Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 2004 - 34

ers no longer knew how to use color as Hurry and Beaton did.
Annals could deploy iconographic design and did so powerfully in Royal Hunt and the final scene of Heartbreak House at
the National for the director John Schlesinger. But he did not confine himself to one visual aesthetic. He could work realistically, poetically, or abstractly. His palette could be somber or colorful. His
stage could be architectural or painterly. He could utilize hightech projections, and he could lovingly recreate nineteenth-century painted drops. His design could comment or stand quietly in
the background.
Annals was disappointed that his one venture into film
did not lead to further offers. Film was the environment where
proper, realistically-based design was still valued. On location
for a film, the close-knit ensemble in which Annals thrived was
maintained over many months.
Good opportunities still came his way after he left the National in 1978. He could turn out prodigious amounts of work
at high speed under great pressure. He met budgets and dead-

lines. He was a congenial, amusing colleague. He was at the
top of his form from 1980 until 1985 with three commercially
successful collaborations with Michael Blakemore and
Michael Frayn. For Noises Off in 1983, he created a design
that, like Royal Hunt twenty years earlier, is so closely entwined with the play that subsequent designers can only toy
with the details, not its fundamental architecture.
The worldwide, long-running success of Noises Off also
gave him the greatest financial stability of his career. Paradoxically,
that coincided with a psychological descent that spiraled to his untimely death. His final five years are a sad and mysterious coda
to a youth of great promise and a maturity of great fulfilment.

Harrow
Michael John Annals, born April 21, 1938, grew up in the
northwest London suburb of Harrow. His father, Henry Ernest
Annals, worked in the post office. His mother, Constance
Walter Annals, stayed at home with their two children, an older

Beggar on Horseback by George S. Kaufmann and Marc Connelly; directed by John Hirsch; Lincoln Center Repertory Company, Vivian
Beaumont Theatre, New York, 1970. Costume design for Tressa Hughes as Mrs. Cady at Home (left). Costume design for Cherry Davis
as Gladys as the Bride (right).

Beggar on Horseback was designed and staged as elaborately as a musical, with a revolving stage and a
series of projection screens that flew in and out and bobbed and weaved in various directions. It was a
considerable technical challenge on the thrust stage of the Vivien Beaumont Theatre. Annals's collaboration
with the director, John Hirsch, with whom he had worked previously at Lincoln Center, in Stratford, Ontario,
and in Israel, had been difficult. Annals complained to a friend in London that Hirsch had come up with no
staging ideas, leaving it all to the designer, but changing his mind in rehearsal. There were "horror stories of
totally different arrangements of different numbers of people in different scenes in different order."
Technical rehearsals were nightmarish, and by the end of the second day only the first half of Act I had
been completed. Hirsch became ill with stomach pains and disappeared, leaving Annals and Jules Irving to
supervise through four more days of rehearsal and three previews.
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