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The Guardian
02-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
William Dudley obituary
The English Stage Company at the Royal Court is world-renowned for having launched a radical phase in English playwriting in the mid-1950s. But equally significant was the concomitant overhaul in British theatre stage design, and William Dudley, who has died aged 78, was one of its outstanding new stars. The age of painted backcloths and front cloths was now the sole preserve of pantomime, and exquisite costumes and furniture were replaced with rough, raw material and free-standing functional objects. The change, rendering stage design more architectural, more 'art school' and certainly more muscularly poetic, had been instigated by Sean Kenny in Oliver! and John Bury at Stratford East and the Royal Shakespeare Company. The transition was supervised by the 'Motleys', three sisters, Margaret and Sophie Harris, and Elizabeth Montgomery, John Gielgud's design collaborators, who launched an influential design course in 1966. Their mantra was design, not decoration. Dudley emerged in Sloane Square, under the aegis of the Motley-influenced great minimalist designer Jocelyn Herbert, consort of George Devine, the ESC founder, alongside such other luminaries as Hayden Griffin, Deirdre Clancy, John Gunter and John Napier. They would all go on to work in the major companies, in new plays, operas and musicals around the world, transforming the idea that mainland Europe had of British theatre design as the province of such throwback decorative geniuses as Cecil Beaton and Leslie Hurry. In a prodigious career, Dudley started at the Court with a stark design for Peter Gill's revival of The Duchess of Malfi in 1971 and embraced a reputation-enhancing design for Mozart's Die Eintführung at Glyndebourne in 1979; Jonathan Pryce's Hamlet at the Court in 1980, where Pryce spoke the words of his own dead father in a medical cabinet setting of skulls; and, in 1985, the triumphant National Theatre staging of the medieval Mystery plays, a trilogy in a Yorkshire dialect version by Tony Harrison, directed by Bill Bryden (a key collaborator in Dudley's career), beneath a glittering constellation of dustbin braziers, domestic utensils and hurricane lamps. Dudley's designs from the get-go were immersive and environmentally organic long before such terms were fashionable and deadly. He was an elfin, impish curly-headed presence in the preparatory theatre, bedecked with tools and flecked with paint, seemingly unmindful of sleep or recreation outside of his obsessive dedication. In 2006, in a collaboration with his future wife, the director Lucy Bailey (they had been together since 1994 and married in 2008), he designed Titus Andronicus, starring Douglas Hodge, one of the most memorable productions seen at Shakespeare's Globe on the South Bank. He transformed the space into a theatre of death, decking the pillars in funereal black and re-energising the whole arena, said Michael Billington, in 'an astonishing makeover.' Bill, as he was generally known, was the son of Dorothy (nee Stacey), a school dinner lady, and William Dudley, a builder and decorator. Born in Islington, north London, he studied at St Martin's School of Art and the Slade. On a Saturday job in the Canonbury bookshop, he stumbled across the amateur Tower theatre nearby in 1963 and found himself painting, then building, sets, while still training. His first design, in 1966 at the Tower, was for Machiavelli's Mandragora, with costumes by Sue Plummer, with whom he worked and lived for the next decade or so. He warmed up for The Mysteries (which opened in the first part of the trilogy in 1977) with other Gill productions – notably Edward Bond's The Fool (1975) about the country poet John Clare, and Gill's own beautiful Cardiff memory play, Small Change (1976), both at the Court, and a stunning National promenade production by Bryden of Flora Thompson's Lark Rise to Candleford (1978, adapted from the novels by Keith Dewhurst). Dudley responded inherently to such a piece of work set in rural communities at the end of the 19th century. His design for Peter Hall's production of The Ring at Bayreuth in 1983 sought a direct naivety in the confection of naked Rhine maidens in a soft tank reflected vertically in a suspended mirror, while Siegfried wandered in an Arthur Rackham-like tawny forest. Dudley was the first designer fully to exploit the amazing double-drum revolve in the new National, when, for Howard Davies's magnificent 1988 revival of Dion Boucicault's Irish melodrama of the 1866 Fenian uprising, The Shaughraun, he conjured the whole of county Sligo, mythical and realistic, with its crumbling ruins, abbey arches strewn with ivy, virgin statues and peasant cottages, with a glittering band of starlit sea beyond. After The Mysteries, his biggest theatre projects were in Glasgow with Bryden. Having commandeered the old Harland and Wolff engine shed in Govan, they produced two of the most spectacular and sensational productions of the past century. The Ship (1990) told the drama of the last great liner built on the Clyde, as the hull slid, literally, from its timber supports away from the audience … who were left to lament and celebrate the end of an era. Then, in The Big Picnic (1994), they recreated the terrible beauty of first world war trench warfare, night-time eeriness, search ights and star shell tracer bullets. The hallucination of the Angel of Mons appeared over the western front, and the audience. The 'show' was rooted in the fate of local Govan lads, with a live soundtrack of anthems and folk rock. In 2004, Dudley's range expanded into designing not only David Hare's brilliant documentary drama, The Permanent Way, about the scandal and tragedy of railway disasters, and a superb revival by Roger Michell of Pinter's Old Times – a mirrored floor and gauze surround expressed exactly the sexual and social ambiguity in the play – but also an ingenious, kaleidoscopically shifting projection setting for Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Woman in White, directed by Trevor Nunn. Personally, I worried about this intrusion of video and CG imagery into design, but Dudley had no fears about it and had taken it one step further in his panoramic designs for Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia (2002), a nine-hour trilogy investigating the seeds of the Russian revolution and the conflict between individual liberty and ideological prescription, directed by Nunn at the National. His last work – before a diagnosis of Alzheimer's – included a wonderfully agile design for Turgenev's Fortune's Fool at the Old Vic in 2013, starring Iain Glen and Richard McCabe, and Bailey's brilliantly conceived 2017 production of Agatha Christie's Witness for the Prosecution in the old County Hall, former home of the Greater London council on the South Bank. Dudley always reminded me of the Artful Dodger. There was something cheeky and subversive about him. He played the accordion, and the spoons; a real north London lad. He won seven Olivier awards – only Judi Dench can match him in that number. He was appointed OBE in 2021. His younger sister, Jeanie, died in 2006. He is survived by Lucy and their sons, Ollie and Billy. William 'Bill' Dudley, theatre designer, born 4 March 1947; died 31 May 2025
Telegraph
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Theatregoers put off booking shows over long run times
Theatregoers are putting off booking shows in the West End over long run-times, a new report has suggested. A performance time of more than two-and-a-half hours has been cited in a survey of over 20,000 of London's theatre patrons as a factor that discourages them from booking again. Veteran West End producer Patrick Gracey said there are an increasing number of shorter plays on offer now with running times of 75 or 85 minutes instead of 150 minutes. 'I do think audiences enjoy that,' he told The Telegraph, but added that the length 'depends entirely on what is appropriate for that story'. Theatregoers were asked in the survey, conducted by the Society of London Theatre (SOLT) and UK Theatre, what factors discouraged them from booking again. More than 22 per cent said longer run times, 21 per cent cited a show without an interval and 24 per cent complained that a lack of public transport options in the evening was an issue. The results form part of SOLT and UK Theatre's 2025 State of British Theatre report, released on Thursday. Mr Gracey, who also serves as chair of SOLT's policy, research and advocacy committee, explained that typically musicals have a longer show time than plays. 'Not a huge number of shows have a run time over two-and-a-half hours, you tend to find more musicals do,' he said. However, he added: 'I don't think run times have changed that much…I think at the end of the day what producers and artists are driven by is what is the best version of this story. 'A night in the theatre can be the most extraordinary thing, no matter how long it is if the story is told well.' Discussing the public transport offering complaint cited in the survey, he blamed a bad 'perception' of the transport system. He explained: 'Over the past few years, we've seen various strikes and other issues with the rail network, and whether or not that is true for most people, it's that perception. 'So what we want to ensure is that moving forward, we hope that we have great transport links, because London does have great transport links that can ensure people feel comfortable coming to town and catching a show.' New figures also revealed that theatre attendance continued at a record high last year, with the West End alone surpassing 17.1 million attendees and generating more than £1billion in revenue for the first time in history. By comparison, the Premier League saw 2.5 million fewer attendees than the West End in the same timeframe. Discussing the positive findings, Mr Gracey said: 'The strength of theatre is that it's one of the few places where you go and sit in a room with a whole lot of other people where you can't be playing with your phone and you get to experience that emotion live. 'I think that's wonderful because cinema attendance hasn't returned to the same level as theatre after post-pandemic… so it says a lot about theatre that that is actually what people go for, that people are willing to spend their money and their time [on it].' The report found that cinema attendance was down by 28 per cent in the UK last year. Mr Gracey said: 'What makes theatre unique, and that difference with cinema, is that live element, being in the room with those actors and experiencing that emotion with a group of strangers is the best thing in the world, and which is why I produce theatre.' In the survey, 84 per cent of respondents said they were more likely to book a show if they had heard about it from friends and family, while 68 per cent said they valued familiarity with source material over recognisable celebrity names performing. Recent star-studded casts in the West End have included celebrities Rami Malek, Tom Holland, Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick. Elsewhere, the report found that West End ticket prices have fallen by 5.3 per cent in real terms since 2019, with more than a quarter priced under £35 and fewer than 4 per cent exceeding £150. 'I think that it's down to a combination of great shows and smart pricing,' Mr Gracey said of theatre's record numbers and revenue.
