Lizzie Clachan:  A Stage Beyond The Image

“It’s really the broad strokes of the energy and rhythm of a piece that I respond to early on as a designer. Then a tentative process of interrogation, daydreaming and research to create a framework on which the design can be imagined”  (Lizzie Clachan).

In a conversation with fellow designer Joanna Parker, Lizzie Clachan reflects on her performance design across theatre, opera and devised performance. Reflecting on the speculatively imagined spaces of the model and drawings as three-dimensional images that prefigure the work within the rehearsal, she offers a remarkable insight into her working process.  These images do not prescribe; more they offer up imagined spaces for playful inhabitation, laying down the foundations for the designer’s relationship to an evolving dramaturgy that lives beyond the image.

Lizzie Clachan is an award-winning stage designer whose recent credits include Life of Galileo(dir. Joe Wright, Young Vic 2017), The Suppliant Women (dir. Ramin Gray, ATC-Lyceum Edinburgh, 2017), Yerma (dir. Simon Stone, Young Vic 2016), Cyprus Avenue (dir Vicky Featherstone, Abbey Theatre Dublin and Royal Court Theatre London), and The Skriker (dir. Sarah Frankom, Manchester International Festival and Manchester Royal Exchange, 2015). Her work across Europe includes regular collaborations with Katie Mitchell – most recently Pelleas et Melisande (Aix International Opera Festival, 2016), The Forbidden Zone (Salzburg Festival/Schaubühne Berlin, 2016), A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (Burgtheater Vienna, 2014), and Le Vin Herbé (Staatsoper im Schiller Berlin, 2013). As a founder member of Shunt, she designed all their productions, including Amato Saltoni (2005), Tropicana (2003), Dance Bear Dance (2002), The Tennis Show (2000) and The Ballad of Bobby Francois (1999). Clachan is recognized both for the extraordinary precision of her stage landscapes (as with Simon Stephens’ Wastwater, 2011) and the conceptual line of her work (as with April de Angelis’s Jumpy, 2011). Working across different scales with classic works, new writing, devised work and adaptations, Lizzie Clachan is quite simply one of the most influential designers at work in Europe today.