'Court shows equal to West End’

Press, 7 August 1985, Page 18

'Court shows equal to West End’

Hideous flies, 6ft long, crawled over a tangle of giant documents, red tape, huge rubber stamps and oversized pens. Then slowly the whole bureaucratic landscape rose silently into the air as the set for the first scene of Gogol’s “The Government Inspector” trundled forward, and the great mountain of official papers swung down again to form a backdrop to the play. Playing at the National Theatre in London, it was a spectacular example of the set designer’s art, and easily the most impressive of the 20 West end plays that Tony Geddes, set designer for the Court Theatre, saw on his recent three-month visit to Europe. “The play was outstanding for everything — a monumental production,” he says. The exaggerated size of the office paraphernalia was designed to show the dead hand of bureaucracy which is central to the play. Another remarkable effect was achieved by hoisting a sledge on a huge hydraulic ran so that it appeared to fly through the air. Tony Geddes, who has achieved some remarkable effects himself at the Court Theatre, took the opportunity to tour the National theatre’s facilities. He says it is so well equipped that it takes designers a long’time to find out just what the theatre can do. “While stages can be raised, lowered or moved sideways — whatever you can conceive can be done.” Its only big failure was a huge lift that proved so noisy that it could be heard, not onljwby the audience,

but also by the audience in the theatre next-door. Faced with a bewildering selection of more than 200 plays being performed in London, Tony Geddes chose to see Michael Hastings’ “Tom and Viv” first, because that was one for which he was to design the set at the Court when he returned to Christchurch. “I was jet-lagged when I saw it,” he says, “and I’m jet-lagged now, when I’m designing it.” In London it was playing at the Royal Court with Margaret Tyzack in the role of T. S. Eliot’s wife, Viviene Haig Wood. She has been seen in numerous television roles, most recently as Antonia in the re-run of “I, Claudius.” “The important thing is this play is what happens between the actors playing Eliot and his wife,” Tony Geddes says. “It is a play where the set must be almost invisible, but there are 24 scenes.” The Court Theatre’s artistic director, Elric Hooper, also saw the play when he was in London, and he and Tony Geddes are now discussing how the sets will be done. Neither liked the way the Royal Court did it, with complicated sliding screens. Most of the plays Tony Geddes saw were in the commercial theatres of the West End. He found no avant garde set designs, largely, he thinks, because most theatres were proscenium arch theatres, and the sets tended to be pictorial, rather than sculptural as happens with a theatre-in-the round such as the Court. “I think the Court in almost everything it’s ©ing,

is in no way provincial compared with the West End,” he says. Plays were marvellously done, but they were done in ways that they would be done at the Court. “But I get the feeling that it’s a greater effort for us to get it right, because there are fewer people here and it’s an effort to find enough good people for a really large-cast play — whereas in London there are so many good actors just waiting around. “I get the impression also that they have a greater amount of money and greater technical resources for sets, costumes etc. They’re all complaining about theatres not making money, but it is rare to find a theatre not full any day of the week. People were queuing at 5 a.m. on the offchance to see Anthony Sher in ‘Richard III’.” It is London’s flood of tourists who fuel all this theatre activity, and Tony Geddes wonders if New Zealand theatres sell themselves enough to tourists. “I’ve heard them saying complimentary things about what they’ve seen in New Zealand theatre,” he says. “They’ve been pleasantly surprised.” In England, France and Italy, Tony Geddes made a special study of architecture and painting, long-term interests of his which bear on his own work as a painter and as a set designer. “So much of how we see things is connected with paintings,” he points out, “and so much of what we represent in the theatre is connected with architecture.”