Break Down And Rebuild

Stephen Curtis has an extensive history designing for Bell Shakespeare. A quick glance over his credits reveals Much Ado About Nothing, Romeo And Juliet, and even Moby Dick for the lauded theatre company. “Shakespeare's plays are just, well, you know, they're the best,” explains Curtis with a playful matter-of-fact delivery. “John [Bell] and I have had a very long relationship; John offered me my first professional show actually, The Venetian Twin, right at the start of my career. Apart from the delights of the plays themselves it's been one of those relationships we've enjoyed continuing.”

Beyond Curtis' obvious love of the texts that Bell's company tackle, there have been parallels that exist between the theatre making philosophy of both Curtis and Bell that ensured the longevity of the working partnership, and which came to define their most recent collaboration, Bell Shakespeare's mash-up of Henry IV parts I and II, dubbed Henry 4, directed by Bell with assistance from Sport For Jove AD Damien Ryan and starring Bell as Falstaff, David Whitney as King Henry and Matthew Moore as the rebellious Prince Hal.

“I think for John and for me too in a parallel way, for both of us that sense of anarchy is inherent in our sense of what theatre is; that it is something [which] is a little bit unpredictable, a little bit dangerous, the audience shouldn't really be sure of what they're going to be getting,” declares Curtis. “So with John, we've worked on this with a lot of our productions, we try to deconstruct the formality of theatre, deconstruct the formality of the theatre space and the theatre experience for the audience so that for them it is a little bit like an anarchic experience as well.”

That sense of anarchy is one that Bell has returned to time and again in his discussion of Henry 4, a modern day telling of the classic that, for Curtis, became aesthetically inseparable from the 2011 London Riots. “Henry's talking about the world of riot and collapse, and insecurity in the kingdom, and I suggested to John that we actually start the play with a scene where we see a number of the characters actually creating that riot and wrecking the stage and that the rest of the production happens in that chaos that we create in the first moment of the play. My work was then to sort of create a pre-show for the play that took the audience into this state of complete chaos and riot.

“I'd also just passed an installation where someone had collected a whole lot of stolen milk crates and arranged them using different colours to spell the word 'stolen' in this wall of milk crates, the word in blue, and all the other milk crates were red,” Curtis says of the central inspiration for his design. “So I created a wall of milk crates that's in the shape of the Union Jack and in the pre-show of the play that is destroyed by the cast in this mad party riot, and the rest of the play happens in the state of collapse and mess. For me as a designer, that invitation to the audience into the world of the play, and really letting them know that they're going to have a good time, is a very important part of my job.”