Set Design for Romeo and Juliet

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Above, a slide show of the Romeo and Juliet campervan being craned into the Globe theatre.

An interview with Anthony Lamble, the designer for Romeo and Juliet.

Initial thoughts about Romeo and Juliet
Romeo and Juliet presents quite a few challenges. In terms of the play and what’s required of the design, you can get caught up in long convoluted conversations about where the bed comes from and how it works, or how you do the tomb and the balcony. It’s a real challenge.

Designing for Shakespeare
Shakespeare liberates the imagination for a designer in a way that no other writer does. It sort of doesn’t matter how many versions of it there have been and what they look like, you just start again from the text and it is always an original production. The language is so universal; it is about all of us and what it means to be alive. Shakespeare gives you so much freedom. You can be abstract if you chose or you can use doublet and hose. You can do a modern contemporary version of the play or transpose it to another period. But what’s really exciting and challenging about Shakespeare is he allows you to create your own world, your own universe within which you tell the story of the play. It is quite exacting for a designer and director to do that, but it is very rewarding: finding a world that these characters can inhabit. That’s the context, and once you discover that the play takes on its own life. Shakespeare gives you great freedom to be creative, to be an artist.
But, as with all writing, as a designer, you have to serve the text. It is about putting on a play, making the language work and telling the story. And if you do that, you can’t really go wrong.

The touring production of Romeo and Juliet
My brief for this job was just to design a touring production of Romeo and Juliet for eight actors. We, the director [Edward Dick] and I, needed to find a context for eight young people turning up and creating Romeo and Juliet. The frame for the story became the actors’ (their stage, their props, and their costumes) means of arrival in the space.

We decided that, rather than trying to create all of these separate characters, we’d be honest about who these people were, and that it was actors playing these characters. We see costume changes. We always know that it’s one person playing two or three parts, and we want to comment on that, not try to disguise it. We didn’t want to interrupt the flow of the production with convoluted scene and costume changes. So you have the opportunity to lose yourself in the language, and be caught up in the poetry of the play, but not lose the essence of its theatrical quality.

Costume
With these characters, with the way that Shakespeare describes them, you get the impression that they’re vain and attractive and full of fire and anger. They’re really not different to how young people are today. This is reflected in the show’s costume. The actor’s contemporary costume is augmented and enhanced by the Elizabethan costume elements that they put on to become a character.

The costume has traditional elements. If you’re telling a story about people becoming different characters, when they turn up, the company are a version of the actors that are playing them. So we think about colour and who they are and who they’re playing and a little bit about the character that they’re going to be playing, but if you like, it’s a contemporary version of them. And then they add in various hats, gown doublets and so on – they become the character that they’re playing, which is an Elizabethan character. There isn’t time to do complete changes, but in a sense, the aesthetic, in shorthand, is a doublet with a pair of jeans. There’s something very attractive and interesting about that.

The balcony scene
The Volkswagen camper van is a versatile piece of German engineering. All in one vehicle it gives us a sense of the tiring house, it has an upstage area, curtains, and it also has got a balcony because we have a sunroof.

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