Set Design: First Thoughts

Last night I confirmed the first member of my design team: Matt Odrobny, who will design Lear’s sets (and possibly lights). Matt designed a show for my last company, and his visual work has the right combination of elemental impact and creepy darkness. I think he’ll be a great match for the show.

Some of the things we talked about: I emphasised the need to have a lot of open space on stage, because Shakespeare’s characters like to move, and don’t like to be encumbered by unnecessary set pieces. But I also admitted that it would be great to find some way to transform the Walterdale Playhouse stage entirely—to really shock the long-time subscribers who have become accustomed to seeing stories played out in that venue.

I talked a bit about incorporating musicians into the play, and how they would need some kind of niche apart from the action—possibly on platforms above the main playing area. This is where the musicians would have sat in the Globe, and I think it’s an especially nice touch to have them up there for Lear—hovering above the characters like silent gods, involved but impassive. But it would mean constructing platforms from scratch, which would blow most of our budget.

Finally, we talked about specific images and metaphors that could be culled from the play. I told Matt about the vortex image, and we agreed that it was a pretty mind-boggling challenge to try to construct a whirlpool onstage (or a black hole!). And on a whim, I mentioned cliffs, too. There are no literal cliffs in the play (Edgar describes the cliffs of Dover to his father, but they’re not really there), but having some clifflike scenery might help allude to the whirlpool movement, in a metonymic sort of way. I just like the idea of erosion, of having a set that looks as though it may crumble to dust at any moment—but which will be, of course, completely up to safety standards. Ah, the illusion of theatre.