Joanna Scotcher “didn’t really come to theatre through being taken to see plays as a kid; I came at it through making really ridiculous sculptures that were suddenly big enough to dance in.” And although she’s an RSC-trained designer, she still leaps far beyond the world of traditional theatre. When we spoke, she’d just come from working on an early-morning fashion photo-shoot in a hotel room. To date, she’s also created a “giant game” of installations in Kensington Palace, charmed theatre and railway buffs alike with a production of The Railway Children staged in Waterloo Station, designed caravans and time-travelling promenades as associate designer for intimate devised and verbatim theatre company Look Left, Look Right, and, most recently, worked on more traditionally theatrical productions for Clean Break, a company dedicated to producing work by, about and for women prisoners.
Her varied portfolio means that she’s used to working in unconventional spaces; “every now and then I get to work in a theatre that has a fly bar, which seems like quite an amazing novelty to me – someone else will lift your stuff up for you!” She explains that “odd spaces and new spaces have always excited me, because I get so much inspiration from having solved challenges and problems that arise. For me they goes very much hand in hand with developed and devised work. I’ve always felt quite comfortable in the new writing, new spaces camp, so sometimes having a script in a traditional venue feels slightly odd to me. Although that said, if someone wants me to do a huge West End show, I’m also available for that, too!”
Her work on House of Cards at Kensington Palace involved filling the space with installations from giant paper silhouettes of kings and queens to tiny dolls in suspended glass cases – “I was very much a co-conceiver, and it’s riveting to be involved in that stage. I think a lot of directors are realising that there’s a growing role for a visual artist who can exchange their own visual language with verbal language, and are getting comfortable with what must be quite an unnerving thing, even if you’ve read every contemporary playwright. It’s about finding directors you can have a genuine collaboration or meeting of storytelling languages with.”
House of Cards. Photo: Coney
Scotcher’s also been involved in devising work with Look Left, Look Right from the company’s very beginnings. She enjoys the challenge of site-specific work where “it’s about seeing through the closed door and around the corner, and flirting with your audience about what they’re going to see and what they’re not, and where they’re allowed to go.” She explains that “whereas in a traditional theatre space, you control what the audience see, information in immersive work is received in a different way. As a visual artist you’re dealing with a whole different spectrum of inputs to play with – when people aren’t pointed in one direction, what they see is as much as about what they feel, and the temperature and the lighting change and who’s coming into the space.” This means walking the route of promenade shows with the productions’ writers, and coming up with ways to “convey shifts in time through the semiotics of what someone’s wearing, and having a really filmic, immersive understanding of storytelling from all angles.”
Although her work with Clean Break might not embroil writers, actors and audience in a giant game, she’s still found that playful collaboration working with director Lucy Morrison, its head of artistic programme – ever since continuing an intense discussion about the company’s production of Billy the Girl last autumn right onto the director’s school run.
Scotcher finds that “it’s always wonderful to have an ongoing relationship with a director because you’ve already created a language or a bank of ideas. People sometimes say it’s a shorthand, but it’s more that you can settle into a depth earlier, so you can really burrow into an idea and scrutinise it to a much greater extent.”
Billy The Girl. Photo: Alistair Muir
Working with Morrison on Pests, Vivienne Franzmann’s new play, has involved plenty of burrowing; she describes it as “a rat’s nest of ideas and social comment and spoken languages. The text is so deeply rich with imagery, both in the stage directions and within the minds of the characters, that we spent a long time just plotting our way through its rich, tangled visual world. My design has really sprung out of [the character of] Pink’s mind; she’s suffering mental ill-health and is self-medicating with street drugs so there’s a real temperature of emotional highs and lows to the piece.” Part of the challenge of the piece is that Pink sees and hears things that her sister Rolly doesn’t. To express this, “what we’ve done is essentially like mapping, or storyboarding a film; it’s a static set but we’ve created mini canvases with projections which reflect the imagery of her emotional journey mapped out on top.”
It’s hard to describe Pests, or to visualise it; it’s an intense two-hander between two sisters with a dense, playful, and sometimes impenetrable language of their own. Fortunately, as Scotcher explains, “I’m kind of seduced by the obscure. That’s what so seductive about the initial conversation with the director, where you’re scrutinising your gut reaction to the text and you can go to the most incredible recesses of your mind. For Pests, Morrison mentioned the inside of a cushion cover that she remembered from when she was a child and instantly it took me back into the gym cupboard at school and the places I’d been where the insides had fallen out of soft things, and that’s kind of when inspiration struck. It was from the odd bank of emotion and visuals that as a designer you store in these crevices of your brain, then it just takes a director to say something to ignite that little idea and it finds it way out. Then suddenly you’re responsible for building it 10 metres across, so it’s able to come apart in sections and tour round the country and be seen by people. You have to be a very practical person to be a designer, and I love that technical side to it too. I’m a huge geek and sometimes I get as excited talking to a technician about a valve that can release blood from a fuse huge box as I am sketching a picture when I first read a script.”
In Pests, this geeky, practical side is being exercised both by “sticking foam to pillows to create a huge, nesty mound – it’ll be quite tempting to have a snooze on the set!” and by working closely with Kim Beveridge, the production’s projection designer. Scotcher feels that “working with projection is like being let into a whole new language game that you can sort of flirt around with onstage, like another colour to your palette – it’s fascinating learning about all the new technologies we’re using. But it’s got to be integral. I’m not happy with people just throwing projections over my set when it doesn’t work with the language I’m using. And I don’t like empty projection screens; it makes me feel uncomfortable and it makes me think of a turned off TV. One of the most ingenious pieces of projection I’ve ever seen was a show where a man pulled a handkerchief out from his suit, and as he unfolded it a projection appeared on it and grew to the size he unfolded the handkerchief to. When the projection finished he just folded the handkerchief up and put it back in his pocket, and it wasn’t there, and there wasn’t a screen. It worked within the story rather than laying on top of it. So that’s what I strive to do when I try to use projection.”
Hopelessly Devoted. Photo: Richard Davenport
There was a similar mix of emotional depth and robust practicality at play in Scotcher’s work on Hopelessly Devoted by Kate Tempest – “I’m interested in construction techniques and what that means when you’re telling a story. We drew as much from graphic designers, we were looking at kind of structuralist work and lighting installations, and then ended up building a light-up ceiling panel which was inspired by the front of a drum machine.”
Scotcher’s first job out of her RSC apprenticeship was still more technical, but also substantially more naturalistic. Her design for The Railway Children involved working with a real train and platforms at Waterloo Station – “I was so utterly swept up in it that I didn’t have time to be daunted, but it was absolutely a huge engineering challenge.” The production combined picturesque research “ going round Yorkshire looking at all the stations, and researching uniforms and goods wagons” with the “real challenge raising my game to get the rest of what I could call the supporting scenery to hold its own against this incredibly majestic, 40-tonne train as it rolled into the middle of the stage every night.” What focused attention away from the great smoke-breathing beast was the “choreography of four moving platforms, as they and the characters on them met and parted again. In amongst all the Edwardian paraphernalia of the railway, there are the key emotional journeys locked into the mechanism of travelling – the excitement of travel, the sadness of losing someone, and the joy of meeting someone at a station.”
Like The Railway Children, the set for Katie Hims’ Billy the Girl had a strong naturalistic element – “the furthest into naturalism I’ve ever ventured”, it’s ripe with the kind of realistic detail that a lot of Scotcher’s work moves away from. She explains that “the joy of that kind of work is getting to open the doors on either these incredible historical worlds, or on the private, hidden little worlds you see walking past windows as you go down the road.” Working on the play, which dealt with a woman named Billy’s return to her family after prison, meant being “very gentle and supportive of the tone of the work, and its subtle kind of language. Early on our initial ideas swung it out into a very abstracted space but on further reading it felt we had to find a parallel between the naturalism of the language we were using and the naturalism of the materials, albeit in a very odd kind of way. The ease with which Billy’s mother wrapped things up in a comment and put them to bed is what started to stick in my visual throat, and that came out in this tidal wave of boxes and detritus.”
Ellie Kendrick and Sinéad Matthews in Pests
Scotcher talks a lot about the different visual vernaculars she uses, about aesthetic languages and semiotics, but in more verbal forms of communication, she admits that “I can be a little erratic! Given the avenues my brain takes, I don’t know what I’d do rather than apply them to storytelling and theatre. I’m lucky to have found a profession that sort of relies on having that weird tangent quality to your sort of visual mind.”
Working with Morrison and Clean Break is something she’s drawn to partly for the company’s “nurturing, ethical culture for women playwrights and directors, with so much respect and dedication ploughed into creating these pieces.” But it’s also an opportunity to find a supportive creative environment outside the lively, looser culture of immersive performance and installations. “The process of collaboration is a term that’s often thrown around to mean that the director and the designer might have coffee, but it’s so much more complex than that. When you do find a director who wants that input and is excited by looking at the pictures and saying ‘Yes, we could do that’, and is open to being as playful as I think most designers are, it’s a hugely rewarding position to be in.”
Pests is at the Royal Court from 27th March – 3rd May. For more on Joanna Scotcher’s work, visit her website.
