Site-Specificity and Freedom for Stage Designers - Annotation

This post discusses a sound document:

Clachan, Lizzie. Interview by Matt Trueman. “Designer Lizzie Clachan uncorks the National Theatre’s Port”. TheatreVoice, 8 Jan. 2013. www.theatrevoice.com/audio/designer-lizzie -clachan-uncorks-the-national-theatres-port/. Accessed 30 July 2017.

This sound file is an interview with Lizzie Clachan conducted by Matt Trueman about her revival of Simon Stephen’s Port. She speaks about “site responsive work”, and how that means acknowledging the space, which for her often leads to working against it. She talks about her theatre, Shunt, which focuses on devised theatre, and how freeing it is not to be bound by an author. Nonetheless, she describes a traditional method of design: reading the text, meeting with directors, creating the model box, and then managing the actualizing team. She explores the frustration of not truly knowing how her model box will react with the space. They then move to discuss Port and its challenges. Port’s main struggle is that it is often a two hander and she talks about the struggle of putting that in a cinematic, epic space without the story getting lost. Clachan mentions a character who is onstage for the entire show and has to age from 11 to 24, and her role as facilitator in making that transition smooth. Lastly, she speaks about sacrificing some qualities of the setting to emphasize others that are more thematically relevant.

The case-study of Port was in some ways similar to the problems the set of Ibsen Huis would pose. The characters of Ibsen Huis’s struggle lies in its intense intimacy, yet the space it must live in is an expansive outdoor courtyard. Similar to the case of Port, Clachan was faced with keeping the familial space claustrophobic while working in a large space and housing many characters. It seems that she used the tactic of a rotating set to solve the problem of time, of characters aging and changing before our eyes. She also conveys the sense of voyeurism and entrapment very well, while ignoring the setting of a “holiday beach house”. Clachan perhaps got to work in a more devised fashion as the text was not pre-written, which could explain how beautifully the setting of the house emerges as a successful container, viewer, and facilitator of the family relations in the middle of a courtyard that contains the audience. Clachan, like others I have researched, favours sets that emerge with the work and emphasizes the importance of freedom when working in spaces in order to use the site’s particularities to the show’s advantage, which clearly she did within the courtyard of Cour du lycée Saint-Joseph.

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