Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 1983 - 7

specialty in design.'"
Dye;"s concern with the total production including its handling of audience space undoubtedly helps account
for his being in charge of the planning of
both the small Pit Theatre in the RSC's
ne\\' home in the Barbican complex in
London, and also the transportable
stage-audience module for the RSC's
small scale touring program. Although
he ha, also designed for the main stages
of th'~ RSC, Dyer represents one end of
the (urrent spectrum of British scenographers, those for whom less is more,
those who reject the idea of scenography
as spectacle, and who find allraction in
a Brechtian spareness of scenery. Typical evidence of his work was found in
Timon of A Ihens (RSC 1981), the setting of which was a classically simple,
neutral platform that changed to an
eroded shell of itself for the second half
of the play. Both Taming of Ihe Shre\l'
(RSC 1978) and Macbelh (RSC 1982)
employed a highly functional, spare
construction of stairs and bridges that
served as platforms for acting.

Chris Dyer's model Jar The Taming of the Shrew, 1978.

~I~
" B"Jornson
~ ~ M ana

Chris Dyer's sef Jar Timon of Alhens, 1981, showing fhe disill/egrllled version oj fhe sef Jar fhe second half oj fhe play.

position, he asked, "Where do we go
after Nickleby?"-meaning what might
folio\\' John Napier's culminating example of scenography based on a radical
reshaping of traditional audience-stage
space and an improvisatory assemblage
of random objects and props on an essent ially bare but construct ivist stage?
Dyer's response to his own question

points toward an almost oriental spareness of a few key objects in space. The
ideal for him would be "a set space, like
the oh stage, where you can focus entirely on what you're doing with actors
you kno\\', actors who would accept the
idea, and on the quality of costumes and
props. This wouldn't eliminate the designer. My job is to do plays, with a

In strong contrast to Dyer is Maria
Bjornson (born 1949). Like Dyer, she
spent several years in provincial theatres, especially the Citizens Theatre in
Glasgow, and found work there with her
peers in directing to be very valuable.
Unlike Dyer, she had more than three
years of theatre design schooling (London's Central School), and has done
most of her work as a free lance designer
in opera-a genre which corresponds to
her feeling that theatre ought to be a
"celebration." Although she expresses
admiration for a designer like Jocelyn
Herbert, the definitive senior exemplar
of the restrained, spare approach,
Bjornson noted that "there's room for
other things as well. I like the whole
thing to be much warmer ... I find the
other a very cold approach, clinical."
Acting on the conviction that "the first
thing that tells you something exciting is
goi ng to happen is t he set," she has
tended to create large, romantically expressive sets and elaborate costumes that
present, in her words, "a distorted reality: either heightening it or squashing it."
Some characteristic examples of her
work include David Blake's TO/lssainl
(English ational Opera 1977), which
involved hundreds of costumes, over

USITT /Spring/ 1983/Thealre Design & Technology

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