During a break in technical rehearsals, Simon Daw talks about designing the sets for the current production.


The director Peter Gill wanted to set the production at the time of the original story, i.e. in the late medieval/early Renaissance period and what I wanted to establish first and foremost in the designs was a feeling of Verona. Then I had to think about the play's challenges and essential requirements - for example, the text calls for a balcony, a tomb, a shift of location to Mantua where Romeo buys poison from an apothecary and so on.


Initially I worked from a cheap picture guide book to Verona but it was frustrating because the images were never precisely right or they failed to have the timeless period feel I was looking for. So in the end I spent a weekend in Verona taking hundreds of photographs of crumbling walls, frescoes, churches, arches, squares, sculptures and statues - and of course the arena, all of which were not only evocative but texturally interesting.


In the early stages of design, I looked at creating architectural details such as specifically Italian walls. I wanted to enclose the space with three very large stucco crumbling walls which are made by cladding a metal frame in textured ply. The walls are made up of six irregularly shaped panels. The people in the workshops worked very hard and spent a lot of time getting the splits to follow the line of the painted image, so that the joins are scarcely visible and there are no gaps. It was costly to do, but absolutely worth it, because the back wall now really does look solid. For the stucco effect, they've used a texturing material which is a bit like plaster, only stronger. The set has to play in repertoire here with Macbeth, Hamlet and King Lear before transferring to another theatre, so it has to be tough: it can't crack when knocked about a bit during get outs or changeovers.


Once I'd taken the images, I played around with tone and colour on a computer and tried about 12 or 13 possible backdrop designs using the images in different sequences. I kept changing the composition and style, adding colours, changing the tone, making colours brighter and so on. Originally the colours I worked with were black and white but that proved too harsh. I chose cream for the walls because it takes well the warm Italian light and the colder blue colour because it contrasts well with the cream. We've introduced a strong magenta red to the areas of blue and, more subtly, some turquoise. The preview period is one of experimentation and fine tuning: we're still playing around with colours and working out what works under the lights - that involves working closely with the lighting designer Hartley Kemp. It's also the first time we've seen the clothes Deidre Clancy has designed against the set. It's very hard to tell everything from costume drawings and set models because the finer details are sometimes lost.


The biggest challenge was creating the collage of images. We spent a long time getting the right level tonally and then working with the painters to achieve a photographic feel. I was very keen that it didn't become too painterly and that we kept a sense of photographic realism, which, mixed with a fresco technique, gives the finished walls something which is period, but at the same time modern. For the images, I developed a technique of printing onto tissue paper on a scale of 1:25. It was hard, finding a way of transferring the photographs in scale for the model so that they were accurate and to scale for the set painters. We could have reproduced and applied the images, but instead we've gone down the route of painting them. I gave the workshops each individual image you see on the walls of the set, which they reproduced on acetate and projected (enlarged) onto the walls. That way they could retain a sense of the colours I was looking for.


There are two key areas in which you'd want to position Juliet for the balcony scene. We chose place her centre stage. We could have flown a balcony in or had it as a permanent fixture, but we decided to truck it in. Having the balcony on a truck which tracks up and down the stage gives us a wide range of options and makes the space bigger or smaller as required. For internal scenes like Act 3 scene 5 (Juliet's bedchamber), we bring the truck downstage to enclose the space. In the party scene, the truck becomes an island around which guests dance.


The floor was inspired by a bit of terracotta Roman flooring I found in Verona. I've kept the size and style of the stones but changed the original colour to a more uniform tone. There's a trap in the floor for Juliet's tomb - she's carried up a set of steps onto the stage. There's also a double sets of doors, at the top and bottom of the truck, which we use to create interior spaces and for the apothecary in Act 5 scene 1. The doors have metal frames and open and close automatically - experts in the workshops spent a long time perfecting the engineering of those doors.


Deidre Clancy talks about designing costumes for the current production.


The director Peter Gill was very clear that he wanted this to be an un-traditionally traditional production, i.e. set in the period in which it was written [the late fifteenth-century]. That can be tricky, because it involves great, swooping long dresses for the ladies and tights for the men. I was very pleased though when he said he wanted Renaissance costumes, because it's not often done any more (for obvious reasons) and it's not a period I've done for a while. Indeed, when I showed the wardrobe my designs, there were gasps of delight because they don't often get the chance to work on costumes like these. Long ago, before modern dress productions became popular, designers often produced very silly hats, very big sleeves and little pleated jackets which looked terribly camp. That was a pitfall I didn't want to fall in to: I wanted the boys to look uncluttered and romantically attractive in a way that could be understood by modern audiences.


The design process is really hard to describe, because it's such an intuitive, intuitive process, marrying together a combination of technique, character, character development and making it look attractive. Partly the designs were influenced by Italian paintings of the period and partly by pictures of boys on bikes. If you look at the jackets carefully, although they are in period, they are also rather like biker jackets and jean jackets. That's why the actors look very comfortable in them. Plus it gives them a feeling of being in a gang.


There's quite a space for looking very silly when men wear tights and naturally enough none of the men wanted to look silly, nor did I want them to, so I chose fabrics very carefully. There's a German firm that makes dance tights in every fabric you can imagine, from velvet to towelling. They made up the basic garment, and then the wardrobe department here (at the RSC) added lacings and cod-pieces and so on. The difficulty with cod pieces in this period is making them attach, because realistically, they were the knickers. Due to constraints of time, we've simply attached them by lacing them to the tights which means that whilst they look like the real thing, actually they're not.


First of all, after talking to Peter and deciding when we wanted to set the production, I looked at lots of paintings and drew some shapes. Some of the shapes are very beautiful and very easy to work with, and some are difficult and need a fair amount of processing. Next I realised the production was going to have to be colour-coded, so that you know who everybody is. Peter was very keen that the Capulets should be in shades of red, which seemed instinctively the appropriate colour. The Montagues are in blue because the set is very blue, which I like, because it relates Romeo to the set - i.e. to Verona itself. The Prince and Mercutio wear purples and plums. The colour Juliet wears at the ball is a lilac-pink, which serves to bridge Capulets and Montagues.


Some of the fabrics we've used are Indian - from Southall, London - and some are ecclesiastical. We've used ecclesiastical silks, for example, for the Prince of Verona's robes and for people at the party, whose clothes have big Veronese and Florentine patterns. The guards' swords and breastplates came out of the RSC's immense stock. The helmets, though, had to be altered a bit.


At the beginning of the play, I wanted Juliet to look young, just on the brink, so she's wearing childish things like an apron and her costume is unadorned. She's wearing flat shoes and has her hair very simply tied back. At the ball, she's dressed like a little rich girl - Peter Gill calls her "spoilt but not spoiled" and I think that's absolutely right. Originally I gave her a jewelled coronet for the ball but it looked too sophisticated, so now she wears a simple garland of flowers around her head. For her wedding she wears the day dress we saw before only without
the apron.


The Nurse was Juliet's wet nurse, she suckled her, so consequently there is an extraordinary intimacy. And although she's a servant, she has great status within the household - she has her own servant, Peter. She's full of character but I didn't want to give her an obviously comic costume because she's annoying enough as she is, so I concentrated on making her costume completely real and let June Watson do the rest.