My father, Douglas Heap, who has died aged 88, enjoyed a successful career as a theatrical designer, creating sets for Rada and the RSC as well as many West End productions.
Doug established the scenic design course at Rada in 1969, delivering 15 sets a year for the acting students’ productions until the late 1980s. In 1971, he came up with the designs for the play Boesman and Lena at the Royal Court theatre, in Chelsea, for the South African playwright Athol Fugard, whose works examined the apartheid system. Their collaboration on Sizwe Banzi Is Dead and The Island took them to the West End and then to New York, and continued through the 80s.
