© Lez Brotherston 'Highland Fling' reviews 'Swan Lake' reviews 'Play Without Words' reviews 'Liaisons Dangereuses' reviews 'Edward Scissorhands' reviews Dani Crawford reviews

One of the best known, and best loved, stage designers interviewed in depth by Dani Crawford. An interview from early summer since which Lez's designs for 'Les Liaisons Dangereuses' and 'Edward Scissorhands' have been unveiled to unanimous critical and audience acclaim...

Lez Brotherston is pondering where best to set a near bursting bag of garbage amidst a rusted out Volkswagen, a tattered armchair and various other bits of battered and discarded household rubbish. He is on the set of Matthew Bourne’s Highland Fling, a collaborative version of the romantic ballet, La Sylphide. The setting described is from Act Two where James meets up with the ethereal Sylphs in the forest. If you’ve only seen traditional versions of this ballet, then you might be skeptical, considering this scene is often designed with babbling brooks and waterfalls, lush foliage and dreamy backgrounds. Well, I can assure you that this version is dreamy too; its just got one heck of a twist to it that is all.

It is also one ‘wee’ example of Brotherston’s particular creative flair. He has worked extensively in dance, theatre, opera, musicals and film, and has picked up some pretty lofty accolades along the way, including a Tony and an Olivier. I had long wanted to sit down and chat with him, but I admit to having always been a bit nervous at the prospect, as he has always seemed larger than life to me. But as it turns out, I could not have spent time with a nicer person. He is very open and honest; a seemingly no-nonsense sort of guy who is thoroughly delightful to talk with and has a great wit and humour about him; all of which are often parlayed into his set and costume designs

The following are short takes, a sort of anecdotal narrative if you will, of some of our conversation. A detailed accounting of his work and his accomplishments can be found at the end of this article.

The Accidental Designer

“Originally, a long time ago, I thought I wanted to be a stage manager. So I applied to the Central School of Speech and Drama and got accepted as a stage manager. I remember there was a designer at the Warehouse who I used to get on with very well, who I used to go and help. She said to me, ‘You’ll go mad being a stage manager. It’s all about organization. You really, really will go mad. It’s not what you think it is.’ And so I had a big think about it, and even though I had been given a place, I turned it down.”

Lez Brotherston's designs for Matthew Bourne's Play Without Words
© Sheila Burnett

“So I was 18 and going into A levels and I decided I would like to be a designer; but I hadn’t done any art or craft or anything. So while I was doing A levels, I had to completely rethink everything and throw out all the sciences and I ended up doing A levels and O levels at the same time. I had a very compact art education and I finished everything in two years. I then got a place in The Central School of Arts and Design; but I couldn’t draw. I can’t draw now. But I did learn skills to communicate. While I was at art school I was always wrestling with how to do costume drawings without them looking like diagrams. Finally, in my third year, I was able to come up with a sort of style that I could feel confident about and do quickly. It is a particular style, and to my shame, I don’t dare go out of it. I am always apologizing for my drawings saying, ‘it’s sort of what I mean’ and ‘just trust me on this’.”

Two Roads Diverged

“I had been working with Christopher Gable for about eight years. He was the first person to encourage me to work in dance. He had the Northern Ballet Theatre and he took on what was at that time, the worst funded, worst staffed, most worked, lowest paid ballet company in Britain. He ended up with a lot of very committed dancers who were not necessarily the best classical technicians, and he was the first person who went in there and said, ‘we can’t do Swan Lake with 32 fouttés, we haven’t got anybody who can do 32 fouttés, we’re not even going to try. What we are going to do is we are going to learn to act and we are going to turn this into dance theatre. We’re not going to be a ballet company, we’re going to be a dance theatre company. And he started working on narrative stuff and got me in as a theatre and opera designer and to work on character and making the production.

The problem was because they did an enormous amount of touring and they survived on their touring and they had, at that time, a very kind of middle-aged range of audience, you couldn’t do something like that because it would frighten them off. So it was always slightly on the back foot, it was always slightly pulling back from taking it as far as we could, even as over those eight years we kept pushing it just a little further trying to bring the audience with us until we got it to where we wanted and people were finally coming.”

“I think, in terms of what touring ballet was in Britain at the time, I think we did enormously well in this regard. But had I said to Christopher, ‘Okay Act One is going to be set in some toilets, he would have gone ‘No, No! Help me!’. (laughs) Whereas with this company, (Matthew Bourne’s company) you could go in and because it was an audience made up of 19 and 20 year olds, you could do what you wanted. You could really push it.

When we started to do this (Highland Fling, 1994), it was the first time we could put on this kind of humour, this kind of character, this kind of piece. It was, in its time, very different. I hadn’t seen anything like it before. And it was liberating. I don’t have a favorite work but I am very fond of this one because it’s the first one I’d done with Matt. It was a very important time for me. I got involved with Matthew and the dancers, Etta (Murfitt) and Scott (Ambler), all of whom I’ve known now for 11 years. I loved doing dance and I loved working with Christopher; I thought it was great. I absolutely loved the work. But with this company I could go further.

The Next Big Idea

“Like Matthew (Bourne), I don’t think there are any new ideas; there are only new interpretations of old ideas. You need to look and see what people have done; not as direct reference, not to copy, but so you don’t copy and so you can see how people have dealt with it. Then you’ll know ‘that’s been done’. Like in Scissorhands. There’s a family and I was saying what if the mother is played by a man and Matt said, ‘that’s Hairspray, we can’t do that. (laughs). So if you hadn’t seen Hairspray then you wouldn’t have that wealth of interpretation. You wouldn’t know not to do it.”

“I just think there are ideas floating out there and somehow we all latch onto them because if you look at trends in theatres now, suddenly everyone will be doing something similar and we’ve never spoken to each other. It just means there is something out there that we are all looking at, maybe that is influencing us into making those kinds of decisions. And it’s whoever gets there first, whoever gets the opportunity to put it on stage and claim it as their own.”

Big Brother is Watching

“The Linbury (Studio Theatre) is a very nice space but it’s sort of regarded as a funny kind of try-out studio theatre by the Opera House in general, and it never gets programmed into the mainstream. It was really strange to have to try and make them want an event. I was determined to do that with Will (Tuckett); to make A Soldier’s Tale into an event piece so that we’d get people coming in who

Lez Brotherston © Lez Brotherston

would feel that something big was happening. And that is why I wanted to pull people onto the stage and make it feel like a cabaret kind of atmosphere. The Opera House wanted something that didn’t cause them any trouble, that sort of went in there and that nobody would notice and you think, why? You have this wonderful opportunity, you’re only doing a few shows, let’s throw everything we’ve got at it. I remember one of the biggest battles was with the front house because I said it would be great if we could allow the people who sat at tables to have a drink. I don’t care if I buy the drinks and I put a bottle of wine on the table and they can just drink while they are watching the show. And it was, ‘Absolutely not’! I don’t get it, I really don’t get it. Why don’t (you) want to support us in trying to make this something special? (You) absolutely want to bland it out into something that’s not offensive, not going to ruffle any feathers, not going to challenge anybody.

But it was lovely working with Will. I think Will’s great. And we had such fun doing it….we had such a great cast and a lot of really dedicated people with a lot of good will coming in to make it a big event.”

A Dangerous Liaison with Adam Cooper

“There came a point when we both had a bit of a gap. We had two projects that we were working on at the time (Nijinsky and Les Liaisons Dangereuses). I was more interested in the other one and he was more interested in Liaisons and very keen on doing it so that’s what we worked on. And what we did was, he wrote the original scenario and sent it to me and I rewrote it and so we went back and forth and sort of wrote it together. We kept having meetings, we got a scenario and then we got a bit of money from the producer to develop it into a rough model box so we could see what the production might be like. We then had a two week workshop.

I had been working with Philip Feeney quite a lot at Northern Ballet and I suggested he write the music. So Philip wrote the music and I designed it and it got everyone interested. Then suddenly there was no interest. So it all went to sleep for a bit. And then Japan wanted a project and Adam said ‘Liaisons’, so we came back on board. At that point, because I had co-written it and because Adam was going to choreograph and be in it, I didn’t particularly want to work with another director. I knew the story well enough and knew what we were trying to achieve and wanted to avoid a third party coming in because we didn’t want another idea – we already knew what we wanted to do. And so I took on the role of co-director as well.”

Adam Cooper and Lez Brotherston's Les Liaisons Dangereuses
© Roy Tan

The Cutting Edge Designers

“Colleen Atwood (Edward Scissorhands) is my favorite costume designer. She is the most brilliant. I’d love to meet her one day. I absolutely worship at the shrine of Colleen Atwood. She is totally gifted.

So the hard part is I can’t react to that. I’ve got an idea for what Edward Scissorhands will look like, which won’t be like the film. I mean it’s got to sort of look like the film, but not I’m sure we should be trying to emulate it; in fact the story we’ve come up with is slightly different and there are some different characters in it as well. Obviously we’ve got to have hands like scissors, we’ve got to have scissorhands, and for all intents and purposes from this far away, they’ll look like what you remember from the film. I’ve got an idea of what Edward will look like and it’s got to be a suit of some kind, but how that suit is made up has got to be different; it has got to be something more anatomical than what Colleen Atwood did in the film. I’ve got to find a way to break the back of that costume. But it’s such a big costume show, if I start with Edward I will still be drawing at performance time trying to come up with a different Edward. If I can get a whole world around him first, then I can put him into it.”
 

Opera, Ballet or Dance

“It’s all the same to me. What I like to do is character based stuff; narrative based stuff. It’s only about making a character and making a world for that character to live in. And that’s it. And as long as you can believe in the character, then you can believe in the characters that they react with and you can believe in the world they live in - and then it doesn’t matter if it’s opera or ballet or dance.”

From Stage to Screen

“I’ve done some work on film – Letter From Brezhnev. I only got that because I knew the producer and they didn’t have a designer, and they were filming in two weeks and they called me onto it. We filmed Car Man in a film studio over a few days. When I was in art school I did a lot of costume/prop work on film, The Last Emperor, Highlander….I have a list of high profile films that I don’t have on my CV anymore because I really just made things for them.”

Lez Brotherston's designs for Matthew Bourne's Highland Fling
© Bill Cooper

“I’d really like to do costumes on a film though – as long as it wasn’t going to Marks and Spencer to shop. If there is something I could design and have made, then I’d really, really like to get involved. The problem is, being a theatre designer, I love having control of both sets and costumes. When I don’t have control of both, I don’t feel as involved in the production. I don’t get to know the actors very well; I don’t get to know the characters very well; there’s always story line changes that can affect me that I don’t get to know about, so I sort of feel like a technician. When you are doing everything, you really feel like you’re creating a world and people and that’s much more exciting, much more visceral.”

The Stuff of Which Dreams are Made

“I’ve always wanted to do the Duchess of Malfi. I got very excited when Adam (Cooper) and I were looking for another project to do as a dance piece, and he was busy doing Singing in the Rain at the time and I was kind of looking for things. I was reading Interview with a Vampire and had some music on and suddenly everything kind of meshed and I said this would make a fantastic dance piece; this would make a brilliant dance piece. It’s all about longing, sadness; it’s about emotions, all things that dance can do. It can tell you someone is happy or sad or jealous; it gives you that. I got very excited about it and we tentatively looked at the rights, but then all the rights for all the vampire books had been taken up by Elton John because he’s writing a musical. I thought that was a shame because I think it would be better as a dance piece.”

“The big project I have wanted to do for years, just before Christopher (Gable) died; we were going to do a ballet about Nijinsky. I think it is a fascinating story. It’s about Nijinsky and Diaghilev and the Ballet Russe and it’s about love, jealousy and again, it’s all emotional things that dance can do better. So the idea was floating around and Christopher wanted to do it and we finally got on to it but then he died and it stopped. And then Adam and I started working on it but Liaisons took it over. Matt (Bourne) loves Nijinsky as well and we’ve talked about it. I really, really want to do it. I’ll do it with anybody because I think it’s a story worth telling that people don’t know about.”

The Secret to Being a Great Designer

“I can’t bear it when some of the older school designers play this ‘oh there’s a great secret to designing ballet dear boy’. Bollocks! There is no secret to designing ballet. There are about four technical things you need to know when you’re making a costume and any costume maker who has made for dance and is more experienced than you, will sort that out for you. There is no mystery…it is just something invented to give oneself a great mystique. Anybody can do it. The most important thing is the idea. If you have the idea then you can find the people who are technically able to help you make it real.”

Lez Brotherston's designs for Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake
© Bill Cooper

Lez Brotherston has certainly made it real for audiences. Perhaps, as he says, anybody can do it. But very, very few have the extraordinary imagination that he does; capable of creating the magical worlds from which our journeys begin whenever we sit down in a theatre and become a part of his world. He is a designer and he is a storyteller --- and he is “brilliant and totally gifted” at both.

Biography is courtesy New Adventures.