Theatre Design & Technology - Fall 1983 - 10

nificance of a scenographer to a total
production:
Design can do tremendous damage in
the theatre by making an audience
think the wrong thing in relation 10
the work being presented. Correspondingly, it can do an enormous
service by leading the audience, which
is all O\'er the place when it assembles
in the theatre, 10 a point from which
it can discern what is being presented
most accurately and completely.

Timolhy 0 'Brien's sel for The Knot Garden, 1970: miles ofslTUng cord wilh fronlal projeclions, pills
a lllr/lIable. PholO Donald SOlllhern cOllrlesy Royal Opera, Covenl Garden.

Timolhy O'Brien's sel for The Rake's Progress, 1979. PholO Reg Wilson cOllrlesy Royal Opera,
Covenl Garden.

West End productions. Between 1966
and 1976 he did virtually all his work for
the RSC, except for a few operas. Since
then he has been working free lance, increasingly on purely commercial productions, primarily musicals and operas.
Important to any consideration of his
work is that almost all of it in theatre
has been done in partnership with Tazeena Firth, who was originally a scenic
artist and executed O'Brien's work.

They subsequently came to share the
work on both sets and costumes, which
O'Brien regards as a major advantage in
providing a second opinion or thought
in the creative process, resulting in work
that is more distilled, lucid, and
economical.
O'Brien, who among the British scenographers is perhaps the most articulate and analytical about his art and
craft, pinpointed his views on the sig-

8 Theatre Design & Technology/USITT /Fall 1983

The neatness and concern for accuracy in that statement underlies all his
work, however lavish and complex its
surface may be. A classic example was
the scenography for Etheridge's The
Man of Mode (RSC 1971), the chief element of which consisted of a series of
polished silvery spheres about a foot in
diameter, some attached to vertical rods
at floor level, and some suspended as if
from a necklace in several rows running
up and down stage, and capable of
movement. Completely abstract and
unrelated to anything speci fic in the
play, they conveyed both a marvelous
precision and playfulness, and also
helped to redescribe the space for various scenes. For O'Brien, they depicted
"the surplus energy of the fashion conscious leisure class and the nimble imagination of the capricious [characters]."
O'Brien views his and Firth's work
as having evolved toward "greater expressive force" over the years. It has
also become technically more complex,
as a few examples make clear. For the
Michael Tippett opera, The Knol
Garden (Covent Garden 1970), the set
consisted of eleven miles of thick string
in a series of wings and a backdrop in
several layers; in front of each wing was
a panel of rods of about the same diameter. The strings were weighted at the
bottom in groups but not attached to the
floor, and so were free to move imperceptibly with any flow of air. Two high
powered projectors cast a series of pointillistic photos of gardens onto the
strings, filling the stage with an abstracted impression of nature in which
the characters stood out as a result of
tightly focused spotlights. One added
element was used in scenes depicting
subconscious turmoil: two concentric
arcs of steel rods on substage rails normally stood at rest upstage but, when
appropriate, could ride around in
grooves in opposite directions while the
projections continued and so provide

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