I would say it was one of the more challenging things I've ever done.
It was, technically, a really difficult project
to think about how we were going to stage these three shows all in one day.
We started about a year in advance.
First, I just sketched and drew and we looked at research together.
Little by little, we threw things into the model box, very roughly,
bits of paper and card, just looking at shapes and scribbles and ideas.
The biggest obstacle was seeing how they all dove-tailed together.
We couldn't get too focused on one play. We were constantly cooking with three pots.
(♪ MELANCHOLIC MELODY)
Chekhov is so regularly done. It's quite a well-trodden path.
So we wanted to find a new, fresh approach,
whilst being truthful to the plays.
We wanted there to be a development,
so the audience felt like they were going on a bit of a journey with the set.
We looked at the way that
how he changed his style from melodrama
into more beginning of the modern theatre with
..One thing remains true. The soul...
Platonov
so in that one we had a big rake pushing up from the backstage at a severe angle,
and very heavily forested to suggest a dark rough woodland going off into the distance.
MICHAEL OAKLEY: It's mediaeval Russia.
The land hasn't been flattened yet, hasn't been neatened.
Also, when the train track comes down the slope,
it should be like the Industrial Revolution
cutting through the Russian countryside to change it all.
Ivanov
Most of that play is set inside, so that's a bit calmer.
We designed it, setting it in the landscape.
So even though
there's only one scene outside, you get this big Russian, wild landscape framing it
and reflecting the rooms.
So there's water and trees around the drawing rooms.
There was always something added that the text didn't really ask for.
The Seagull
the most stripped-back, the most modern.
On that, the whole rake stage goes and we flood the whole upstage of the theatre.
So it's a lot cleaner, a lot calmer.
The rustic feel of the wooden floorboards
and weeds coming up from the ground just puts you in that place.
The sound design of the crickets.
Sometimes when I hear it at the beginning of
I can hear it on the Tannoy — and you just suddenly feel like it's summer.
You're just already there.
In the stage directions it says that you can hear the rain,
but by actually having them physically makes it so much more elemental.
TOM: It was very challenging.
It isn't easy to build a set over water, but it did help to always give that feeling.
We use water in every single play.
(♪ MELODIC THEME PLAYS)
In Chichester, we had a dock
and we put sky back there and then flooded it right back into that.
Then when we got to the Olivier to do it there —
there's other shows, it's in rep and Threepenny Opera was upstage behind it —
we built fake concrete pillars and fake portals and walkways
to make it feel like the trees and the lake were just flooding the theatre itself.
Having seen so many great productions, that is a challenge,
to go onto the National Theatre's main stage,
to do something that works, and honours the plays and yet is exciting.