My friend and collaborator Kate Owen, who has died of cancer aged 72, was a designer dedicated to radical fringe and alternative theatre.
Prolific and hardworking, she created 150 shows over 35 years. These included repertory theatre commissions, but the alternative sector was where her heart remained. There, she could give voice to her feminism and gay rights commitments.
Among many companies with whom she collaborated were Blood Group (for which I was artistic director), Extemporary Dance, Paines Plough, Shared Experience, Theatre Centre, and, centrally, Gay Sweatshop. Serving on their management committee (1984-90), she was instrumental in setting up two new writing festivals, Gay Sweatshop X 10, for the company’s 10th anniversary in 1985, and Gay Sweatshop X 12, two years later, with the playwrights and directors Noël Greig and Philip Osment.
Born in Croydon, south London, Kate was the only child of Valerie and Peter Owen, both artists who taught at Croydon School of Art. She went to a grammar school in Crystal Palace, where she also excelled in art, leaving aged 17 to take up a place at the Central School of Art and Design (now part of Central Saint Martins) in London, on the theatre design course. Training there with the distinguished stage designer Ralph Koltai, she graduated in 1972.
Kate’s commitment to alternative theatre had begun in 1979, when she was invited by the Albany Empire Deptford’s director Jenny Harris to design comedy acts, cabarets, parties, music events (for the young Jools Holland) and new plays. The Albany was a pioneering socialist theatre for local people, with a permanent acting company that included Alfred Molina. Working to tight budgets, Kate would habitually work through the night to transform the venue with her immersive vision.
We were introduced by Greig in 1981, our seven-production collaboration beginning two years later with a Blood Group piece about the sex industry, Dirt, shown at the Cockpit and ICA in London. Our adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, entitled Nature (1985), for Theatre Workshop Edinburgh, 1985, opened with a chorus of corduroyed Sackville-Wests planting books in the venue’s garden.
Deft at inventing imaginative solutions on a shoestring, Kate was a genius market, charity and junk-shop searcher, fashioning scenographic materials hands-on in her studio from found objects, furniture and used clothing – a sustainability ethos way ahead of her time. The director Teddy Kiendl described her as having a “good eye backed up with joy and a degree of mischief”.
Her interior design ingenuity was equally remarkable, creating her own homes since the age of 27 in Britain and France. In 2000, she returned to the Albany as interior designer for their National Theatre art of regeneration refurbishment programme, and subsequently worked as design consultant for several new theatre spaces.
When arts funding cuts drastically hampered design opportunities, she quit the theatre, but continued to create with her hands, making musical instruments and bookbinding. In 2009, she obtained a foundation degree in furniture making from The Cass, London Metropolitan University.
In 2005 Kate entered into a civil partnership with her longterm partner, Lesley Weiner, a clinical psychologist. Lesley died in 2013.
