There was upheaval in the world of British theatre design in the 1980s when, said Peter Hall, director and founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company and Laurence Olivier’s successor at the National Theatre, the stage “explored a new world of space and lightness, of suggestion rather than actuality, of eclecticism rather than period accuracy”.
A crucial participant in this upheaval was the spirited and inspirational Pamela Howard, who has died aged 87. She was deeply embedded in the contemporary European theatre, and also influenced by the earlier visionary, exploratory theatre design projects of Adolphe Appia and Edward Gordon Craig, as 19th-century stage realism was challenged, and Caspar Neher, Bertolt Brecht’s mid-20th-century designer, placed the actor in a brightly lit alternative world without decorative furniture or antimacassars.
