The stage designer Timothy O’Brien, who has died of prostate cancer aged 93, was the last of an extraordinary postwar generation of innovative and influential designers – Sean Kenny, John Bury, Ralph Koltai – who utterly transformed the way our theatre looks today: they displaced the pictorial and decorative theatre of such designers as Oliver Messel, Leslie Hurry and Roger Furse, with raked (and bare) stages, art gallery artefacts and symbolic statuary, new technology, platforms and trucks, stone, wood and leather.
O’Brien designed the first production of Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane (1964); the first London revival of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, also in 1964, starring Nicol Williamson, with a real stone rock and a faintly perceived tree (“My last tree was by Giacometti,” said the playwright); and the Covent Garden premiere of Michael Tippett’s The Knot Garden (1970), using a backdrop of sash cord and a powerfully projected image of sun shining through a high canopy of beech trees to bring the stage alive in the spirit of the music.
