Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 1992 - 24

In 1981 and 1982, he designed two
operas with Yolanda Sonnabend, and
then spent six years designing mostly
operas for small companies or schools
both in and outside of London. He
emerged into prominence in 1988 when
Jonathan Miller engaged him as resident
designer for a series of revivals Miller was
producing at the Old Vic. Hudson's
marathon of six shows included a muchacclaimed production of Ostrovsky's Too
Clever By Half(usually known in this
country as Diary ofa Scoundre~, which
teamed him up with director Richard
Jones, a frequent pairing previously and
since. The Old Vic season also won
Hudson a Laurence Olivier Designer of
the Year Award.
Since then, he has worked for
Britain's tWO major companies, the Royal
National Theatre and the Royal
Shakespeare Company, as well as continuing to design opera at home and abroad.

His first West End assignment was
Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods,
directed by Richard Jones, in 1990.
Into the Woods gave Hudson's playfulness and love of stage magic free reign.
Michael Billington, writing in The
Guardian, gave the designer an equal
share with the director for what he called
the evening's triumph: "Old-fashioned
footlights give the faces a sinister glow.
The woods themselves are a semi-circular
screen punctuated with nine doors and a
crazy clock; they achieve exactly the
'agreeable terror' of Gustave Dore's children's illustrations. And the effects are
terrific: Doors open to reveal rhe rorating
magnified eyeball or the admonitory finger of the predatory gianr."
The decision to use a wall of doors
instead of a background of trees was
arrived at through the leisurely give-andtake between director and designer that
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Hudson savors. "We thought about real
trees, artificial real trees, painted back
cloths, abstracted cut out trees, abstracted 3-D trees, skeletal trees, projected
trees-all of which were abandoned."
Each option under consideration would
be accompanied by a model, and Hudson
notes that it's not unheard of ro go
through 22 models before he and the
director are satisfied.
The final choice of doors came from
two considerations: Richard Jones'
notion that the high-speed first act
should play like a farce, with people running in and out of doors, and Richard
Hudson's witt)' visual pun on the word
woods. He described the result to Theatre
Crafts' Sheryl Flatow: "The walls are
painted like a wood in sepia and cream,
and we have wooden floor boards that are
very obviously wood grained. The doors
are also wood grained. That's one of
many jokes, our way of saying that

they're in the woods. With people going
out one door and coming in another, you
feel that they are actually traveling. There
are ti mes when all the doors open and
people are seen running past one door,
then another, and it's like they're running
through the trees."
More than clever decor, Hudson's set
conveyed its own commentary on the
show's Freudian-Bettleheimian ethos. As
the characters moved through increasingly darker nights of the soul as well as the
forest, the set began to visually disintegrate. Walls curled, doors came crashing
down, and a giant cuckoo clock at the
center of the semi-circular wall exploded:
Another of Hudson's unsafe worlds menaced its inhabitants.
Two of Hudson's best known sets and
the ones he selected ro include in the
British exhibit at the 1991 Prague
Quadrennial are Two CfelJer By Halffor

the 1988 Old Vic season and A
Clockwork Orange, Anthony Butgess'
own stage adaptation of his novel for the
Royal Shakespeare Company in 1990. In
both of them Hudson played variations
on his favorite motifs.
Fot the Too Clever apartment of a
scruffy and unscrupulous young Moscow
parvenu, he enclosed the stage in a large,
high-walled room parallel to the curtain
line. Doors to the room were several feet
above floor level, so characters had to
hoist themselves in and out of the room.
The remaining scenes took place in various aristocratic drawing rooms, all long
tunnels rising steeply from the front of
the stage to the rear. The walls canted
perilously to one side. Even the leading
character's hair swept up and slanted at a
dangerous angle.
Richard Jones' bouffa direction sent
the actors whirling and colliding in every
direction, achieving a stage simulacrum
of zero-gravity. Wherher the actors actually suffered vertigo from working on the
set, as was rumored, or merely appeared
to, they clung to the walls, to the few
pieces of furniture and to each other in
breathless desperation.
In A Clockwork Orange, Hudson provided what Jane Edwardes in Time Out
called ''the only glory" of an otherwise
inept, sensation-seeking evening, "a
blood-red, semi-circular, metallic-panelled set, from which a giant milk bottle
initially protrudes like an unexploded
bomb." Throughour the 21 scene
changes, Hudson projected other outsize
objects through the red, metallic surround: an anglepoise lamp for the scientific experiment room, a bust of Alex's
beloved Beethoven for his bedroom. As
Michael Billington noted in The
Guardian, the giant objects gave the
characters "a Lilliputian feel (not for
nothing is 'gulliver' one of Alex's favorite
words). This is design making its own
creative comment on the story."
At the 1991 Quadrennial, Hudson's
models for Too Clever By Half and A
Clockwork Orange joined designs by
Pamela Howard, Ralph Koltai, igel
Lowery, Antony McDonald, Timothy
O'Brien and Joe Vanek to win the British
team a Golden Triga award.
Richard Hudson's style may seem
best suited to non-realistic drama that
can stretch to accommodate his large
imagination. But despite his intention to
make strong visual statements of his own,
Hudson clearly knows how to serve his
playwrights and directors with respect.
One of the achievements he finds most
satisfactory was his setting for Adrian
Noble's production of The Master Builder

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