Busy Designer

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31584, 23 January 1968, Page 6

Busy Designer

Professional theatre on the down and out in New Zealand? “Nonsense,” says the stage designer, Raymond Boyce, “I’ve never been busier.” One has only to look at the drawing-board in his Wellington studio where he is planning four productions for premieres at festivals next March in New Zealand and Australia. The first is "Don Carlos” for the Australian Opera Company, a Verdi opera set in sixteenth-century Spain. Boyce describes it as "a tremendously impressive period of gloom and grandeur.” His designs for the opera’s seven scenes are spacious yet glowering, in some respects reminiscent of the “II Trovatore” he created for the New Zealand Opera Company. They are based on the idea presented to him by the patterning of tin steel mesh. Expanded for stage purposes to 6in mesh and used variously as screens and filters, tensions are created to underline the opera's theme of man’s temporal powers at war with his spiritual. The second design on the way is the new Australian play, "The Lotus Eaters,” to be produced for the Adelaide Festival by Richard Campion. With its theme of sugarworkers versus waterside workers in a small Queensland port, Boyce calls it a “Power Game” of Australian trade unionism. The third design is Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet” for the New Zealand Ballet Company. This will have its premiere at the Pan Pacific Arts Festival in Christchurch and will be seen later at the Auckland Festival. Boyce’s fourth design Is really bis second: “Madama Butterfly” for the New Zealand Opera Company, a new production which will also be

a feature of the Christchurch and Auckland festivals. Always the strongest critic of his own work, Boyce says: "This design is much better than the first one I did for the opera company: It uses the action of the opera to much better effect—tilings are definitely in the right place!” Raymond Boyce has lost count of the number of productions he has designed for opera, ballet and theatre since be came to New Zealand in 1953 to join the New Zealand Players. “By now, I suppose it’s well over the hundred,” he says.