inside
THE MINDS
{ IN-HOUSE }
P A mid-century aesthetic, augmented by luxurious nuances.
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laying simultaneously at The Sydney Theatre’s Wharf venue and the Opera House’s Drama Theatre, Disgraced and Hay Fever each have a design that presents a visual echo of the play’s written setting and creates the physical constraints and apertures, blind corners and offstage spaces for the actors to expand and use as needed. The skill of each of these sets, however, lies in their ability to support the emotional setting of the unfolding tale. Effectively layering and un-layering racial tolerance through the intimacy of a mixed Muslim/Christian marriage, “Disgraced is a theatrical bombshell that doesn’t let anyone off the hook,” as Seattle Times theatre critic Misha Berson put it in her 14 January 2016 review. Unfolding an incredibly complex sequence of ideas and interwoven expectations, where political correctness and incorrectness vie for a plethora of separate truths, the play’s triumph is its ability to remain unresolved, to not answer, or even try to answer, the concerns of a fragile changing society. Elizabeth Gadsby’s set facilitates this complexity superbly with a near empty New York loft apartment that is clear and uncluttered, and effectively allows the unravelling of the relationship room to breathe. “The text itself was so important I needed to create a space that would support the hearing of that text,” says Gadsby. Creating an authenticity to the
set, as the home of Amir, a high-income New York lawyer and his artist wife Emily, centres on a mid-century aesthetic, augmented by luxurious nuances. Gadsby points out that asking a set painter to create paintings that represent a body of work evolved from 20 years of thinking is never going to work and, as such, has chosen to create an authentic interior with furniture sourced from auctions, authentic Punjabi embroidery and African masks. She has also very cleverly placed the artist’s work on the forth wall, leaving it to the audience to imagine and experience through the eyes of the players. Taking advantage of the double height of the Wharf theatre stage and its corner position, Gadsby has given the back wall over to a set of windows – the small rectangular panes are instantly recognisable as New York, as are the sounds emanating from the offstage street below. That she has built a physical long balcony behind the glass is an exceptional decision that most would reject in favour of a painted depth and some sort of ‘NY’ indicator. Instead, she allows the depth a life of its own, a three-dimensional void where light can change, noise can shift and, in a crucial moment, a crystal glass can be resoundingly shattered. Pairing this wall is a staircase and curtained loft bedroom where ideas of transparency and obfuscation provide an off-script parallel. “When [Emily Kapoor] goes upstairs to get changed… it was also her stripping bare physically, which is about to happen to her emotionally… it also keeps her very much in the consciousness,” explains Gadsby. On a far lighter note, Noel Coward’s Hay Fever, about the eccentric and self-centred Bliss family, could not be in better hands than Alicia Clements. Taking the idea of Coward’s play as an experience of theatricality, Clements has framed the stage with a proscenium of moulded architrave of mossy and verdant greens and a frivolously gold curtain. “I have an interest in the aperture through which you see a production… Noel Coward is so theatrical and from that old world of theatricality… I set about turning it into an old theatre as much as possible, but I wanted full immersion when the play was underway, so I created a proscenium that was an extension of the interior space,” says Clements. And beautifully so. The interior is more conservatory than lounge, yet it is the natural place for these hothouse characters. It is also
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