'I'm Bunny Christie and I'm a designer of set and costumes in theatre.
'So when you go and see a show in the theatre, every single thing
'that you see on the stage has been chosen by the designer
'or picked by somebody on the design team.
'So we're looking after the whole look of the piece.'
When I first get a script, when I'm first working on a piece,
I do a kind of a grid in my sketchbook,
and I go through the script, and I'm very sort of methodical,
and I write down every single scene, who's in that scene,
what time of day is it,
what's the month or the time of year, what's happening in that scene,
'and then any sort of special notes on it,
'like if there's something particular that happens, like...
'I don't know, that somebody falls over
'or that somebody has to come in through a door.'
Then you'll kind of spin off in several different directions.
So I might come back to them with maybe three different ideas
of how a production could go.
And I'm looking at films that I've seen or photographs.
I just collect lots and lots of images of different ideas.
And we're just trying to get a kind of visual language that we both like.
Then I can go away and hone down and develop.
'Most theatres of course aren't like the National Theatre,
'because you don't have the resources and the financial backing and you do have to'
often be more imaginative, maybe,
or be more creative with limited resources.
And that's... that can be really fun.
I remember on Comedy, Dominic spoke to me
about the look and the feel of the production.
He wanted something that was really vibrant,
so I had lots of images of nice kind of cranes and containers,
and we worked for a while, actually, on the idea
of it all being set in those... like in a container terminal.
And then Dominic came back and said,
"No, I really think it needs to be in the centre of the city."
And it should feel... In London, it would feel like you're in Soho.
Some designers do quite a lot of drawing,
so they'll maybe be doing lots and lots of sketches and drawing.
I tend not to do that. I quite quickly go to the model stage,
because we build scale models of our sets, like architects do, in a way, really.
So I'm quite quickly, then, working in the model box.
And then we do what we call a white card model,
and that's literally what it is - it's a model made of white card
and it shows exactly the layout
and we can change it really quickly, because it hasn't got any detail on it.
So if we suddenly want an extra door in something
or we want to make something... push something further off
or make something taller, we can make those alterations quite quickly.
This is the finished model of Comedy of Errors.
And so this is all built to scale.
We work in 1 to 25.
And at the top of the show,
we were in... in the docks
and then in a storm.
So we were in this kind of scaffolding world - a really dark,
grimy, oily world.
We had lots of these ladders and it all looked like scaffolding
and we had chains hanging off stuff
and people up on all of these levels.
'In the Olivier, it's a really big theatre'
and it was great to be able to get people two storeys up,
'hanging over, yelling down. There was people all over, dotted around.'
These could shut, and then these were able to kind of swivel.
And then you were able to go into a...
into a kind of world of...
of streets and alleys.
So you've got a kind of a shop front here
and then you've got an alleyway with stairs going up to somewhere above.
You could have people hanging out of these windows.
Lots of people really love models, because they look like kind of doll's houses
and they really, really like them.
And they are really lovely, but actually, they're just a tool for us.
They're absolutely just so we've all agreed
that that's exactly what it's going to look like.
So we know the blue door is that blue and not another blue
and that the finish of that wall is exactly like that
and we're not imagining something different.
[♪ Mad World]
(AUDIENCE APPLAUDS)
'It's the world of theatre. We're not in a world of reality.
'We're somewhere other,'
and the audience turns up and we all agree to suspend our disbelief.
We know what we're looking at isn't real,
but we are going to invest in it for the evening as being real.
It's really, really different from watching a movie,
which is generally in world of reality and naturalism.
And theatre's not like that.
Theatre, we can do magic.
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