Career
Educated at Cambridge University 1949-52 and as a Henry Fellow at the Yale School of Drama 1952-3, his career began in television at the BBC in 1954. From 1956-65, he was Head of Design of ABC Television, working largely on the Armchair Theatre and at the same time designed for the London stage, mostly new plays by Shaffer, Orton, and others. His designs for the National Theatre include Next of Kin, directed by Harold Pinter.
John Gabriel Borkman, directed by Peter Hall and Tales from the Vienna Woods, directed by Maximilian Schell. He designed his first opera, Wagner's The Flying Dutchman, in 1958 for Sadler's Wells and has since designed operas for Covent Garden, ENO, the Vienna State Opera, the Kirov in Leningrad, La Scala, Milan, and opera houses in Berlin, Adelaide, Sydney, Cologne, Oslo, Amsterdam, Geneva and Lisbon. The best known of these have been Michael Tippett’s The Knot Garden, directed by Peter Hall.
The Bassarids, directed by Hans Werner Henze. Peter Grimes and Wozzeck, directed by Elijah Moshinsky. Lulu, directed by Gotz Friedrich and Luciano Berio’s Outis and Wagner’s Ring Cycle, directed by Graham Vick.
From 1984-1991, he was Chairman of the Society of British Theatre Designers. And in 1991 he was appointed a Royal Designer for Industry, serving as Master of the Faculty of RDIs 1999-2001. The variety of his work, and its evolution over 50 years, demonstrates a constant embrace of the theatre as a live, collaborative and ephemeral art form.
