Alice in Wonderland reimagined in Partition-era India, a lifesize puppet of a hyena daemon from Philip Pullman’s Magisterium and the cast of John Webster’s 17th-century play The Duchess of Malfi dressed as 1970s truckers. These are some of the creations that feature in a National Theatre exhibition showcasing the next generation of UK stage designers.
The display, which is at the National until the end of March, comprises work by the winners of the Linbury prize, a biennial award whose alumni includes some of the biggest names in the business, such as Es Devlin, who recently designed the stage for Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour.
What stands out in this display is cross-disciplinary imagination and playfulness. In the past, only theatre design graduates were qualified for entry but the prize has now broadened its remit. Among the 12 winners are those who have studied fine art, sculpture and fashion before coming to stage design – and that richer creative hinterland shows. There is everything from model boxes of stages to digital designs, photography and elaborately dressed mannequins. Some of the ideas have been realised while others are conceptual production.
Biz Sutton, a costume designer and recent graduate from Edinburgh College of Art, reimagines characters from The Duchess of Malfi as truckers in 1970s New Mexico, clad in leather and denim, with one petrolhead poised on a motorbike. It seems at first an arbitrary transposition but once Sutton explains the concept – that New Mexico has long had a trucking community and that, depending on the characters’ roles, they are assigned rigs, trucks and bikes which translates as a “hierarchy reflecting the order of a royal court” – it brings a refreshing interpretation to the play. She has also reconceptualised Molière’s comedy Tartuffe as a whodunnit in a Tudor mansion, the characters part of a life-size Cluedo game. It accentuates the comic intrigue of the story, about the titular fraud who masquerades as a pious man, and the play’s underlying themes of dishonesty and pretence.
A baroquely dressed mannequin in an ornate, almost arachnoid black dress, by Nitin Parmar, looks like one of Louise Bourgeois’ crouching spiders and reflects Parmar’s background in costume design (at University of the Arts London). The dress is part of a project incorporating Hindu religious concepts called Kala Pani, which includes video art. Parmar also reimagines Alice in Wonderland in a series of sketches that feature her as a Punjabi teenager in traditional Indian dress.
Another mannequin shows the devilish figure of Dr Faustus from Christopher Marlowe’s Elizabethan tragedy, in a garish, red jester-like costume. It is designed by Tiffany Fraser Steele, who has previously worked as a senior fashion magazine editor as well as styling fashion shoots, and who found inspiration for this piece from Elizabethan circus.
Four of the winners - Ola Kłos, Jodie Jew Yates, Ania Levy and Bethan Wall – are graduates of the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, which offers puppetry among its theatre design courses. Big spectacle shows such as The Life of Pi and My Neighbour Totoro have used puppetry to dazzling effect and no doubt raised its profile in design circles. Among the most arresting submissions is a puppet of a daemon, its skin made of hessian sacks and its ribs exposed, for a production of Pullman’s The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage, and created by Yates.
There are interesting miniature box models of sets too: Tallulah Caskey, a set and costume designer from Essex, created a hypothetical set for Samuel Beckett’s Endgame with a slate coloured, slab-like stage, and the characters Nell and Nagg in craggy stone-like bins. This look captures the devastated universe in which the play’s characters are stranded – the scene looks both archaic and apocalyptic – and has the essence of Beckett’s nihilistic landscape.
The Linbury prize has been picking out stars of the future since it was founded in 1987. If this latest display functions as a weather-vane for the state of the industry then these emerging designers are confident in their imagination and playful in their humour.
• The exhibition for the 2023 Linbury prize for stage design runs until 30 March at the National Theatre, London
