DESIGNER STATEMENTS


TIM HATLEY—SET AND COSTUME DESIGN My starting point as a designer is always to read the play, and in the case of Travesties, which is a complex play, it required careful reading and thought to begin to understand the threads and layers of the writing, and talking closely with the director, Patrick Marber. It seemed to me that our production needed a strong yet simple approach to the design. The shifting of time and location is clear in the writing and did not need physical transitions to interrupt the flow. Our space is both present and memory, library and apartment, and allows for characters to appear and disappear within. The costumes are rooted strongly in the period, and their palette was developed in tandem with the development of the space. Cross references to Oscar Wilde’s play, The Importance of Being Earnest, were an enjoyable anchor to designing the play.


NEIL AUSTIN—LIGHTING DESIGN Tom Stoppard brilliantly represents the failing memory of Henry Carr through Dadaist jumps and repetitions in the text


of his play, Travesties. And so, the lighting is designed to help the audience follow the narrative through these fractured reminiscences by giving them visual clues as to which time period it is and where the location is. The lighting in the more narrative sections of the play, when Carr in his dotage is unreliably recalling his time in Zurich, has a very different visual look to the scenes in the play which are set in the year 1917. As Carr’s memories misfire and get repeated in ever more confused versions, both lighting and sound mark them with a library bell and a flicker—not only to underscore the time-slip, but to also aid the audience through the confusion happening in Carr’s mind.


ADAM CORK—SOUND DESIGN & ORIGINAL MUSIC On the surface, Travesties seems to be a play about the unreliable reminiscences of a British diplomat named Henry Carr. But my inspiration for the music and sound score is drawn from the way it stages the struggle between the brutal power of meaninglessness (as expounded by the anarchic “Dada” art of Tristan Tzara) on the one hand, and the


The set model for Travesties


18 ROUNDABOUT THEATRE COMPANY


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