Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 2004 - 38

Ann-Margret and Peter Firth in Joseph Andrews, a film based on the novel by
COURTESY OF PARAMOUNT PICTURES

Henry Fielding; screenplay by Allan Scott and Chris Bryant; directed by Tony
Richardson; Woodfall Films, 1977.

Tony Richardson, a founder of the English Stage Company at
the Royal Court, may have chosen Annals to design the film
because he liked to introduce artists from the theatre who could
bring a fresh eye to the process, or, as one co-worker said, "to set the
cat among the pigeons" of the hidebound film veterans. He also
liked to shoot on location. So most of Annals's work as production
designer would have consisted of choosing locations and working
with art director Bill Brodie and set decorator Ian Whittaker. He
would have done most of the design work on costumes during
pre-production that started the prior fall. He could have juggled
both design assignments by having Patrick Wheatley, a costume
supervisor with whom he had worked frequently in the theatre,
oversee purchasing of fabrics and construction.
The film was shot in Bath and the adjacent Cotswolds. Annals
had to deal with "the many 20th-century aerials, street signs,
drainpipes, guttering and asphalt," he told Sharon Warner in
Theatre Crafts magazine (March 1978).
Interiors were filmed at the Pump Room on the site of the Roman Baths and at No. 1 Royal Crescent, built
in 1767 and recently acquired and restored by the Bath Preservation Trust as a museum. Exteriors and
interiors were filmed at the 16th-century George Inn at Norton St. Philip six miles southeast of Bath. The
company also filmed at Chastleton House, a 1617 Jacobean manor near Stow-on-the-Wold; Broughton Castle
near Banbury, a medieval manor transformed into a Tudor mansion; and in Upper Slaughter, a charming
village of Cotswold stone houses dominated a gabled Manor House dating from the fifteenth century.

New York

Rose Cottage

After he finished his year at Yale in May, Annals stayed on in
New York to take the examination for the American stage designers union, United Scenic Artists. Then he had offers for
work on Broadway and remained in America, with short intervals in London, for another year.
During that time he worked on three Broadway productions, including a new musical, Her First Roman, based on
George Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra. It was the most
lavish show Annals had designed, with nineteen sets and 175 costumes, and he yearned for a big smash hit. But the production
suffered from the heartaches and shocks that misbegotten musicals in their out-of-town tryouts are heir to-frantic rewrites,
changes of director, choreographer, composer and lyricist. It
ultimately closed after seventeen performances on Broadway.
As Her First Roman was about to open, Annals received
a telegram from Laurence Olivier asking him to return to the
National. Annals replied immediately. He had expected to sign
commitments for the following fall that week, but after the experience of a failed Broadway musical, he was ready to go
home. "In dilemma but homesick," he wrote.
He planned to return by ship, and he asked his parents to
collect him by car in Southampton. He had a notion that on the
way back to London he would begin looking for a country cottage, perhaps near Chichester.

Michael Annals became nostalgic for the English countryside
as soon as he arrived in New York to teach at Yale. Just as he
was getting established in a new country that he found somewhat alien, a friend wrote that he was thinking of buying an estate outside London and suggested Annals buy one of its farm
cottages as a weekend retreat. A country cottage, Annals told his
parents, would be, at last, "a bit of my very own soil in England."
But it was to be fifteen years before he acted on his idea.
In March 1982 Noises Off opened at the Savoy and was settling
into what promised to be a long run. Plans were already percolating for a New York production the next year. To Annals,
the regular influx of royalties seemed like winning the lottery.
He began house hunting in Devon and in June bought a property called Rose Cottage in Bucks Mills, a tiny hamlet on a
steep wooded lane that plunges down to the sea. The nearest
train station is Barnstaple, nearly twenty miles away. From
there, it is some 250 miles to London.
He plunged excitedly into repairing and refurbishing
the cottage. "Thank God for 'Noises Off'!" he wrote a
friend. The cottage was "utter chaos," he said, but "I continue to love it here in spite of frustrations and frankly have
no regrets or ever feel a wish to be back in London."
In retrospect, however, it is clear that Rose Cottage
marked the beginning of Annals's decline. It seems to have
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 2004