Was there any one image which crystallised the play for you?
Rupert mentioned the Arctic on the phone, so of course then you instantaneously start looking at stuff to do with the Arctic. I never go for the obvious, that's one thing about my work. I would always look behind something. So Eskimos, yes, but at the same time I was more interested in Eskimos from 1890s photographs - very, very early - so you then start to see just exactly how they would cut up the furs to make the clothes. Then in that way you can update that so it's not just a period costume which I think would be immensely dull and very limiting for an actor on stage. From the point of view of things like the mariners' clothes, I quite often research old army things, again because the way they're cut is interesting. So things lead me on. I really love working clothes, you know, things that are made for working in. It's very interesting when you find things. For instance, I found a Second World War overall. I can relate that back to the Eskimo clothes – I work in a very abstract form, and that's how I get to the point where I can draw it. I was looking at Francis Bacon's The Harpy. There was no particular one image but I have got a lot of books and old photographs from strange, obscure periods of history, which I work from a lot.
In terms of the director's input, what's helpful and what's not helpful?
I think ideally they have to be quite rigorous, and have a plan of how they're going to work it through, because if it's not really well thought through and that's not dictated to me, then I don't have the plan to work with so I can be really struggling to form it myself, without knowing. Because when you get to the stage, it's like a mathematical equation – you know, A has to be here and B has to be there – how does the way I'm going to make them look relate to how they are on the set at that point. How does that then to relate to the character?
I think you have to project the character out to the audience. I don't think my job is about putting my own ego on the stage. It's definitely about facilitating the actors' ability to be that person. So director-wise I think, I like them to be pretty rigorous and sorted out in how they are going to go through all the scenes and what each scene requires really, rather than being left just to kind of come up with an amorphous mass of stuff that you're not quite sure where you're going to put it on.
How did you collaborate with Giles Cadle, the set designer?
I always find colour is very, very important, so very early on I always need to see what colours the set designer's going to use, because then I can work out what I think will work with it from my point of view. So Giles' set is a kind of a blue-white, so that's how I knew that the orange of the oil-skins would be quite a good colour to put on it, so then they would resonate, they would slightly work against each other. Then you're dependent on the lighting designer, because if the lighting designer puts pink on it, then it doesn't work at all!
To read the full interview, download the transcript.
