Beehiiv is where I’ll be sharing a selection of posts from “But anyway, I digress…” which is my regular blog over on my personal website — to see all my posts in full, and for more information about my writing, head over to philipholyman.com
8th July 2025
One of my nerdy passions is stage design. and I’ve got a little section of a bookshelf dedicated to the subject. Every now and then, I take some of these books off the shelf and I leaf through them with the same joy and fascination that other people might look at books on gardening, photography, cookery (I do that, too), fashion or architecture. Packed with images of shows I’ve never seen and can only fantasise about, journeys through my stage design library are one of my guaranteed good mood boosters.
This passion collides with a slight problem when you’re a writer, though. 99 times out of 100, it’s not my place to get involved with decisions about what the set and costumes look like for theatre productions of my work, or even about what the core concept of the scenic and costume design might be. That is rightly the proper place for the designer and the director to concern themselves with. What I think, as the writer, is pretty much immaterial — even when the rest of the creative team are busy translating a vision to the stage which first started out in my head and on my page.
It’s a little bit easier for me to poke my nose in when I’m fulfilling the role of dramaturg (whether I wrote the playscript or not), but even there, I have to tread carefully, mindful not to be a complicating or contradictory voice in a process which already has lots of people thrashing out ideas. I’m also very aware that I’ve got no practical design experience or capability myself, so even when I do have ideas (usually somewhat overambitious ones), I have to be selective about what to speak up about and what it’s within the resources of a production to deliver.
The three legends on my design shelf are all German — Bettina Meyer, Erich Wonder and Katrin Brack. (If anyone can find me a good and affordable book of images on my fourth legend, Johannes Schütz, PLEASE let me know!) Of these, it’s Katrin Brack I return to most often: her book Katrin Brack: Bühnenbild/Stages is like catnip to me. She exemplifies a principle which really excites me whenever I see it upheld in any art form, but especially in stage design: using just one element and really going to town with it.
Many of Brack’s designs do exactly that, and the fact that this principle is often being applied within a very large performance space in some of Germany, Austria and Switzerland’s biggest venues only serves to make its impact more substantial. Just looking at some of the production photographs can set something tingling through my tummy and make my heart beat faster. I can only imagine what it must be like to experience these designs for real, firsthand.
There’s the giant glass goblet filled with water for Oscar Wilde’s Salome (dir. Dimiter Gotscheff, Akademietheater, Vienna, 2004); the auditorium filled with nothing but fog for Anton Chekhov’s Ivanov (dir. Dimiter Gotscheff, Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Berlin, 2005); the empty stage under a continual drizzle of rain for Heinrich von Kleist’s Prinz Friedrich of Homburg (dir. Armin Petras, Schauspiel Frankfurt, 2006); the constant downpour of snow for a mash-up of Molière’s The Misanthrope/Don Juan/Tartuffe/The Miser (dir. Luk Perceval, Salzburger Festspiele, 2007); the forest of floor-to-ceiling silver tinsel strands for Schnitzler’s Anatol (dir. Luk Perceval, Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, Berlin, 2008) or the same thing with gold tinsel for Büchner/Leipzig/Revolte (dir. Thomas Thieme, Centraltheater, Leipzig, 2009); I could go on and on.
For some reason, the ones that delight me most are the ones with a perpetual shower of confetti and streamers: Bernard-Marie Koltès’s Kampf des Negers und der Hunde (dir. Dimiter Gotscheff, Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Berlin, 2003) and, my total favourite, Molière’s Tartuffe (dir. Dimiter Gotscheff, Salzburger Festspiele and Thalia Theater, Hamburg, 2006). The image at the top is from that Tartuffe and could well be my favourite stage design image, ever. (It was taken by © Wolfgang Schreiner, and with copious apologies, I’ve had to use an image found on the internet and enlarge it, which is why it’s not in sharp focus, so I hope I’m not doing it a disservice by showing it in less than perfect resolution…)
I’ve been asking myself why these high-concept one-concept designs fire me up so much — and why I felt the urge to write a post about them here. I think I’ve decided it’s the combination of extreme simplicity and extreme versatility which they enable. On one level, confetti and streamers pouring down onto the stage and performers for a couple of hours is exactly that and no more. (And is quite possibly a total nightmare for stage managers — I do sympathise with them when faced with designs and designers like these.)
But on another level, you could read pretty much anything you liked into what the confetti and streamers might signify or represent. That’s not an artistic cop-out. Far from it. I think it takes huge courage to settle on such a reduced palette for creative expression and then to lean into it with such force and such commitment. I think what you end up with is something which people who encounter it cannot help but have a response to, a mixture of the emotional and the intellectual.
Such design concepts are so grand and so opaque that you couldn’t be accused of using them to impose any kind of definitive meaning or message on the audience. What they feel and what they think is up to them, as it should be. But chances are you’re much more likely to provoke a wide range of impassioned and instinctive responses with one big bold element than you are with something that uses multiple elements. Look at that, we’re saying when we put one big bold element out there. Absorb that. Deal with that. Direct your emotions and your attentions to this one thing. Ignore everything else for a while.
Maybe what I’m describing is only achievable, or more readily achievable, within certain strands of creative practice — visual art and design; music; dance; gardening; architecture. Maybe this is something more achievable within the realm of the non-verbal than the verbal. I can’t easily see how I’d apply the same principle within a piece of prose or theatre writing, to reproduce that effect of enormous concentration and magnification that seems to appeal to me so much. Something for me to think about… I mean, I do like a challenge.
In your own practice, how do you — or how could you — explore working with one big bold element, and what effects does it or could it have — on you as the maker, on the work that you make, and on the people who encounter it?