become irrelevant, in fact, I believe their resonance is stronger in today’s political and social climate.

This peaceful seaside home in Northern England becomes an arena for an unseen war. Pinter’s specificity of dialogue paired with a strong rhythm give each character a discipline that I tried to resonate within the costumes.

Each character has a strength, a self assured deception, that needs to remain constant. Pairing this with a unity of colour we simulated the feeling of a faded photograph or a tobacco-stained world. Firmly rooted in the late 1950′ s each character is weathered and accustomed to a sense of routine.

“The past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember,
or pretend you remember” Harold Pinter

This leaves the characters and often the audience in nervous uncertainty. The first uncertainty is the existence of the boarding house. Here is a physical place in which reside Meg and Petey with their boarder Stanley. Stanley needs a sense of home and security, which Meg facilitates. In turn he justifies her needs by not denying the existence of their affair. McCann and Goldberg enter this seaside home gaining access through the guise of holidaymakers. Meg’s boarding house becomes a reality, the existence of which as a public space destroys Stanley in the end. Within this we have the witness, Petey, whose immobility resembles how so many react when in the face of atrocities.

When entering the boarding house the creative team wanted there to be a unity of color, texture and silhouette to hint at the absurdity that underlines this play. It was important that this cohesion not feel heavy or outwardly obvious. We aimed to create a stillness and rhythm that was constant and uneasy like the underlying threats of the play.

I looked to the paintings of Lucien Freud, Francis Bacon and the photography of Mario Giacomelli, which have a strong sense of character and resonate with the uneasiness of Pinter’s work.

“Apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?” Harold Pinter.