Designers' Shakespeare

John Russell Brown, Stephen Di Benedetto

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780415618007
• eBook ISBN: 9781317911777
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Design General

Theatre Design involves everything seen on stage: not only scenery but costumes, wigs, makeup, properties, lighting, sound, even the shape and material of the stage itself. Designers' Shakespeare presents and analyses the work of a half-dozen leading practitioners of this specialist art. By focusing specifically on their Shakespearean work, it also offers a fresh, exciting perspective on some of the best-known drama of all time.

Shakespeare's plays offer an unusual range of opportunities to designers. As they were written for a theatre which gave no opportunity for scenic support or embellishment, designers are freed from any compulsion to imitate original practices. This has resulted in the extraordinarily diverse range of works presented in this volume, which considers among others the work of Josef Svoboda, Karl-Ernst Herrmann, Ming Cho Lee, Alison Chitty, Robert Wilson, Societas Raffaello Sanzio, Filter Theatre, Catherine Zuber, John Bury , Christopher Morley, Ralph Koltai and Sean Kenny.

Designers' Shakespeare joins Actors' Shakespeare and Directors' Shakespeare as essential reading for lovers of Shakespeare from theatre-goers and students to directors and theatre designers.

Chapter 1
Looking at contemporary design practice and Shakespeare

Stephen Di Benedetto

A discussion of Shakespeare and design is productive to foreground methods of contemporary design practice used to construct the worlds of widely known dramatic texts. From the perspective theatre of scholars who study Shakespeare in performance, contemporary design practice provides sufficiently different insights from the study of contemporary acting or directing practice. In comparison with the rest of the production team designers are relatively free from the tyranny of historical production practices. That English Renaissance practices did not rely on visual spectacle has allowed practitioners to experiment with the visual aspects of performance as new technologies were introduced and tastes changed. Shakespeare has offered designers a fertile ground to experiment with representational styles. Historically, at the start of the twentieth century Adolphe Appia and Edward Gordon Craig broke the hold of realist staging practices when they began to construct abstract, evocative settings and designers were freed to play with means of creating the visual worlds of the characters in each of the plays. This volume explores the process of design practice as seen through Shakespearean staging. By looking at what designers see in Shakespeare and what they make of the worlds he imagines we can begin to see how designers make manifest interpretations of plays in distinctive ways different from their peer directors and actors. This look askance of how Shakespeare’s plays are made to mean can offer novel insight into those plays.

There have only been a few studies that look at Shakespeare through the lens of design practice. The most systematic is Denis Kennedy’s seminal Looking at Shakespeare: A Visual History of Twentieth-Century Performance, which traces the historical lineage of production styles from the turn of the twentieth century and is the key text for understanding the various historical approaches to designers towards the staging of Shakespearean text.¹ As taste and convention may dictate the ways in which we expect to view Shakespeare, designers have been instrumental in shifting audience perception of what the potentials are for Shakespearean performance. Without watershed productions such as Peter Brook’s Midsummer Night’s Dream we might still be expecting to see period costumes and Renaissance frippery as the visual language of the text. Kennedy’s text places design practice within hegemonic theatrical history connecting changing aesthetics to directorial and acting styles. His text is organized from the perspective of the influences of nineteenth-century design practice upon twentieth-century design practice followed by an examination of each of the seminal design theories, which influenced major practices in the twentieth century. He looked at the scenographic revolution, the styles of politics, the heavily decorated realistic school later moving to the styles that led to increasing abstraction. This analysis of design practice foregrounds the ways in which design practice mirrors developments in acting, directing and dramaturgy.

While Designers’ Shakespeare follows in the footsteps of John Russell Brown’s edited collections of the Routledge Companion to Directors’ Shakespeare and the Routledge Companion to Actors’ Shakespeare, its central focus is on the ways that designers work to create the visual elements of production as a means to support or embellish a directorial concept.² The aims of this volume are twofold: on the one hand, an examination of Shakespeare and design allows accessibility for a large readership into issues and concepts of designers’ work; and on the other, it reveals how a visual sensibility can yield richer readings of the seminal work of Shakespeare. The traditions of design guide the aesthetics and practice of interpreting Shakespeare’s plays in performance as much as the conceptions of directors. Design practice is both collaborative in nature and choices executed in performance are a complex negotiation between the differing aesthetics and styles of a team of artists working in tandem with a director to realize an interpretation of a play for a particular time and place. Trying to give a taste of the differing aesthetics that shape the production elements, the subjects chosen are from designers or teams of designers who have had a particular influence on Shakespearian aesthetics in a variety of cultural traditions. Each is indicative of the strategies employed at revealing readings or interpretations of the scripts as conceived by the director or the design team.

A comprehensive examination of seminal productions where design is central from the late nineteenth century to today is prohibitively long. The design of this volume is to share images associated with different productions to show how Shakespeare is revealed through production elements. To be able to share these illustrations we chose to limit the scope of the volume allowing for a taste of how designers can offer alternative readings of Shakespearian texts, how their aesthetic can tease out environmental and contextual elements and can offer insight in to the visual and spatial organization of the world depicted within each of the plays. The designer’s manner of interpretation and articulation is different from that of a writer, actor or director. Visual principles of design and composition evoke in a manner akin to poetry and thereby offer poetic analysis of the texts. The resulting designs assist the text and the bodies of the actors on the stage to bring to life the play for audiences to understand and experience the world of the plays. Visual and spatial analyses of Shakespeare’s texts yield useful anchors to support traditional literary and historiographic studies. These frameworks situated within the practical considerations of stagecraft allow us to distill abstract themes into pragmatic representation used to bolster performance interpretations and assist in real-time communication of moment-to-moment transformations of meaning.

Shakespeare’s words are spoken by bodies in space—more than naked corporeal entities or voices emerging in the dark space of our imaginations they are located in a fictive space in time in concurrence with the audience’s shared experience of the duration of the performance. As such, audiences use their senses to make sense of what they see and hear within the confines of the theatre. But as with other fashions of interpretation the analysis of the mechanics and traditions of stagecraft enables us to say new things with the plays of Shakespeare. The following essays describe the practices of a few designers whose work has been influential in the articulation of a Shakespearean visual aesthetic. They represent a plurality of voices of set, costumes, lighting, and sound designers. Their voices are not created in isolation but as part of a creative team whose opinions and aesthetics influence each other’s choices in the building of a performance, in the creation of a stage image. In concert with a director these creative artists craft a world for these characters to inhabit which provides audiences with the necessary signifiers to understand and consider the Shakespearean text. Their work shapes our experience of Shakespeare and subtly guides us through an interpretive journey, visually and sensuously offering our understanding of the shared experience unfolding in front of us.

Just as an editor’s choice of a semi-colon or word with an edition of a play subtly affect Shakespeare’s verse and the arguments of the play, a designer’s palette or choice of texture creates subtle nuances in the potential meanings generated during performance. Design work is not fixed. A single image does not evoke an entire play. Pictures unfold and change over the course of a play and only in performance is an image whole, pregnant with potential meaning. It is not as a single-image moment capturing action but a flow. How that flow is constructed and executed is the artist’s doing and can provide insights in to what designers see in Shakespeare, what they feel is important to make clear to audiences and what is important to add detail to make it intelligible. Their choices have something to show us as literary or performance analysis.

Theatre Design involves everything seen on stage, more than scenery but also costumes, wigs, makeup, furniture, properties, the shape and material of the stage itself, lighting and sound. “Scenography” or “Performance Design” would be used in the title were they in more general use beyond specialists within theatre and did not include the actors’ on-stage contribution and every directorial decision. Stage design is much about collaboration and so preliminary sketches are sometimes reproduced as well as finished renderings to convey the influence of the other members of the design team and director. Theatre design is a more comprehensive term than “set design” and is used in this book as appropriate to each designer studied and each author’s particular interests and experience. Traditions outside of mainstream theatres are incorporated thereby representing the latest trends in design practice. Examples include a few scenographers who also work as directors and tend, responsibly and/or imaginatively, to re-write Shakespeare.

Contemporary visions of Shakespeare

This volume moves through time from the early twentieth-century to twenty-first-century practices. Chapters present case studies on single designers and also on teams of designers situated in a single company or at a single theatre. Rooted in practices that challenge the prevailing trends that were current in the late nineteenth century the designers here experiment with styles influenced by avant-garde experiments with space and place, which value imagination and abstraction over realistic or emblematic depiction. Opening the volume is Christian M. Billing’s “‘Here is My Space’: Josef Svoboda’s Shakespearean Imagination”, which places Svoboda’s practice within the context of his total oeuvre and influence as designer. He explores the ways in which Svoboda’s aesthetic shaped performance and influenced alternative readings of various Shakespearean productions. Here the designer’s vision almost controls the visual and performative possibilities of the Shakespearean text. The visual language opens up multiple layers revealing a meta-discourse and commentary on the action of the play. He situates Svoboda’s aesthetic against the background of the social and cultural upheavals in Czechoslovakian culture of the time and traces his practice back to Craig. Svoboda, coming from an architectural background conceived of space and later the use of screens as a means to create an environment to house the action of the Shakespearean plays performed. His experimental techniques were instrumental in opening up the visual metaphors seen in the works. He unpacks major stepping-stones through significant Shakespearean productions that are emblematic of Svoboda’s dynamic architectonic designs. Through Svoboda’s interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays we learn about recurring approaches the designer employs in his construction of stage space.

Tracing the lineage of Svoboda’s influence, the volume moves to England with a look at how Peter Brook worked with a range of designers preoccupied with finding appropriate techniques to foreground the political messages that influenced his work at the RSC in the 1960s. Liam Doona’s “Scenography at The Royal Shakespeare Company 1963–1968; Towards an Empty Space” looks at Shakespeare design practice from the larger prospective of the collaborations at a particular influential theatre over a period of time with different directors and designers. This allows us to see the ways in which a particular influential theatre made its mark on the visual languages of presentation with the UK and the legacy of the designer’s influence on facilitating interesting readings of Shakespearean texts. Central to the discussion is the network of collaboration that parses out meaning and interpretation as choices are made to build the visual world of a production. In performance interpretation is negotiated through the articulation of choice— what each choice does to the ways in which action is read and understood from the spectators within a particular location and culture amidst a unique political climate. Doona’s discussion of the aesthetics brought by designers to the visions of directors reveals the notion of political and social reading of Shakespearean performance. Productions are viewed through the lens of the aspects brought out of the texts as influenced by the period politics of its creators and its audiences. What is seen of Shakespeare is seen through the lens of its contemporaneous audiences. Likewise the lineage and networks are shown to be transmitted through teams of collaborators and legacies of teachers sharing with subsequent generations the modes and styles of expression that take on a signature style of a particular time and place. This lens helps understand the networks of theatre makers and the ways in which differing collaborative teams affect the ways in which meaning is drawn from Shakespeare’s texts.

Moving to Germany Klaus Vandenberg’s “Karl-Ernst Herrmann: Unfolding Shakespeare’s Space” places the Herrmann within the perspective of post-war culture. He defines Herrmann’s contribution to Shakespeare design in Germany as one grounded in an image space that leaves open an unfolding space enabling contemporary interpretations of the classic texts. Using Walter Benjamin’s notion of an ‘image space’ as a theoretical lens Vandenberg analyses Herrmann’s design aesthetic as a material manifestation of the philosopher’s ideas. He explains “His idea was to eliminate the theatre of illusion and replace it with a stage that performed as a visual field in which location and image lay open similar to a display case in which actors shared deliberate gestures.” For example, he uses As You Like It to demonstrate how image space carries with it the potential for deep analysis. Herrmann’s view of the forest of Arden as something darker and more nefarious than traditional depictions had been up to that point is revealed in his conception of the spatial organization of the setting. Each spatial element references the past as well as reframes the present in the space. The designer’s hand provides tools with which the directors and actors can exploit the space in their own interpretations and choices. Vandenberg’s analysis serves both to discuss design as a mode of philosophical and aesthetic commentary as well as a practical mechanism for creating stage space where the actions and settings are organized in a way to make clear the progression of locations. The arrangement and organization of the settings become an analytical mechanism for understanding the social and political worlds of Shakespeare’s plays.

Next, the discussion shifts to North America and an examination of contemporary American strategies for staging Shakespeare in non-traditional spaces. Arnold Aronson’s contribution on ‘Ming Cho Lee’ places Lee’s work in the context of the traditions he challenged that were in place in the United States from the mid-eighteenth century. Aronson shows how Lee’s work is a deliberate response to the prevalent scenographic trends of the early twentieth century such as those of Robert Edmond Jones and Orson Welles. He shows Lee’s departure from these illusionistic traditions freed the stage space from naturalistic considerations and instead favored an open staging that fits more holistically with outdoor spaces and spaces influenced by American attempts to rediscover theatre architecture based on reconstructions of the Globe Theatre. Aronson, whose seminal work on Lee examines his entire career to date, charts here Lee’s development and style specifically through Shakespeare. He shows how Lee approached the open theatre space combined with the abstraction of a Brechtian inspired theatricality, which moved productions that he was involved in away from representation to a spare abstraction that aids spectators in their analysis of the action and the organization and utility of the stage space. With each production we see how this aesthetic grew and how he became more adept at providing an open space to support directorial metaphors for production. Lee’s influence goes beyond his physical designs but also his position like many of the designers featured in this volume as a teacher at the preeminent design school in the country.

Likewise Alison Chitty’s work has had a similar impact in the United Kingdom as Ming Cho Lee’s has in the United States, both as a designer and as a teacher. Hilary Baxter, a practicing costume designer, similarly analyses Chitty’s work from a pragmatic perspective focusing on the design process and the ways in which choices affect audience analysis. Her chapter “Alison Chitty – The Public Sketch” charts the ways in which Chitty’s Shakespearean productions are emblematic of her manner of theatre production and her insights of the ways in which design provides concrete interpretation of dramatic action. Her methods of storyboarding are integral to her for working out and interpreting dramatic actions. By drawing the characters within their physical environment she creates a tool for seeing the effect of design choices on an audiences’ perception of the characters and she is able to understand Shakespeare’s text from a material perspective that reveals the social, political and personal embodiment of the presented characters and actions. This allows her to contemplate the transmission of a director’s vision. Does a set help or hinder action? Do costumes reveal mood and underlying personal or political status? Do these moods color our perceptions of the words and action performed within the other aspects of performance? For example, Baxter discusses the way that color choices or rakes of stage affect the audience’s perception of the action. Through the use of interview extracts she unpacks the ways that designers use practice to understand the works that they are presenting, and the effectiveness of the design principles and practices to make clear a director’s view of the actions. Whether it is a color choice of a setting or the cut of cloth used to shape the silhouette of the character the choices reveal Shakespeare. Design choices also make sense of the Renaissance texts for a contemporary audience. While the archaic language is accessible to language the design elements help make the language, the action, the emotions intelligible to the audience and give them a means to enter into the world and ideas presented in the action of the play. Chitty crafts how the audience looks at Shakespeare and also looks at the world of each play. She sets a frame of vision. In contrast to the elaborate language her designs are economical and spare leaving room for the audience to see the other elaborate modes performance. The different performances described take place in different locations and show the role of design in crafting reception of the piece in different environments. There is not a ubiquitous style or approach because each location is unique and demands different means to communicate. Unlike the action and words in a textual analysis, the space, bodies, materials all shift an audience’s experience and understanding of the production.

An international figure such as Robert Wilson has had a broad impact across traditions and as such continues to influence contemporary design aesthetics. Maria Shevtsova’s “Robert Wilson” explores the blurred line where Wilson creates as a designer and a director simultaneously. As a scenographer Wilson is an auteur collaborating with set, costume and sound designers to create the living design of his works. He commonly oversees a team of designers collaborating together to build his interpretations. Shevstova places his aesthetics within the influencers of his technique. While minimalist in look, she connects his work to the Bauhaus and constructivism of the 1930s both in concept and in its blurring of the line of director/designer supremacy. Shevstova then traces those influences alongside his American influences of the late 1960s in a black mountain college with John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Robert Rauschenberg. She approaches his work from the concept of Wilson as an architect, who starts the conception of a production from its architecture and sees his aesthetic as a hybrid mixed media designer. Wilson treats Shakespeare as he does all other writers, starting instead from a spatial interpretation rather than verbal approach. His storyboarding, or visual book approach, allows him to begin with the spatial form moving audiences through experiences of the plays. Tracing his process from storyboard, to collaboration and then on to staging she then concentrates her discussion on his use of light as an articulation of the emotions of the production. Lighting is at once the mechanism for organizing the architectonic space as well as the emotional underpinning of the event. Light propels the action forward. Through close reading of his visual dramaturgy she analyses the subtle influences of a designer’s aesthetic upon a director’s practice. Design is “not bound by semantic meaning” and design is an oblique mirror into the core of a play’s essence not constrained by words and action. Wilson’s approach to visual dramaturgy has influenced a generation of theatre makers to create scenographically driven narratives through the principles and elements of composition within design.

The next contribution considers a designer who works in regional American theatre, and is typical of contemporaneous practice of her peers, who relies heavily on storyboarding as a means of exploring potential visual interpretations of play texts. Brandin Barón-Nusbaum, from the perspective of a working costume designer, traces the production practices of noted American designer Catherine Zuber. “The Form of (her) Intent: Catherine Zuber’s Costume Design for Nicholas Hytner’s Twelfth Night (1998)” explores questions of the manner in which designers collaborate with directors to develop the visual context of performance and reveals the ways that designers strip down images to create visual analogies to the unseen social and political metaphors that underpin the action of the play and contextualizes the performances of the actors. Zuber’s collabor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 Looking at contemporary design practice and Shakespeare
• 2 “Here is my space”: Josef Svoboda’s Shakespearean imagination
• 3 Scenography at the Royal Shakespeare Company 1963–1968: towards an empty space
• 4 Karl-Ernst Herrmann: unfolding Shakespeare’s space
• 5 Ming Cho Lee
• 6 Alison Chitty – the public sketch
• 7 Robert Wilson
• 8 The form of (her) intent: Catherine Zuber’s costume design for Nicholas Hytner’s Twelfth Night (1998)
• 9 Designing sound for Shakespeare: connecting past and present
• 10 BEYOND LANGUAGE: performing “true-meant design;” “that risky and dangerous negotiation between a doing… and a thing done”
• Afterword
• Index