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STEPHEN BRIMSON LEWIS: My name is Stephen Brimson Lewis, and I'm a set and costume designer. With the RSC, obviously we know a long while in advance because we have to schedule the rep seed system.

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Or even if it's not rep or if they're standalone productions, we tend to know probably 18 months in advance, sometimes even earlier than that depending on the production. So a long way in advance do I know,

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and often I'm involved pretty much from the get go. If it's a director I've worked with lots of times, like Greg for example, Greg and I have worked many, many times together.

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So we're often talking about productions many, many sometimes many years in the future, where we're sort of saying, what do you think about Cymbeline? And I'll go, oh, it's a strange play, you know.

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So we have these kind of rather, what I call the corridor chats, where we suddenly kind of stop each other and say, what about this moment in The Tempest? You know and then eventually we get into a more formal process

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of, oh right now we're designing the play and it's happening. So surprisingly a long while in advance, but occasionally in commercial theatre sometimes not, sometimes can be up to a minimum of about nine months in advance

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before it hits the stage. But that's quite rare. That's a tough turn around, nine months. That's quite quick.

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I know you can make a baby in that time but you can't make a play, because you try and analyse what the process is because you often think is there a better way of doing it each time?

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But it tends to fall into a system where, obviously you read the play a great deal, and then I like to have what I call dream time. So I try not to obsess about, I've got to design this play,

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because you'll get yourself a bit blocked. I tend to try and somehow let my subconscious dream about it a bit. And in that time, I know my brain,

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a bit like a magpie will be collecting references, and collecting ideas, and seeing something in nature, or go to an exhibition of paintings, something will start to trigger something in my head

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about what the play is. And then having done a bit of that privately on my own, I then talk to the director and see which bits of that tie up with their vision of the play.

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And then it's a kind of give and take throughout that early process of is this the way to go down, is that the way to go down? So it's weirdly a very informal, slightly fragmented process,

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and I switch it up for every play. As I say, I wish I could say I put a blank piece of paper on a drawing board and miraculously out comes a ground plan.

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That's really not the way it will ever happen. You just allow your instinct to start to really connect with the piece. And then from there you then do a much more, as I said,

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structured process of starting to trying things out in the model box, three dimensionally. This day and age I try stuff out in Photoshop, on an iPad, on a laptop, starting to visualize it.

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And then that starts to form and form and form and then you go through early concept designs, and then you go through what we call the white card stage, where you do a very unfinished looking model that's

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three dimensionally roughly makes sense. And then from there you start to really firm it up, and then next bit start rehearsals. The clock or the stopwatch starts and you're off.

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I think really the key questions are for me, is what is the space actually, as much as what is the play, and what's the story of the play, it's what's the space? I kind of respond I suppose more architecturally than perhaps

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some other designers. I'm very aware, particularly in the RSC, we have very specific spaces, both The Swan and the RST. And as the RSC used to be as a proscenium space,

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I think we designed very differently. I know looking back to certain very earlier productions that Greg and I did in the older theatre, you respond in a very different way.

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And in a thrust stage you have to come to terms with the sight lines with the audience on three sides, and all that that entails really in terms of where does the design fit in.

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There's only certain places you can have scenic elements, for example, because of the audience can't suddenly see someone on the other side of the stage.

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So there were some fundamentals. But for me, even if it's a theatre I've never worked in, I spend a lot of time trying to work out the space. And I'll draw lines on a ground plan

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and just work out lines of sight where a stronger position might be, and probably where an actor needs to be compared, that's not where you want a big lump of scenery possibly. I don't know.

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It's all very random the way I do it. But it's mostly quite architectural, and I can tend to want to understand the building itself, and the scale of the space,

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or the intimacy of the space. I think when we're working in The Swan it's such a different process than working in the RST, because the audience are almost sitting forward a bit more.

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Whereas the RST, they sit back and you have to present it a bit more. There's more pressure, I think, on a designer to fill in the gaps a bit in the bigger space, weirdly.

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The smaller spaces you can really, really simplify. You can get it down to a real essence. And the focus is so on the words, and so on the acting and seeing the sort of nuance

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of an actor's expression. And as a designer you mustn't get in the way of that. So it's this very different process from that point of view.

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But you really do, as I think I said, you work very early with the director. You have to know that you're both some way towards imagining the same production.

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Otherwise, you get into trouble when you get into rehearsals if you've designed a production that is not the production that's in their head. But that has happened.

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That's happened lots of times, even with a director that you think you know, and you think you know exactly what they're going to do. You go into rehearsals and suddenly you

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start watching what they're doing and you think, oh my goodness, that doesn't have anything to do with what I'm doing. And then you have some quite tricky conversations.

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So it's really about constantly checking that the thing's tracking, in terms of what you're doing, in terms of what the story is doing, but what you're doing in terms of what the actors are doing.

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Research is a very interesting thing in terms of the specificity of what you're looking at. This day and age with the brilliance of Google Images, or anything like that, you can find almost anything

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immediately. So you can leave a lot of the specific research until often when you're in the room, or with a maker. Like recently doing Richard III for the RSC,

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I'd course I'd looked at armour of that period, and what that might be. But when you get to have the person who's making the armor in front of you,

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you can easily say, well, what does a pauldron look like in 1399 compared to the pauldrons that were worn with the armor in 1580? So you can do it.

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Whereas in the past, you used to have to troll through books and go to libraries, and do weird things like that. And I slightly miss a bit of that. Because going to the library was a treasure trove,

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was a kind of way of quiet time, literally quiet time for you to pore through books, and find a book on a subject. I don't know, a long, long while ago I wanted to find some of all the church spires in London

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that Christopher Wren had designed. Well today that would take you seconds. This took me weeks of going through the London Library and various other places.

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But I think in the process, because it was more drawn out, it went into my DNA a bit more. So research is a very different thing. I can't do general research.

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That seems a bit scattergun. I have to wait until I really know, OK I need to find a chair that's this, or I need to find what's the shape of a bodice,

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or what's the shape of a-- what the door handles look like. I don't know. Whatever it is, the specific detail is the main research.

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So you of course work with an enormous team of people, and some of them at the design stage of it, and some of it at the building and production side of things. I like to design both the set and the costumes,

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as a big control freak. It depends on the scale of the production. There's something more cohesive about it for me. You get to know the company more.

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You feel like you're more involved. In the past, sometimes if I'm doing too many things at once, or the play just seems like it needs two sets of eyes on it, then I'll say let's work with some other people.

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And sometimes I've designed the costumes with another set designer and vice versa. And that's again, you just have to find a designer who I think, who doesn't think like you but at least

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you have some kind of language, a shared language, so you know that you're going to approach it in the same way. I recently revived, actually weirdly, did The Taming of the Shrew.

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I've done very few plays twice. I've tried to not do that. I think I've done about 27, 28 plays with the Royal Shakespeare Company, very rarely done them twice.

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But I did get a chance to revisit The Taming of the Shrew, but having done it so thoroughly the first time in the older theatre, I felt I couldn't design the costumes as well.

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I'd been too close to it last time. So we asked Hannah Clark, brilliant costume designer, to come and work with us, and Hannah worked with me. So yes, you work at a very close relationship

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with the costume designer, obviously an assistant designer who will help you produce the models, and produce some early drawings and concepts, ideas, and just someone else to just be another person to bounce ideas off

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in a very rougher way. And then later on, obviously you're absolutely in the middle of working with lighting designers, and sound designers, and projection

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designers, and everyone else. It's a proper collaboration. And I think as an art form, it's very sociable from that bit. There's a bit of it that isn't, a bit of it that's

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very private and rather kind of reclusive, I think, but you then balance that with a lot of time that's spent in a very sociable way. I don't think I could be a fine artist just locked

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away on their own, months and months on end struggling with a painting on a canvas, or carving away at something. I need the feedback from colleagues and collaborators,

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and a group of people really. I mean I'm fascinated, in theatre, that people think it's such a specific art form. It's so slightly rarefied in some ways.

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And yet actually, I think you could employ anyone in the theatre with any skills from any background. I mean I've worked with plumbers where I've needed to-- I've worked in a theatre where the water pressure wasn't quite

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right for something we wanted. We wanted to do a rainstorm on stage and I couldn't get the water pressure right. So we had to find a specific plumber who would understand,

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who could bypass the plumbing in the building, who could give me the right water pressure, could work out how to get me the right sprinklers without too much air in it so it didn't make too much noise,

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and it was great. And they'd never worked in the theatre before, and they loved the process. And I think it's fascinating.

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You can work, from my point of view, you just get to meet so many other crafts, and skills, and techniques. It really is, if what I am, which is a jack of all trades

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and a master of none at all, it's quite nice to meet some other people who are real masters of their craft. And you can just borrow little bits of it,

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as I say, a bit like being a magpie. You get the best of their skills really. That's really your job. You're a bit like a conductor.

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You've got all these kind of instruments, all these kind of people doing their different things, and you just have to make sure that it all comes together and in a harmonious way.

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And actually, you're making a production that connects with everything else that everyone's expecting. For me I think that the space itself is the starting point. And it really does affect how you imagine that the play will

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be presented. As I think I've said in terms of the RST now, by having such a huge thrust stage, that is also, though, still crossed by the ghost

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of the old proscenium. If you're not careful, it becomes two distinct spaces, upstage of the proscenium and downstage of the proscenium. And I've noticed that designers who haven't worked in that

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configuration before, will often immediately just push all their set to be upstage of the proscenium which of course, is great if you're sat downstage centre, but you're not just sitting downstage centre.

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Audiences are sitting all the way around, so you really do have to take that into account. And that will push you to think in a very different way about how you design a play.

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But for me that's a good impetus. That's a good starting point. And that's the thing that really inspires you to go, well how can I make this work in this space?

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I knew that when we came to do The Tempest, which required a lot of projected content, that was really difficult because you needed the audience to sit in a very specific relationship, so that the projected

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content could bounce back into their eyes. Literally, you start to become quite scientific about it, to work out the sight lines from a very specific point of view where the beam of light is going.

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Because as I'm constantly told by lighting designers, you can't bend light whenever I ask for it to not hit a certain part of the set. I suddenly was aware that I had to find a new way of making

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projection work. If not completely 360 degrees, at least 270 degrees, so people all the way around could experience, if not the same production, at least a version of it--

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a different version of it. But I used to love when I was younger and theatres were certainly theatres in the West End, which are very proscenium-based.

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There's something rather lovely about sitting right at the top miles away. You do have a very different experience. I've never liked sitting right on the front row.

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I know some people really love that, so they see the sweat of the actors and they see the process. I quite like being the bird's-eye view of it.

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And I wonder that's just because as a designer you spend a lot of time staring into a model box, so you're like you really are in the gods if not higher than that.

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So I'm used to it being a long way away. I'm not used to it being in close-up necessarily, but perhaps that changes now with computer-aided design. You can get right in it and you can check those sight lines.

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And that's certainly changed the process with these different spaces. But I do find it a challenge. And I think it's a kind of generational thing.

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As I say, I think this really large thrust stage that we have at the RST, we haven't really got many of those in this country to go with. I mean yes, Chichester Theatre has a form of it.

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Sheffield Theatre has a thrust stage as such, but it's more a sort of amphitheatre. It's more like a Greek amphitheatre. And that sort of semi-circular stage where all the sight lines

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are still focused into one point, like it is in the Olivier for example, is still very different from what we've got here, which is a courtyard box of the theatre where the sight lines

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are radically different depending on what level you're sat at. So as a designer you've got to take that into account. Otherwise, if you don't get upset,

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then the producer will get upset that they can't sell the ticket because you can't see what's going on. And that's your responsibility as a designer. Gosh it's so interesting.

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I mean I've been designing for the RSC since I think '99, '98, something like that on and off. But previous to that in the older theatre in particular, I was always so fascinated by the way they would adapt

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the theatre for a season. And John Napier in particular, was very skilled at just shaping the building to create a surprising new environment.

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So every time you came into a familiar theatre it would look like a new building. And it would immediately make you connect with the performance in a fresh way,

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because you didn't expect they would change the shape of the fore stage, or they would pull the set through the proscenium and try and wrap it around the auditorium.

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And particularly like Nicholas Nickleby, Trevor Nunn, I think that was such a benchmark of what I call environment designing from a set point of view.

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So you're not designing each scene as an individual moment. You design-- you have a notion or an idea. And I think we all do it now, notion for the whole play. So what's a general environment in which the whole play

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could somehow take place? And then you change it within it. I certainly do that with Christmas Carol. And I think Christmas Carol weirdly

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because it's written by-- adapted by David Edgar, who adapted Nicholas Nickleby all those years ago, another Dickens. I think subconsciously I thought of John Napier's

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extraordinary design for Nicholas Nickleby. So probably that one from a long while ago, and then I don't know from more recent ones. I'm always impressed and amazed by how different designers

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change the space and come and approach it in a radically different way, whether they're going to be very naturalistic about it and very specific, suddenly setting all of Hamlet in a school gym, which I've

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seen, or a much more poetic and strangely in a very, very imaginative with a landscape that makes-- I can't connect with at all, that has nothing to do with my imagination.

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But I can still understand that somehow a designer has read that play and that's, they think the best environment for Much Ado or the best environment for King John.

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I'm always fascinated by that because you think this is the same play. We both read the same play, and yet somehow you saw it that way and I saw it this way.

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That for me is inspiring. Well, I mean technology's been around in theatre for a long, long while, certainly in terms of stage technology, in terms of automation within the set itself.

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But I guess audiences are much more aware of projected technologies now how we use video, for example. Because I think that's a very big jump forward.

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That computer-driven technology, in terms of lighting control, has slowly developed over the past decades. And again, and that's maybe more invisible because it's for want of a better phrase, behind the scenes,

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but certainly in terms of how we've used digitally-projected content, has made a huge leap forward. And directors in particular I think, are quite drawn to it.

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Because it means you can make the decisions later and later, because you don't have a painter waiting to say, what do you want me to do with this floor? You know you can change the floor at a flick of a switch,

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or as long as you prepared the content in time. And there's something very attractive about that, about that sort of fluidity. And often theatre needs that because you need to be able

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to switch from scene to scene to scene effortlessly. That's a lot of what your job is as a designer, to make the flow of the piece happen in a certain way, like kind of again a bit like a piece of music.

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You need to know that you've got a chance to take some air so you could have a bigger scene change or, you need to tumble the scene so they need to crash into each other.

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And that needs to be thought about and projected technologies can give you a bit of that freedom, really. I mean I'm fascinated by again, working with people from a different field, people

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who work very much as a two-dimensional art form, which it still remains however much we try and integrate it, however much we talk about being able to create 3D holographic projected images.

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Perhaps I'm thinking of that ABBA concert at the minute. The truth is they don't really exist yet. They're still projected onto a two-dimensional surface. Whether it's a very transparent surface that you can't quite

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see, nonetheless you all need to sit at a certain point of view in order to get the full image back at you. The technology will move on, and quite soon. Yes, I hope.

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I'd be fascinated to see that we can create proper holographic characters on stage. Maybe we can either resurrect some old performances, or do as they're doing in cinema now,

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suddenly bring back actors who are sadly no longer with us and get a bit of their performance and integrate that into a live action piece on stage. For me though, the kind of thing that's so unique about

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the theatre is the sort of live experience of something could go horribly wrong. I always think of people who don't know much about this. I think it's a bit like Speedway.

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I think Speedway is attractive because it is so dangerous, and you think any minute somebody could really do themselves, some injury, and in a weird horrible way that's attractive and fascinating.

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And I think to a lesser degree, theatre is much the same. You just know any minute an actor could forget a line or something could go horribly wrong, and adds a right amount of tension.

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I think that makes it thrilling, somehow. If it's all what we call pre-baked. If it's all prerecorded, it doesn't quite have that does it.

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Quite how we do that in the future, I don't know. And also, how do we make an audience really have empathy with a projected digital character in a way that we can with a puppet?

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I think that for me has been a bit of a goal, and it was with Tempest. Something fascinating about how we can give empathy to an otherwise inanimate object.

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I always quote War Horse because it was so successful the way they brought those horses to life, even though you could see the puppeteers. And probably because you could see the puppeteer,

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and the puppeteers were breathing in time with the horse. It literally came alive. I've yet to see that happen with a digital avatar on stage,

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but I'm sure it'll come. I hope it'll come. I'm trying to remember. Tamer Tamed was a long while ago.

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I think we said 2003 was Tamer Tamed. And Greg and I had done a production of Taming of the Shrew in the main house in the old RST, and we'd already started connecting with that world.

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And in order to give it a fresh take, Greg had, I think probably unearthed for a long while a play called Tamer Tamed by Fletcher, which was the kind of sequel to Taming of the Shrew,

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written about 20 years I think after Taming of the Shrew itself. And some of the characters went across, in particular Petruchio.

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And he remarries in Tamer Tamed, a second wife, who looks very much like Katherine, certainly did in our play because it was played by the same actress, brilliant Alexandra Gilbreath.

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And what was our take on the both plays really. We saw them as a whole, even though they were in different spaces. It was really about trying to understand

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what was a city life like from a Elizabethan point of view, and not from a rather sanitized, rather beautiful, I don't know rather museum re-enactment of an Elizabethan street.

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But what was it really like? And what did it smell like? And how close were people living to one another? And what was it like just to cross a street?

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What was going past in terms of livestock, and goodness knows what else, just that kind of hustle and bustle, the excitement, and also the tensions of living in a really busy city, which

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for Elizabethans was a new thing, a new world and newly excited. And what's great about the plays is he puts together all these people from different places,

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and they all come together in this city. And somehow a story unfolds with how all these lives overlap. And I hadn't really seen that on stage before with Taming of the Shrew.

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I always felt again it was slightly too-- a little bit storybook if you like. It was always a bit-- they always look rather well dressed,

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and it all looked rather a nice place to live, and it was always quite nice, partly because I guess Shakespeare had said it was Padua. It was set in Italy, and he gave it

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a lot of sunshine and warmth. And I think we both decided that actually he was really thinking about London, and particularly thinking about living next to the Thames and the South Bank,

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and the smell of the Thames and one bridge to get across the river. And from that, that was all I needed to go OK, I get this world.

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So we just started to think about how can you put that on stage? And we created a world that was with lots of doors in Taming of the Shrew, just the endless--

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very few stage directions from Shakespeare. But in this one, there's a lot of knocking on doors, and somebody's pounding on the door and trying to get an answer, or somebody

00:27:16.760 - 00:27:24.870

bursting through a door. So quite quickly I went OK, we need some doors. And they were the starting point. So you just have that as a building blocks.

00:27:24.870 - 00:27:38.280

And we used a similar kind of aesthetic if you like on Tamer Tamed really. And it meant you could be both abstract, a little bit stylized about it, but it had the roots in a kind of very real space.

00:27:38.280 - 00:27:48.300

I think that's probably the key to the way I work really. I don't like to abstract it so far that it doesn't feel like it connects with the world that I really think these characters belong in

00:27:48.300 - 00:27:56.310

or live in. It doesn't have to be an Elizabethan perspective. It could be lots of different eras, or an imagined world. But you still have to believe it's

00:27:56.310 - 00:28:08.320

a world where everyone in the play would logically live. And what they're saying makes sense with what we're seeing around them, if that makes sense. It's an odd process.

00:28:08.320 - 00:28:17.130

But I think I've got it right, when it feels like every choice you make as a designer is right for that world. So say you can be very specific about it.

00:28:17.130 - 00:28:28.480

Like we did a production of Measure for Measure, which was set in the early 20th century. So you can be very, very specific about the detail. And little details just conjure connections for audiences,

00:28:28.480 - 00:28:39.540

whether subliminally or not. And that helps to literally fill in the gaps. So you're just teasing the audience with enough information to let their imagination

00:28:39.540 - 00:28:51.810

fill in all the gaps. I think sometimes film is slightly overly descriptive. You as an audience don't get to fill in the gaps. It wants to be overly naturalistic, and overly heavy

00:28:51.810 - 00:28:59.040

with all the set dressing, and all the specifics. Theatre you can't be, because you've got to suddenly move on to the next place. So I like that about it.

00:28:59.040 - 00:29:05.970

I like the editing. I like to be able to go right OK, what do we need here? Well we just need this chair, and that will tell you about the whole room.

00:29:05.970 - 00:29:14.100

So that was-- Taming of the Shrew was fascinating to do a play, Taming of the Shrew as I say, a play that would be done many, many times,

00:29:14.100 - 00:29:24.300

but Tamer Tamed hadn't been done. And certainly not been done as a joint production with Shrew at that point. So I think it was great to contrast and compare.

00:29:24.300 - 00:29:33.960

And you came away thinking yes, Shakespeare's maybe a better writer than Fletcher is perhaps. Maybe I'm being a bit cruel. I mean you realize Fletcher was quite rough and ready with it.

00:29:33.960 - 00:29:52.470

It was quite a bawdy, racy comedy, Tamer Tamed. And doesn't quite give you the heart. And doesn't quite give you some of the other melancholy and the darkness that Shrew can have

00:29:52.470 - 00:30:01.980

I think if you do it properly, balancing the light, the comedy with some of the really darker stuff. There's so much cruelty. But there's cruelty in both plays but certainly in Shrew.

00:30:01.980 - 00:30:13.140

Not quite so much cruelty in Tamer Tamed. It's a bit more of a bawdy romp. Macbeth was one of the earliest collaborations Greg and I did, again in The Swan theatre.

00:30:13.140 - 00:30:24.300

I think we both went through a phase of really loving the fact that we could take the pressure off ourselves by doing it in a more intimate venue. And particularly with Macbeth, we

00:30:24.300 - 00:30:35.760

were really keen to scare the audience, to make it really scary. For some reason, I'd like to work with psychologists and lots of other people

00:30:35.760 - 00:30:47.130

to tell me why it's much harder to do that in a larger venue than it is in a small one. But I know what you could do in the small one, is black it out, and do a complete blackout, and take away even the fire

00:30:47.130 - 00:30:55.590

exit signs. You probably couldn't do that today. And plunge the audience. So we started the play in absolute pitch blackness.

00:30:55.590 - 00:31:06.780

You couldn't see anything, nothing at all. And in the darkness, you heard the first lines of the play, the witch's incantation. So you couldn't-- you didn't know where they were,

00:31:06.780 - 00:31:17.440

you couldn't see what they look like. So there wasn't that terrible thing of, enter three witches. Oh OK, they're going to do it like that. As soon as they walk on, you know what they're wearing,

00:31:17.440 - 00:31:25.450

OK, it's like that. It was sort of suspended. And it was in your head. So you as an audience were literally filling in the gaps

00:31:25.450 - 00:31:35.700

again. And we did this thing where we took their voices, and unknown to the audience, we then switched from live speaking into them speaking,

00:31:35.700 - 00:31:50.790

that came out of small speakers that were on a flying rig. So when they say hover through the fog and fill the air, these speakers on wires just disappear over the audience. So you felt like the actors, or whoever was speaking,

00:31:50.790 - 00:32:01.800

was hovering through the air. But literally in the darkness. It was the simplest magic trick, if you like. But it set up the evening for being just anything

00:32:01.800 - 00:32:17.400

can happen here really. And really simple things you could do in that small space. Like we did a wonderful thing where at the end of a scene, the banquet scene where Macbeth has seen the ghost of Banquo,

00:32:17.400 - 00:32:31.380

and Lady Macbeth has to apologize for his behavior and she has to usher everyone out of the space. They then have this difficult scene, the two Macbeths. He goes away and leaves her in the room.

00:32:31.380 - 00:32:44.680

And just before she exits we had a huge table with candles burning, clearly live candles, and suddenly all these candles blew out at the same time. And you can do that in the Swan.

00:32:44.680 - 00:32:50.530

I won't tell you how you do that. It's a trick. It's a brilliant trick. Again, I love finding an illusionist,

00:32:50.530 - 00:32:59.520

or finding a good magician who helps you as a designer is helpful. But it's a really good trick and my goodness, it was just that simple gesture, suddenly all the candles

00:32:59.520 - 00:33:09.450

going out at the same time. And clearly no one had blown them out, there was no air happening, they all extinguished and you just got these little trails of smoke.

00:33:09.450 - 00:33:20.130

And you could feel the charge amongst the audience. It was really exciting. And for me, it was the right production in the right space. And as a designer, I had to do very little.

00:33:20.130 - 00:33:35.880

I just had to solve these very specific moments that would make the audience feel they were right in the middle of the action. It was, what do we call it now today, where you're submerged,

00:33:35.880 - 00:33:40.380

submerged. What they call it? Immersive theatre. Well it's a form of immersive theatre,

00:33:40.380 - 00:33:46.740

just a different form of it. You're actually sat in the space and it's happening all around you. That was really my job as a designer.

00:33:46.740 - 00:34:06.080

It wasn't really to do with designing scenery. Well I mean, having an archive to really look back at how these plays-- because obviously what's interesting about the RSC unlike lots of other theatre companies,

00:34:06.080 - 00:34:15.800

we have a very specific repertoire. We have one, mostly one writer's work, a very limited number of plays that have been reinterpreted many, many, many times

00:34:15.800 - 00:34:23.840

over the years. And to be, not necessarily as from a design point of view I don't think. I would rarely go and have a look

00:34:23.840 - 00:34:33.590

about what did Maria Bjornson do with Tempest? What did John Napier do with Taming of the Shrew? It would somehow get in the way. I might be too much in awe of it,

00:34:33.590 - 00:34:45.080

or I might be, I don't know, it would get in my way of thinking. But I think having designed the play and had some space around it, I love nothing more

00:34:45.080 - 00:35:02.420

than looking back and seeing how they approached the play. I'm also really intrigued about how, if you like-- I suppose I want to use the word fashion, that's a bad word, but it means a sort of cultural acceptance of what

00:35:02.420 - 00:35:17.060

we think is, I don't know, sexy, or what we want we think is challenging, or what we think is funny even, does massively change as cultural influences change around us.

00:35:17.060 - 00:35:33.940

And it's interesting to see how directors and designers have either wanted to illuminate that in a certain time, or have veered away from it. I always think hair and makeup is such a giveaway.

00:35:33.940 - 00:35:45.820

You can design the most supposedly period accurate production. You can go and study how were the jackets made, what glass would they be holding, what

00:35:45.820 - 00:35:55.120

was the paperwork like, what was the desk like that the paperwork was on? You can get all that right, but somehow we are so-- maybe it's to do with our own vanity,

00:35:55.120 - 00:36:07.240

is that we just, we can't not resist making sure that the makeup and the hair is somehow attractive to today's eyes. And I'll always look back at other productions

00:36:07.240 - 00:36:14.110

and think, really? Did they think that was a really good way to look to play that character? I don't know why.

00:36:14.110 - 00:36:24.220

I mean I've been intrigued to see if other people share that with me. But if you watch old television filmed productions, certainly the BBC's archive of BBC Shakespeare's

00:36:24.220 - 00:36:34.300

that they did, now you look at them and you think, yes of course, something about the camera work and something about the set, and to some extent it's something about the way we act,

00:36:34.300 - 00:36:45.710

but often for me hair and makeup is obsessive. But hair and makeup to me we just went, oh my God that looks so 70s what were they thinking? But at the time they weren't trying to make it 70s at all.

00:36:45.710 - 00:36:59.800

But I think all our cultural influence is leaked into it, don't they, just somehow invade our aesthetic instinct and we can't avoid that. And I'm interested to see where they've tried to avoid it

00:36:59.800 - 00:37:11.750

and where it's risen to the surface, if you like. But and I think you can learn so much. You can learn so much about the spaces that we used to design for, and that we used to perform in,

00:37:11.750 - 00:37:27.390

and how we were quite happy for an actor to be miles away, miles away across an orchestra pit. And today, somehow maybe with television and appreciating things on screen more, we want the close-up.

00:37:27.390 - 00:37:38.870

And we really want the close-up, and therefore trying to get the actor as close to the audience as possible has become an obsession over the past few decades. And maybe that will shift again.

00:37:38.870 - 00:37:45.350

I don't know. I think it's unlikely. I don't know, because I think we are now so used to, as I say, there's such a blurred lines isn't there

00:37:45.350 - 00:37:58.370

between film and live event. And we'd been talking about from a technological point of view, but I just think for all purposes, and acting as well. There was theatre acting, which you can sometimes glimpse today

00:37:58.370 - 00:38:10.670

on the opera stage shall I say. But there was theatre acting, which was meant to happen a long way away, with a certain way of presenting something, certain way of speaking, that would carry across a big space.

00:38:10.670 - 00:38:21.230

And now today that just looks odd to us. It just looks strange and phony, because we're used to microphones and speaking very intimately and not having to project.

00:38:21.230 - 00:38:32.180

Well, I think it's the same for design. We now, it's all too intimate. You can't get away. It's all in 4K, super, super, super duper HD,

00:38:32.180 - 00:38:42.310

so we make all our choices now are so detailed. You sort of need it really. You can get away with very little from a design point of view.

00:38:42.310 - 00:38:53.960

I mean you have to really have it all laid in there, particularly when we're filming things for the cinema. But I'm intrigued by aesthetics really.

00:38:53.960 - 00:39:03.620

It's the aesthetic point of view. What was the starting point? Sometimes politically, but often just visually, what was your starting point for that production of that

00:39:03.620 - 00:39:14.380

play then? And how that's changed us as a society really, because it is just a reflection of us as a society in the end, isn't it.