Many West End and Broadway designers are quite prolific, often working on more than one show at once. British scenic designer Simon Higlett likes to keep incredibly busy. As he spoke to PLSN from England, he was in the midst of simultaneously designing three shows at that very moment and seven in total for the time period. “I average about 15 or 16 a year,” he revealed, adding, with a touch of understatement, “I’m quite busy.” Higlett maintains a disciplined regimen to tackle this heavy workload. “I divide my time between morning, afternoon and evening and have quite strict rules,” he explained. “If it’s not done by the morning, I move onto the next one, and it kind of works until deadlines approach. It’s a slight juggling, but it’s not a problem really going from one to the other because they’re always so different. They don’t cross except when the deadlines get close together.”
The award-winning designer spoke to PLSN about a show that he has designed for five different venues on two continents: Yes, Prime Minister, a theatrical adaptation of the famed British television series that ran during the 1980s (which was also revived this year and broadcast via BBC in England). Directed and co-written by Jonathan Lynn, the play chronicles the political shenanigans that go on in the office of Prime Minister Jim Hacker (Michael McKean), who is trying to sort out the devious machinations behind a multi-country oil pipeline that could benefit the U.K. and Europe, but at what cost? His slick, underhanded cabinet secretary Sir Humphrey Appleby (the hilarious Dakin Matthews) tries to disguise what is going on, while the Principal Private Secretary (Jefferson Mays) and Special Policy Advisor (Tara Summers) cope with the chaos.
Open Floor Plan
The comedic play began life at the Chichester Festival Theatre, went on to play three different theatres in the West End, and recently wrapped up a six-week run at the Geffen Theater in Los Angeles. Chichester has a thrust stage, so the initial design was different than what they had in the West End and in Los Angeles. The audience surrounded the stage on three sides.
“I’m not absolutely sure Jonathan was aware of that, because I was the first one to meet him when he got off the plane the first time, and I had to break that to him in a restaurant,” recalled Higlett. “It was quite amusing, but it was okay. We solved it relatively well for that space, which is really difficult for a set that is primarily a box set. I think it gained from starting in a place like Chichester, because it opens up more. It would been very different if we started in a proscenium.”
“Simon is one of the top West End designers,” declared Lynn. “He’s done everything and is very skillful. We worked very closely together and very fast. It didn’t take us very long to come up with a design that we wanted, I would say a day or two in terms of roughing it out, and then obviously there was lots of talking about detail. But we roughed out the ideas very quickly. It was easier for me because I was co-writer of the play and knew what I wanted to see.”
The requisite elements for the show were all in the wood and oak paneled set at the Geffen: the big doors where people enter and exit, the sofa, the PM’s desk upstage, a wall of books, part of which is a secret door that leads out to the garden, the three mullion windows overlooking the garden (through which rain is later seen), a big screen HD TV, and a large projection screen that rolls down from the ceiling when the hilariously confusing pipeline diagram is shown.
The Geffen design certainly maximized the use of the space, and the stage was wider than those in the West End. But the stages in the West End were deeper. “We did three versions in the West End, and the first one was very nice,” said Higlett. “It was a good-sized space and fitted very well, and the last time we were in the West End we were in a tiny, almost studio theatre where the front row sat with their feet on the carpet of the room. It’s been through quite some transformations, but it’s been an interesting project. Although it’s set in Chequers it’s a room that doesn’t really exist in Chequers. We discovered that you’re not really allowed to work there. Because we’ve got an office in it, it’s slightly out of keeping with what the proper Chequers is.”
A Country Retreat
A 17th century Tudor house donated to the British government nearly 100 years ago to serve as a place for prime ministers to retreat from the craziness of London and Parliament, Chequers is like the U.K. version of Camp David. “It’s not a working place,” explained Higlett. “Although they meet foreign dignitaries usually for dinners and getting away in the country, it’s literally in the middle of nowhere, as far as you can be in England. It’s in Buckinghamshire, relatively a long, long way away from anything. It has acres of space and is very private. When we first needed to do the project, I tried to get in or have a look, and that’s just not allowed. It’s one of those places you just can’t go. You can go to 10 Downing Street and the usual places in London, but not in there.”
So how does one go about designing a set based on a famous house that they have not seen? It turns out that Norma Major, the wife of former PM John Major, created a coffee table book entitled Chequers: The Prime Minister’s Country House and Its History that documented every room. “ I amalgamated about 10 rooms into one,” revealed Higlett. “It’s a made up room, and I suspect anyone who knows Chequers would slightly smile at what I’ve done.”
The set may be an amalgamation, but it doesn’t stray too far from the facts. When Higlett first meet Lynn, the director had French doors in the original script to allow characters to come in from the garden. But the designer stressed that “they didn’t have French doors and never had them. That’s one of the things that I discovered, hence that slightly secret library door upstage. That was a way we thought of getting her [the Special Policy Advisor] out into the garden. In fact, there is a secret door in Chequers, so we were slightly influenced by the building. If we put French doors in, anybody who knows Chequers would know we got it wrong.”
Wrestling with Realism
The biggest challenge for Higlett was fitting in everything that the script required. “The door had to be in a space where everyone could see, because of that big entrance when Sir Humphrey throws the doors open and is silhouetted. Getting the doors and the desk in the right position and the [projection] screen, because everyone needs to see the screen when it comes down, that’s been a real challenge in various spaces. It’s just making sure that everyone can see. It’s making sure that everything fits within the space and has some kind of reality. I know Jonathan and I fussed for some time about whether it should not be a real space — we should stop the walls halfway up and surround it with trees because it is in the middle of the country — but eventually we decided it should be a real space. It was touch and go for a bit as to whether it would be.”
Another important element was rain. After Jim Hacker prays to God for strength during a political crisis, his response is a startlingly loud thunderclap and then rain pouring down outside of the mullion windows. Higlett is no stranger to utilizing rain onstage. He designed Singing in the Rain, which recently finished playing in the West End, and he also just designed Grapes of Wrath, which features a huge rainstorm. He says the key is to find a good company to handle it.
“The days of having a hose and connecting it to a little pipe with holes drilled in it are over,” said the designer. “It’s much more sophisticated now. There’s a certain amount of control, and you can get rain under high-pressure. Collecting is the problem, because it will go everywhere you don’t want it to go. They key is having a big enough gutter and some kind of drainage.”
In the show’s original conception at Chichester, “around the front of the stage we had the outside world as well, so it actually rained on the pavement all around. We had a much bigger take on it originally, and, in fact, coming off of the front of the stage we had a real garden with lavender bushes. The pavement actually got wet, it flooded while it rained, and we had real rain out the back, so it was much bigger in its original form. Every time we’ve done, it got ever so slightly smaller or different, but the rain has always been a bit of a challenge.”
A Design from Afar
The most surprising revelation of the interview with Higlett for this article was his admission that he never stepped foot in the Geffen Theater and did everything with Lynn via email, then mailed him a model of the set. “I usually like to go to the space that I’m designing for at least once, but with photographs and everything I got it,” recalled the designer. “I don’t usually do that. I think this is the fifth time I’ve designed it now for a different space. It’s become quite a challenge from that point-of-view.”
The set sits at an approximate 45° angle from the audience, and Higlett said that the idea for that came from the initial Chichester run. “The stage there is a hexagon, so the back wall is a point. That’s what I quite liked about the evolution of the show, because if I’d done it straight in the proscenium, the temptation would have been a straight back wall because of all the information I had to get on it. It works quite well in the Geffen as far as I can see, and certainly in the West End it did.”
“It’s been a really interesting project,” summed up Higlett. “It was really nice to put something that was an iconic television series on stage, because everyone in England was not sure it was going to work. Both original actors had died and were so well known in their parts. But our original cast was so amazing, and it worked really well. It’s just gone on and on and on and has been done in Australia and New Zealand.”
