King Lear

Tom Piper - set designer
In the early stages of rehearsal, Tom Piper talks about set designs for the current production.

First impressions
When I read the play with a view to designing this production, I knew that I wanted to keep the space as clear and architectural as possible because I had a powerful sense of big open spaces and of people living in large, draughty castles. In the world of the play, great distances are travelled, by foot or on horseback. There’s a nomadic quality in the play which led the costume designer Kandis Cook and me to reference images of nomadic tribes. We looked at the way nomadic peoples wear their wealth, they take it with them and so there’s a sense of that in the piece. We also felt that the world of King Lear is harsh.

Creating a focused space
When I talked to the director, Bill Alexander, it was clear that, from his deep knowledge of the play, he already had some very strong yet simple ideas about how to stage it. He talked about using a cruciform shape, so the floor is a cross between driftwood and blasted ash with walkways creating a focussed space in which the play will take place. He didn’t want to over-illustrate changes of location, so instead we’re simply using furniture. Four tables and potentially six benches will be moved around to create different interior and exterior spaces. The great advantage of a long rehearsal period is that we’re able to explore how we use these elements and how we move them from scene to scene.

The physical space
In a large space like the RST, you can celebrate the epic but we have also, in recent years, thrust the stage out as far as possible, bringing the point of command for the actor further down to the edge of the proscenium. And for the Tragedies season we’ve exposed the brickwork on either side of the proscenium arch, which means that the brickwork of the back wall in this production links into the brickwork of the proscenium and the theatre. There are girders too that link into the girders of the balconies we’ve created, the idea being that it grows out through the proscenium to bring the world of the play as much into the auditorium as possible. The back wall splits in half but not in any way that’s distracting for the audience. When Lear’s head is cracking, you don’t want to illustrate the moment with an eight-metre-high piece of wall splitting in half because that would draw focus away from the emotional intensity of the language.

The girder framework, which creates a cube above the upper stage space and gives an abstract sense of being simultaneously inside and outside, was influenced by the paintings of Francis Bacon - Bacon often has frameworks around his figures. I’m hoping that we will be able to produce a spray of mist in the storm scene which will look like a cube of water. I don’t want it to look like there’s rain falling from high above, I want it to belong to the cube, giving an abstract idea of wet weather rather than a realistic effect. If you try to be naturalistic in the storm scene, it ends up being about controlling the water, which gets everywhere and ends up going into a trough. It just looks like a lot of people standing under a line of a shower and you start to think “why don’t you just move a few feet and you’d be out of it?”

Parallel worlds - early industrialisation
Bill felt very strongly that you can’t set this play in one particular place, it has to be an invented world, so we’re aiming to create parallel worlds: the Victorian married with strange bits of technology, like odd lamps, oil lamps which don’t look like any oil lamp you’ve ever seen, lamps that have a proto-sense of industrialisation. We wanted to hint at a time of strange scientific development, so I researched paintings by Joseph Wright of Derby and went to the Science Museum to look at early scientific instruments. There’s something very beautiful about those phenomenally well crafted objects. I also looked at Pre-Raphaelite paintings of early industry and decayed factories. I wanted to include a broken element, to convey a sense of a world that could be in decay or on the edge of industrialisation. We wanted to give a sense that the world we’ve created is powered by strange gases, so we’re looking at the idea of having gas lamps. We’ve talked, too, about having bowls of fire contained in glass, something very primitive encased in something civilised. For the first scene, we are definitely going for a map of Britain, one that Lear can draw on with an Indian pen. It’s a rather strange device, a bit like a cross between a whiteboard and a projection screen, something like an overheard projector, only more primitive. There will be a metal frame and a magic lantern behind that is lit up to make the screen glow.

An element of uncertainty
As well as some bizarre technical things, like the lamp, Bill suggested the little burners, on which the cast might heat poppy seeds to put into their drinks in the first scene. He has created little senses of strange rituals in the play, so for example the opening scene has half the feel of a family meal and half the feel of something ceremonial and ritualistic. The text is slightly unclear as to whether Lear has decided everything beforehand and the first scene is simply a public signing off of what’s already been agreed, or whether he is making it up as he goes along. We’re trying to reflect those kinds of uncertainties in the design.

Props
Designers have to rely on the expertise of those around them. I’ve been extremely lucky because there’s a fantastic technician call Tacker Taylor in the Props department who takes great joy in creating strange things and he’s absolutely brilliant at it. He made a trick chair for me for The Broken Heart [RSC 1994] which snapped round people’s ankles. When I was designing the magic lantern, the process was fairly intricate. I did some research into early magic lanterns and came up with ideas and references but it was the props technicians who found the materials, adapted and pieced them together. What’s exciting is that everything here is a one-off and you’re able to work with people who are able to pick up on my ideas and develop them. Now that I’m the Associate Designer and around quite a lot, staff in Props know me and my way of working. Every designer works in a different way. One of the things I now appreciate is how difficult it is for the creative team supporting those designers to adapt to different working methods. People have different ways of communicating - some designers make an exact scale drawing of what they want and expect everything to look exactly as they drew it, others sketch things on the backs of envelopes and some don’t do any kind of drawing at all - they simply describe what they want. Sometimes the Props department have real difficulty getting any kind of information out of people.

On leaving the theatre
Whenever one does a play, one hopes audiences leave the theatre taking with them a new, a fresh telling of the story. Even if someone has seen the play eight times before, my hope is that they haven’t heard or seen it done like this. That’s not to say that this will be the definitive telling of the story, but it’s the way it’s being told now, created by us, for audiences now, meaning that it will have a completely different agenda to a production of King Lear done ten years ago. I think at the moment the nature of power, of political power, and the way people deal with power, the break-up of power, the misuse of power all have very particular resonances.


			In the early stages of rehearsal, Tom Piper talks about set designs for the current production. When I read the play with a view to designing this production, I knew that I wanted to keep the space as clear and architectural as possible because I had a powerful sense of big open spaces and of people living in large, draughty castles. In the world of the play, great distances are travelled, by foot or on horseback. There’s a nomadic quality in the play which led the costume designer Kandis Cook and me to reference images of nomadic tribes. We looked at the way nomadic peoples wear their wealth, they take it with them and so there’s a sense of that in the piece. We also felt that the world of King Lear is harsh. When I talked to the director, Bill Alexander, it was clear that, from his deep knowledge of the play, he already had some very strong yet simple ideas about how to stage it. He talked about using a cruciform shape, so the floor is a cross between driftwood and blasted ash with walkways creating a focussed space in which the play will take place. He didn’t want to over-illustrate changes of location, so instead we’re simply using furniture. Four tables and potentially six benches will be moved around to create different interior and exterior spaces. The great advantage of a long rehearsal period is that we’re able to explore how we use these elements and how we move them from scene to scene. In a large space like the RST, you can celebrate the epic but we have also, in recent years, thrust the stage out as far as possible, bringing the point of command for the actor further down to the edge of the proscenium. And for the Tragedies season we’ve exposed the brickwork on either side of the proscenium arch, which means that the brickwork of the back wall in this production links into the brickwork of the proscenium and the theatre. There are girders too that link into the girders of the balconies we’ve created, the idea being that it grows out through the proscenium to bring the world of the play as much into the auditorium as possible. The back wall splits in half but not in any way that’s distracting for the audience. When Lear’s head is cracking, you don’t want to illustrate the moment with an eight-metre-high piece of wall splitting in half because that would draw focus away from the emotional intensity of the language. The girder framework, which creates a cube above the upper stage space and gives an abstract sense of being simultaneously inside and outside, was influenced by the paintings of Francis Bacon - Bacon often has frameworks around his figures. I’m hoping that we will be able to produce a spray of mist in the storm scene which will look like a cube of water. I don’t want it to look like there’s rain falling from high above, I want it to belong to the cube, giving an abstract idea of wet weather rather than a realistic effect. If you try to be naturalistic in the storm scene, it ends up being about controlling the water, which gets everywhere and ends up going into a trough. It just looks like a lot of people standing under a line of a shower and you start to think “why don’t you just move a few feet and you’d be out of it?” Bill felt very strongly that you can’t set this play in one particular place, it has to be an invented world, so we’re aiming to create parallel worlds: the Victorian married with strange bits of technology, like odd lamps, oil lamps which don’t look like any oil lamp you’ve ever seen, lamps that have a proto-sense of industrialisation. We wanted to hint at a time of strange scientific development, so I researched paintings by Joseph Wright of Derby and went to the Science Museum to look at early scientific instruments. There’s something very beautiful about those phenomenally well crafted objects. I also looked at Pre-Raphaelite paintings of early industry and decayed factories. I wanted to include a broken element, to convey a sense of a world that could be in decay or on the edge of industrialisation. We wanted to give a sense that the world we’ve created is powered by strange gases, so we’re looking at the idea of having gas lamps. We’ve talked, too, about having bowls of fire contained in glass, something very primitive encased in something civilised. For the first scene, we are definitely going for a map of Britain, one that Lear can draw on with an Indian pen. It’s a rather strange device, a bit like a cross between a whiteboard and a projection screen, something like an overheard projector, only more primitive. There will be a metal frame and a magic lantern behind that is lit up to make the screen glow. As well as some bizarre technical things, like the lamp, Bill suggested the little burners, on which the cast might heat poppy seeds to put into their drinks in the first scene. He has created little senses of strange rituals in the play, so for example the opening scene has half the feel of a family meal and half the feel of something ceremonial and ritualistic. The text is slightly unclear as to whether Lear has decided everything beforehand and the first scene is simply a public signing off of what’s already been agreed, or whether he is making it up as he goes along. We’re trying to reflect those kinds of uncertainties in the design. Designers have to rely on the expertise of those around them. I’ve been extremely lucky because there’s a fantastic technician call Tacker Taylor in the Props department who takes great joy in creating strange things and he’s absolutely brilliant at it. He made a trick chair for me for The Broken Heart [RSC 1994] which snapped round people’s ankles. When I was designing the magic lantern, the process was fairly intricate. I did some research into early magic lanterns and came up with ideas and references but it was the props technicians who found the materials, adapted and pieced them together. What’s exciting is that everything here is a one-off and you’re able to work with people who are able to pick up on my ideas and develop them. Now that I’m the Associate Designer and around quite a lot, staff in Props know me and my way of working. Every designer works in a different way. One of the things I now appreciate is how difficult it is for the creative team supporting those designers to adapt to different working methods. People have different ways of communicating - some designers make an exact scale drawing of what they want and expect everything to look exactly as they drew it, others sketch things on the backs of envelopes and some don’t do any kind of drawing at all - they simply describe what they want. Sometimes the Props department have real difficulty getting any kind of information out of people. Whenever one does a play, one hopes audiences leave the theatre taking with them a new, a fresh telling of the story. Even if someone has seen the play eight times before, my hope is that they haven’t heard or seen it done like this. That’s not to say that this will be the definitive telling of the story, but it’s the way it’s being told now, created by us, for audiences now, meaning that it will have a completely different agenda to a production of King Lear done ten years ago. I think at the moment the nature of power, of political power, and the way people deal with power, the break-up of power, the misuse of power all have very particular resonances.