Frankenstein typically brings to mind gothic imagery and schlocky horror films. Did you set out to declutter the story of those ideas with your design?
Yes, we walked away from a classic gothic re-enactment. We were also referencing the Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In, which replaced the darkness of a gothic story with a white wasteland. It was a refreshing view and just as scary. One of our first thoughts was: what is the source of power that would allow this life force to be regenerated? If you look at the mid 19th-century [Frankenstein was published in 1818], electricity has an extraordinary change on society. Rather than the mythical business of lightning and thunder, we show power generated through electricity as a fantastical thing.
We erected a giant structure on the ceiling, with around 3,500 old lightbulbs lit up, stretching across the stage and the auditorium. It was inspired by a Jeff Wall photograph that was based on Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, depicting the character in a room full of bulbs. We used the lights in various ways to shock the audience – Danny’s idea was to have a very visceral engagement with the play. When all of the lights were on full it was blinding – and they hung so close to the audience that they could even feel the heat from them. We also referenced the transformative use of steam with a steampunk section in the play.
You have worked with director Danny Boyle several times. What is he like as a collaborator?
I love working with Danny. He is very visually astute. He’ll come to the first meeting with a pile of books and images to discuss. There will be half a dozen images in his head before I even get involved, and they stay throughout the project. From a designer’s point of view, that’s very exciting. Some directors don’t care as much about the look.
Both Danny and I started out in theatre and then spent years working in film. So it was extraordinary fun to be back in theatre, where you can evoke ideas in minimal ways. At this time we were also preparing to do the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony. We became fascinated by bells and visited a bell foundry in London; we were messing around there and found one that was rung in Shakespeare’s time. It’s quite a precious piece but they loaned it to us and we hung this ancient bell above the audience. At one of the previews, someone in the audience actually pulled on it – she jumped out of her skin at the noise. Danny also brought in the musicians Underworld, who he had worked with on Trainspotting; they sampled the bell ringing and amplified it to be pumped around the sound system.
The Olivier stage is vast and often quite empty in Frankenstein, which exaggerates the sense of loneliness
When we first looked around the Olivier, it was stripped bare because it was in between productions. The scale of the space gives it a presence, like a sort of landscape. Our play was really like a road movie, a journey from one landscape to another. It’s a tricky business knowing how much to put on to a stage and how much to let it breathe. But Frankenstein is performance-led. I could have watched Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller in a black box. We got enticed by the mechanics of the Olivier’s drum revolve, too, which we brought back into use. If you open up the revolve and look down into it, it’s like looking into some sort of space project.
The elements are used strikingly but very sparingly in the show
That came out of Nick Dear’s script. Also, you don’t have much time to get things on and off the stage or to imply something. So we had fire, rain, the earth and a sense of discovering nature, finding the world through the smell of the grass and the feel of heat. We had to be economical because there were so many things to do.
The design palette is predominantly grey, white and black but there is a deep red colour in the opening scenes, when the Creature is born
We wanted a sense of life and had looked at some images of an icy landscape with a drop of blood in the middle; that juxtaposition between the richness of the heat of the blood and a frosty cold world. There were many ideas about how we might give birth to the Creature. We had seen an exhibition by an artist who filled sacks full of seeds and hung them. They looked amazing and alien-like.
The structure that the Creature emerges from combines an idea of embryonic skin and birth with Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man figure. It was a lot of fun getting that structure to work. The actors were brave – they were almost naked and it had lots of cold liquid inside it. I remember sitting there, looking at Benedict Cumberbatch coming out of it and thinking to myself: “Mark, what are you doing?”
Frankenstein streams on YouTube from 7pm on 30 April as part of National Theatre at Home. Available until 7 May.
