Until Richard Pilbrow came along, the job of the lighting designer in British theatre was to light the actors and flatter the decor. Richard, who has died aged 90, recognised that stage design had the potential to be architecture in motion, and that the technology of photographic projection could allow stories to be told in a different way.
Inspired by the Czech “scenographer” Joseph Svoboda, and creative American lighting designers such as Tharon Musser, Richard brought vision, technical expertise and talent to the craft, making stage lighting an expressive and essential part of theatre design. He played a key role in the construction and design of the National Theatre on the South Bank, London, in the 1960s and 70s, and his legacy can be seen in almost every contemporary stage production in the world.
In 1957, with £150 borrowed from his father, Richard obtained a stockpile of lighting gear stored under the stage of the Drury Lane theatre and started a company, Theatre Projects, with his soon-to-be wife, Viki Brinton, and Bryan Kendall. Initially they rented equipment, but the team gradually became the dominant sound and lighting designers of the 60s, 70s and 80s. Later they became the leading consultancy in theatre design, working on more than 1,800 projects in over 80 countries.
Having made his mark as a lighting designer with the 59 Theatre Company at the Lyric Hammersmith, in the early 60s Richard was asked by Laurence Olivier first to advise on the new Chichester Festival theatre, and then, in 1963, to become the lighting director for the newly created National Theatre at the Old Vic, where he lit, among others, the launch production, Hamlet, and the world premiere of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967).
Olivier then brought him on to the advisory committee for developing the future National Theatre on the South Bank, to help mediate tensions between the practitioners on the committee and the architect, Denys Lasdun.
Lasdun designed the seating spaces and stages of the Lyttelton and Olivier auditoriums and Richard supervised the technology, which included the groundbreaking Olivier drum revolve, in which two semi-circular lifts could be raised and lowered independently and, while lowered, rotated at sub-stage level. It was long delayed in completion but, since being commissioned in the 90s, has been used widely and successfully. Other innovations included computer-controlled power flying for scenery (adapted from television studio systems) and a computerised lighting desk.
Richard and Lasdun managed to build an effective working relationship, and later Lasdun invited him to collaborate on a competition for Genoa Opera House. However, by the time the Lyttelton and Olivier theatres opened in 1976, it had become clear to Richard that, owing to the disproportionate volume of space, the remoteness of the balconies and the unfriendly material of concrete, it was hard for even the most accomplished actors to make themselves heard without amplification, leaving both audiences and practitioners frustrated.
Consequently, when the design of the Cottesloe (now Dorfman) theatre was delegated to Theatre Projects, Pilbrow urged his colleague, Iain Mackintosh, to design it with the audience gathered tightly around the stage – a shape that had previously been dismissed as anachronistic by the advisory committee. The so-called “courtyard theatre” became the model for many Theatre Projects buildings all over the world.
Born in Beckenham, Kent, Richard was the son of Marjorie (nee Hayward), a music teacher, and Gordon Pilbrow, a property developer and Olympic fencer who took part in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Gordon desperately wanted his son to follow in his fencing footsteps and arranged tuition from the national coach. It was all in vain: Richard was more interested in playing with his Pollocks toy theatre and the lure of the Beckenham Children’s theatre. He later told me that his interest in lighting may also have been engendered by growing up during the second world war and watching the floodlights, flashes and fires of the blitz from the fringes of south London.
After attending the nearby Bickley Hall prep school, then Cranbrook school in Kent, Richard did his national service in the RAF, becoming a corporal. He went to Central School of Speech and Drama, where he met Viki, and together they helped transfer the school’s show in the year of their graduation, 1955, to Her Majesty’s theatre (now His Majesty’s) in the West End. They married in 1958.
Her Majesty’s offered Richard a job, as an assistant stage manager on the Broadway play The Teahouse of the August Moon. There he was exposed to the work of Peter Larkin (who had designed the original lighting in the US) and George Schaefer (who adapted it for the West End), and started to see the possibilities of a discipline that was only in its infancy in the UK.
In 1963 the American director Hal Prince brought A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum to London, and he asked Richard to do the projections. This led to Richard’s involvement as co-producer of a number of musicals directed by Prince that transferred to the West End from Broadway, including She Loves Me, Cabaret, Company, A Little Night Music and Fiddler on the Roof. In 1968 Richard lit the musical Zorba in the US for Prince, making him the first British lighting designer of a Broadway show.
Richard also produced the film Swallows and Amazons (1974) and a 1977 TV series about popular music, All You Need Is Love, with Tony Palmer. An indefatigable organiser, he was the co-founder of the Association of British Theatre Technicians and of the Association of Lighting Designers.
He wrote an indispensable guide to his craft, Stage Lighting (1970; revised 1997), and a memoir, A Theatre Project (2011). In the last years of his life, Richard was working on a history of the making of the National Theatre building, A Sense of Theatre – to be published this spring – in which he argued that he was mistaken at the time to see the challenge in technical rather than theatrical terms, and that his work over the subsequent five decades had led him to advocate a return to the model of Victorian and Edwardian theatres – horseshoe-shaped auditoriums that embrace the stage and seating layered on several levels, creating a sense of unity between actor and audience.
For all his concern with design and technology, Richard was always passionate about the medium itself: he thought that the human element – the actor – had to be at the centre of the event and that, in all enterprises, the whole had to be the sum of its parts, technicians as much as artists.
His marriage to Viki ended in divorce. They had a son, Fred, and a daughter, Abigail. In 1974 he married Molly Friedel, also a lighting designer, and they had a daughter, Daisy.
Molly and his children survive him.
• Richard Pilbrow, lighting designer, born 28 April 1933; died 6 December 2023
