Design: Discussion with Designer Neil Warmington (1/6)

Interview with Neil Warmington - designer of the Prime Productions production of Sunset Song.

Interviewer
Neil, how did you become a Designer?

Neil Warmington

Well, I did Art at school, O Level and A Level, and decided to go to Art College. Then I did Fine Art Painting at College, and then just as a way of making money you know, I thought I should apply it to something that was employable rather than painting away till I'm dead and getting nowhere. So I went on this postgraduate course, Theatre Design, really with the view of becoming a scene painter rather than a designer, just to paint sets, and somehow I ended up designing. I think from just seeing other people's designs and thinking "I could do that". And then being given the chance to do it. The rest is history.

Interviewer
Tell me what you think the job of a designer is.

Neil
The design course was Motley. That was run by an old lady who used to design in the 50s at the Royal Court and she said that you have to just do the play, design to serve the play, don't over embellish it or elaborate or deviate, just serve the play and the text; the words and the text are the important thing. So that's what I try and do.

Interviewer
But when you say "serve the play", in what way do you serve the play?

Neil
Well, it's tricky because there's a way of serving the play that's just very pedestrian and literal. You say 'Well, what's required? A room's required, and doors are required'. But that can actually limit you because you really want to re-invent it and make it your own and make it less pedestrian, so you have to make this leap in your head where you're serving the play but you're actually reinventing the space to make it modern and interesting.

Interviewer
Because you've got a number of things to think about - you've got the space that already exists, depending on where you're working. It could be a theatre like the Lyceum in Edinburgh which is all very ornate or it could be a space like the Traverse in Edinburgh which is much more modern and cool.

Neil
Yeah. And then sometimes you can go with that, like if you've got the Lyceum which is Victorian - you could either go with that feel and make your set quite period or you could go against the periodness so that it sits quite oddly in the space.

Interviewer
One of the ones I remember working very well at the Lyceum was when you did Merlin and I think it was possibly Merlin Part 3 when you'd got all this beautiful theatre and ornate, gilded, gold stuff, and then in the centre on the stage you had what looked like a desert with a burned out car sticking out of it and .....

Neil
I think it was just at the time of the Gulf War so there was a lot of those images on telly at the time of bombed out tanks along the roads. Merlin was this play about the search for the Grail and he kept getting temptation put in his way and kept falling for it, so he kept getting waylaid with all these temptations being put in his path. So we had this road in perspective going up to the sky. But I think that the very bombed out earthy nature of it just sat quite interestingly in amongst the gilded proscenium.

Interviewer
I remember that contrast - it was very powerful. It seemed to me, going back to the contrast between somewhere like the Lyceum and the Traverse, the Lyceum has quite a strong energy hasn't it and you have to use that energy, either by working against it or working with it? You can't ignore it.

Neil
And, yeah, I think you'll get a play and then you'll get the plans and then you'll go and visit the theatre and you'll see the auditorium and the seating arrangement. And somewhere like the Traverse, the audience is around the sides a bit more, and that'll determine how far forward you can put a wall so that everyone can see. Whereas the Lyceum's proscenium is very much more front-on, and it's a lot easier to make images, looking at it in a two-dimensional way rather in the round. So you take on board everything really without even realising you're taking it on board I think, you just, you're just reading the play knowing that you've seen the space and .....

Interviewer
And there are also budgetary and touring, practical things ....

Neil
Yeah.

Interviewer
So, for example, on this show we've just done, Sunset Song, you had to think about the fact that it would be going in and out of different venues and size of theatres.

Neil
Usually the Production Manager will sort of send you a pack of sizes of get-in doors for each theatre which will determine how the set is broken up into pieces, and how high and wide the doors are, so you go through all the pack until you find the smallest and then - unless it's ridiculously small compared to the others - you tend to work to the smallest so that if it fits there it fits anywhere. And I think, just through doing it over and over again, you get to know what things cost. You know that a cloth to paint the sky on is X amount, and just in your head you think, Yeah, that's roughly in budget.

Interviewer
Do you think you're aware of the budget much when you do the work, when you come up with the idea?

Neil
I think it's quite hard to tell because you come up with an idea and there's some things there's no way of knowing if someone's going to borrow it or prop it. So there's some things that you can't even gauge because you're thinking, 'Oh, that's £2000 for that bit of furniture', and then someone will say 'Oh no, we've got one in the office', and you'll get that for nothing. So I think it's quite hard to gauge it but I think generally you know how far materials go.

Sunset Song was a bit different because it wasn't an in-house production, so some of the budget went on farming out the build to another company, so the money goes less far.

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