Bunny Christie doesn’t design stage sets. She creates worlds. Audaciously theatrical and frequently startling, her creations pull spectators headlong into the universe of a play – whether through the disorienting aperture of The Red Barn or the vintage newsroom pile-up in Ink. Christie often places us inside a protagonist’s head – she designs psychology as well as space, most notably for the singular hero of The Curious Incident, which won her one of her three Olivier awards. She relishes how design unites the entire production. “Designers are often a conduit from the rehearsal room to the rest of the team,” she says. “We’re with the director from the moment of starting the show, but also go into the wardrobe, prop shop and stage management. You share the thinking. It’s really important.”
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Christie won Olivier and Tony awards for designing Simon Stephens’ play, based on Mark Haddon’s novel about Christopher Boone, a teenager who has a condition similar to Asperger syndrome. It was directed by Marianne Elliott at the National Theatre, London, in 2013 and continues to tour.
“I spent a long period with just Marianne and the model, cooking up the show. You’re making a language. Marianne is so thorough: we had a version of how it could work before we got into rehearsal. We’d storyboarded everything with little figures.
“Marianne had initially imagined it might be set somewhere like a school hall. But I felt we needed to key into maths and science. We needed to be in a world where Christopher would want to be, and that would be a world of technology.
“I was looking at gaming rooms and nightclubs. The book is quite anarchic, and I felt the show should feel fun. Somewhere people would come in and think ‘That looks cool’. When I watched the builders wire everything up, it looked like synapses and neurones all interwoven.”
“When we moved from playing in the round at the National and into the West End, we could use the walls. There was this great bit where Christopher went down the escalator. He climbs really high up, and treads for the escalator come out of the back wall. You can’t see them, so it looks as if he’s walking down the wall – and the wall is coming forward and is on a rake. I did think, My god, will that actually be safe? Then I was running down an escalator to the tube, with my phone and a coffee and my bag, and I thought – ‘Yeah, we can do this’.”
“The book and play never diagnose Christopher – but he can find colours too bright, so some of the colours we made super-bright, almost vibrating. There were also lots of lovely details from the book. Christopher doesn’t look people in the eye, so often descriptions of a character are about their shoes; the old lady next door wears New Balance trainers with red laces. Christopher also hates yellow and brown, so anyone in those colours is someone he doesn’t like.”
Shakespeare Trilogy
Phyllida Lloyd directed Julius Caesar, Henry IV and The Tempest with all-female casts for the Donmar Warehouse, London, between 2012 and 2016.
“Phyllida always knew that she wanted to set these plays in a prison. I went with her to Holloway women’s prison for a couple of workshops, which was just fascinating. You see that the women try to make their cells comfortable, with their own duvet covers, things from home, cuddly toys. But you’re obviously always aware of the environment.”
“Julius Caesar was wild because we were finding the rules and language. It was pretty crazy and rehearsals were anarchic. We wanted to strip everything out at the Donmar, even the seats, and Neil Austin, the lighting designer, took out almost all of the lights. Most of it was done with domestic lights and torches. We tried to make it feel as if the audience were invited to see a production the prisoners had been working on.
“The costumes were a series of lumpy, grey, washed-out tracksuits and hoodies. We asked: ‘Is your character’s tracksuit tight or loose, does she look after it?’ Some characters had just arrived in prison, so their stuff looked fairly new, while others had been there a long time. Each costume had a backstory.”
“Julius Caesar was darker, more political and threatening. Henry IV was more playful. Phyllida wants rehearsals to feel like a free space; it could feel chaotic at times, always in flux. It was a good lesson to me to work like that and not be in control of everything. It felt really fresh, surprising things happening in the moment.”
“There have been different incarnations of the shows. I designed a baseball court space for St Anne’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, which we used when we did the entire trilogy in King’s Cross. Chloe Lamford designed The Tempest and we worked together on the surrounding framework for all of the shows: it was so nice to have a design compadre.”
The Red Barn
Robert Icke directed David Hare’s 1969-set thriller, adapted from a Georges Simenon novel, at the National Theatre, London, in 2016.
“The aperture was an idea that Rob had very early on. It fitted so nicely with the themes of the piece – what you can and can’t see, watching, observing. That’s the metaphor.
“It’s filmic: you feel that you’re seeing a closeup and then a wide shot. We went from the eye test at the beginning – a quiet, dark, controlled world – then closed it down and opened up to a blizzard, a white world of nature and crazy weather.
“Directing what people were looking at was very important – Rob was keen that the audience would only be getting to see something as the character gets to see it.
“All of the sets were very spare, pared-down. None of the rooms had clutter or any architectural detail. That was also practical – we made it very simple to build, because detail adds cost. For the New York apartment, I wanted it to feel that when Mark Strong arrived, it was like he had gone to heaven. It was hushed, cool and white: 60s chic.
“Rob talked a lot about Hitchcock – the clothes in his films are exquisite, with fabulous tailoring. We bought some beautiful vintage stuff and made some really lovely pieces. Elizabeth Debicki is absolutely stunning, and we made her a cool, psychedelic catsuit – which was kind of inspired by one my mum wore in the 1960s.”
“We get very little stage time, so do a lot of preparation beforehand. We storyboarded everything rigorously: the model is exactly to scale, and with technical drawings, we know that everything will fit. Quite a lot of the pieces were pushed by the crew or flown manually, which can be quicker and more flexible than automation. The National made a great film of what happened backstage. It was jam-packed, with pieces lined up like buses on a forecourt.”
People, Places and Things
Duncan Macmillan’s play about an actor in rehab was directed by Jeremy Herrin for Headlong and the National Theatre, London, in 2015. It transferred to the West End, and will tour the UK and visit New York.
“Jeremy rang to say, ‘I’ve got this great play, can I send it to you?’ At that point, it opened with a woman falling through space, past the stars and clouds, then landing bang on a gurney, and suddenly she’s in a club. I wasn’t even halfway through before I texted Jeremy and said, ‘I really really want to do this.’”
“It took quite a while to find that world. The script was changing, and Jeremy and I came up with multiple versions of Emma’s inner being. We keyed into her hallucinogenic world, things coming at her unexpectedly, so the audience has some sense of how disorientated and dislocated she feels.”
“There’s also a theatrical metaphor. Emma’s an actor, and there’s something about how you act differently with different people that can be disconcerting. Having an audience on both sides of the stage, looking at the rest of the audience, felt like a good illustration of that. You weren’t sure – who are you really? Which way up is the world? It was fun to include multiple Emmas, lots of versions of herself.”
“Most of the set was white, with rounded walls. I was thinking about big pills and capsules, and it also looked clinical, like you could hose it down.
“At the end you’re in her childhood bedroom, which has to feel quite real. It was Jeremy’s idea to have it falling around her, like the collapsing house in Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill Jr. It passes over her, enveloping her. I loved that scene, between Emma and her mother – you think everything is going to be OK, but treating addiction doesn’t fix everything. Then the room lifts back off her, and there’s something almost religious about it passing through and off.”
Ink
James Graham’s play about Rupert Murdoch buying the Sun was directed by Rupert Goold at the Almeida, London, and is at the Duke of York’s theatre, in the West End, from 9 September until 6 January 2018.
“Rupert Murdoch bought the Sun in 1969. Crazily, the contract was that if the paper wasn’t in continuous production they lost the right to use the title. They literally had a weekend to turn it around. It’s an extraordinary story.
“We did a lot of research into how papers were printed; it’s mind-blowing that they did this every single night. You’ve got the lino typesetters, and they use molten lead to make the discs for the printing press. It’s industrial, manual labour.”
“Fleet Street at that time was a crazy boys’ club. There was loads of drinking, loads of smoking, people in bars keeping a taxi running across the road just in case something happened.
“We were interested in the look and feel of the newsrooms. The desks and typewriters, telephones and notepads: a bit like a factory of ideas, all inky, typewritten and note-written. We talked about sewers and rat runs: dark, oily and industrial. Among all of that you’ve got all of these fun 1960s attitudes and behaviour. The Sun actually employed quite a lot of female journalists.”
“I don’t charge ahead with costumes until we get into rehearsal. Ink had a very fluid script, not set in stone, so you have to be very adaptable. Leaving actors to find stuff, watching how they move, is very important.
“In costume, we discussed how much are we modelling characters on a real person. Some of the actors want to channel that look or feeling, and others we can bend or stretch a bit. 1969 is a funny time – a transition between 1967, which is the height of 60s fashion, and the 70s. There are a lot of suits, but some guys have 60s-style thin lapels and others are creeping into the wide lapels of the 70s. Often an actor would say, I look just like my dad!”
- Photographs by Brinkhoff-Moegenburg, Helen Maybanks, Johan Persson and Marc Brenner, and courtesy Bunny Christie
