Theatre Design & Technology - Fall 1992 - 30

it's done I think is vety dramatic. You go
in under that SOrt of bit of tent. The fact
that they've built, really most ingeniously, the balcony of the stage, I think, is
dramatic and theatrical, and for that
reason I'm very impressed. I think it's
lively. There are no SOrt of dark corners
where you think, "Oh, that's a bit boring." At least I didn't think so. The one
[place] that bothered me a litrle is the
Muscovite from Love's Labour's Lost who
has been pinned behind the center pillar, which in real life would never happen; you'd either go one way or the
other. You'd never crash your face
against it. But I think that's a little sense
of humor on the part of the organizer,
the designer of the scheme, who is an
artist in his own right.

what the actor brought to the role duting the rehearsal process, with the
director's agreement, changed the conception of the character so much that
you felt you needed to revise the
design?
Do you know, I think that may have
happened, bur Freud has taken care of
it, it's completely sponged from my
memory, because it can't have been very
pleasant, if it was a real complete
change, because all the people concerned would have been working away
making this thing and it's horrid to have

Did you ever have the expetience where
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Presumably people who were not good
collaborators weren't invited back.
I have no idea about politics. On the
whole, I think here the workmanship
has been of such high caliber, and the
feeling of cooperation from all the
departments has been, to me, unique. I
won't say it's the only theatre in the
world that is like that, but it's the one I
know best.
Was that also the case at the Gurhrie
Theatre?
After a while, yes, it was breaking new
ground. There were some overtones, I
suppose one would have recognized, if
there'd been time to Stop to analyze anything. As a rule, you JUSt plough ahead
and hope the furrow was going straight.
If the director is going in one ditection
and actors are going in another, and the
designer's going a third, and people
making the thing going any which way,
I don't what will happen at the dress
rehearsal, but it will be total chaos. That
never happened.

I understand that after the sketches
had gone through the process of development with the director and had been
approved by the director and the management, they would be shown to the
actors at the first read-through. Is what
we're seeing in the exhibition the completed sketches that the actors would
have seen at the very beginning of
rehearsals?
Not always. [For the first seasons] we
had to design Richard IIJ and most of
All's Well in England and arrive with ...
I'm not sure if the sketches weten't sent
on in advance to get started. Fabric had
to be bought. Alec Guinness, of course,
was consulted in London. "Is this
alright? Is this the way you'd like to
look?" And he was very cooperative and
agreed, and that was it. From then on,
the work was prepared in Ireland, where
Guthrie lived, and sent in advance, or I
would come in advance. The actors
weren't always cast at that point. If they
were, they'd come sometimes to a fining
not knowing what the heck was happening. They hadn't learned the lines, they
didn't perhaps see the character quite as
the way it was being dressed. So that
was uncomfortable. But on the whole
they were very agreeable, very, I would
say, disciplined, and sometimes very
enthusiastic. They'd say, "Oh, that's how
I'm going to look. That's fine." On the
other hand, you have to play along
sometimes with an actor's preconceived
idea, but it's gOt to fit in with the director's overall idea. If it doesn't, then you
plead with your director to come and
make the peace and say why this has
been chosen this way or this color or
this silhouette.

designers, wigmakers, bootmakers, you
name it, we all had to collaborate.

In the early days at the Old Vic, where
there was more of a star system, was
there a similar collaborative spirit?
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to go and tell them, "Forget it, we're
starting again with a new idea." It does
happen, of course it happens.
At the first reading, Guthrie would
say to the actors, "You've all read the
play, of course," in a voice that meant,
"Don't tell me if you haven't" and
implied as well that we had read it many
times, and then he would say, "These
[design] ideas that you see all around is
how we're planing to do it. If you've gOt
any problems, now's the time to tell the
designer, because we don't want this all
to happen at the last minute." I don't
know if the actors saw anything but
their own picture, but some would look
at the thing as a whole and see more or
less why the production was going to
look way it was. After a couple of
rehearsals, they were into it. It all
became a great big collaboration: actors,

Well, on a much, much lower budget.
Every penny counted. One worked a lot
with that in mind. I won't say it was a
bad thing, because we all had to be
inventive and, in a way, making something out of nothing. I do remember
Alex Stone, whom I worked with a lot
over the years, being inventive to the
rune of using botrle tops for jewelry,
painted with wonderful paint that
glowed. I think that was for the Oedipus
production that Laurence Olivier did. I
wasn't concerned with it, bur I saw the
raw materials and then I saw the finished thing, and I was full of admiration. She worked with me a lot on
Cyrano, and later in Srratford-uponAvon we were very much close designers
for the history cycle.
That was somewhat of a landmark production in the evolution of the permanentset.
So I'm told, so I'm told. You see, at the
time, when you're doing it, you don't
know that it's going to have any impression on anybody. One JUSt hopes that
the audience will accept it. Some of

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Fall 1992