At the Almeida theatre in Islington, in 2000, Eileen Diss, the Bafta award-winning television and stage designer, who has died aged 93, conjured a double bill of Harold Pinter plays – an early one, The Room, set in an ordinary large house, and a new piece, Celebration, set in a swanky metropolitan restaurant, not unlike the Ivy.
It was one of many collaborations she had with Pinter, and it exemplified her meticulous, poetically imagined but still naturalistic talent for reproducing the writer’s imagination in concrete terms. She was never abstract or surreal in her designs, but specialised, in her theatre work, in evocative interiors.
