Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 1996 - 39

eighteenth century court theatre near Prague], I understood
the techniques. When I talked to the restorers I knew what
they were doing, because I was trained that way. For one year,
I washed paint pots until I could see my face in the bottom of
them. I was not allowed to touch color. Washed brushes and
paint pots, cleaned the shop. Second year I was allowed to
mix color. Third year I was allowed to start filling in what he
had drawn. The fourth year he ttlrIled me loose. It was an
old-fashioned apprenticeship which I don't think many young
people could hack today."
From the CBC, P0I1eous went to head the scenic art department at the independent network, CTV, and finally into
motion picture work, supervising scenic art for major films
and art directing for low-budget ones. Through this work, he
met Peter Howitt, later to become an Academy Award-winner
for set decoration forAnne a/The Thousand Days.
Howitt encouraged the young technician to rettlrn to

Cameron

school to train as a designer. When Porteous protested that
there were no institutions in North America giving the kind of
training in the art of theatre that he wanted, Howitt steered *
Porteous to the Winlbledon School of Art in London.
"There I ran head first in the real meaning of what it is to
be an artist who has chosen to work in the theatre. My biggest
difficulty was to suppress all the technical knowledge that I
had. I almost packed it in the first year because I knew more
than the teachers on the technical end. The headmaster of the
college said, 'Cameron, what you have to do is put all those
skills in a box and put them in the back of the closet. Start
fresh. And when it's all finished, you can go back and pick
them up because they're always going to be there.' "
The headmaster was Richard Negri, a powerful force in
British design, noted for landmark productions in the 1960s
of As YOll Like It at Stratford with Vanessa Redgrave and Miss
Julie at Chichester with Maggie Smith. Negri had worked with

Porteous
talks about the deSign process

I find the one moment in the play that is the realest to me.
Doesn't matter what it is, don't know where it is, could be the
beginning, could be the middle, could be the end. It could be
just a line, it could be just a scene, two people talking, when I
suddenly see sometlung extremely clear, what that scene is
about. That's where I'll start, right there. I'll design that scene
and find out what it is about that scene tllat I see. Sometimes
it's light, just light. Sometimes it's form. Sometimes it's nothing.
But it comes from tlle words, I have to find the vision in
the words. Believe it or not, many of them are images that go
back to my days in the praiIies. I'll see my mother standing at
tlle stove sweating in the heat, and suddenly something from
Lorca clicks in, or a moment in Chekhov.
I was trained to start \\~th tlle black box and put in the
middle of the black box the first tlling you see. line times out
of ten, it's the character. So I always say to people when tlley
ask me, "Is there any formula whatever in what you're doing, ' well, if there is a formula, it works on realities and tlle
first reality on the stage is the performer. I don't consider the
te).1 to be the first reality, because tllat's taken for granted. I
don't take the stage to be the first reality, because that's taken
for granted.
The first reality on tlle stage is tlle actor, the character.
The second reality is probably tlle clothes they wear. You start
finding a way through to the character by seeing some
clothes. It may not be tlle right clothes right off the bat, but
you start seeing sometlling: black shape, what's tlle silhouette. Then I start putting those clothe and characters together in a confrontation for a scene.
You and I sitting across from each other, it doesn't take
much imagination to know tlus is an interview. We could
eliminate this whole room and that tape recorder and sit like
we're doing right now, and everybody knows this is an inter-

view. So that's how I approach the work, to find the essence
of what's happening in that scene. Then I put into the scene
what is needed to communicate the story.
The trap with Bernard Shaw is he writes too much information into his text. At school, I was doingAl'ms and the
Man. I was told to blank out every stage direction there was,
everytillng, including everytillng he says about character, just
blank them out with a felt pen so I could not read what Shaw
had written, and read the text only and design it. And what I
got was a mirror image of exactly what he had written. It's all
there in the words anyway, you've just got to search for it.
I work from models. I'm a model-maker. That goes
back to our training as well. That's one of the big differences
between the two training traditions we have, the American
and the Continental, is tbat we work in the three-dimensional style. There's a very good reason for that. To see it in
your imagination, to allow your imagination and your whole
body to get inside the play and walk around it, the closest
thing to virtual reality is tlle model. It's out of the model that
I find things and explore ideas. It's out of the model that I
start hacking it apart and moving it about, reshaping and reforming it, until I finally get tlle shape that is a balance of
what the scene is about.

Porteous at work on Cyrano de Bergerac (1982)

TD&T

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 1996