Designing Ghosts.

  Ibsen’s Ghosts, traditionally a 19^th Century  ‘drawing room drama’ takes place in Mrs Alving’s  home, a grand, isolated house in the country.  As a Designer it can sometimes be easy to be attracted to the pretty trimmings of a Victorian setting. However, it has been a great pleasure creating this new world for Nicki Bloom’s updated adaptation.  Working with this new script has presented enormous scope to delve beyond the traditional trappings of a period melodrama. Having been given great freedom by the director Geordie Brookman in my visual decisions, I was very excited to see where our new version could take us.

  Geordie and I approached this play with the intention of stripping it back both literally and visually.  I hoped to be able to lose the corsets and top hats and still retain a convincing and strongly atmospheric aesthetic. Presenting an abstracted, slightly distorted world existing out of time and place that still could be familiar to a contemporary audience. Interestingly, through the process of stripping Ghosts back, remarkably little embellishment was needed to bring Ibsen’s characters into the present.

  The visual influences incorporated in the design were mostly drawn from looking back at the imagery surrounding Ibsen at the time of writing.  Ibsen had a strong connection with the Artist Edvard Munch. Munch was a Symbolist Painter and fellow Norwegian, best known for ‘The Scream’. He worked closely with Ibsen, even illustrating scenes from his plays.

  Looking further at 19^th century Northern European artists, print makers and architecture, I was strongly influenced by the delicacy and fragility of the Victorian glasshouse. Its skeletal structure sitting appropriately with our stripped back approach.  Among other ideas, Geordie and I also looked closely at cutting edge, present day home design, in which the concept of the ‘Glass House’ is currently very popular.

  We are all familiar with the ‘architecturally designed’ home sitting ostentatiously in ‘harmony’ with the landscape, its transparency a means of flaunting the status of its isolation. It is easy to imagine that a present day Mrs Alving might live in such a place, floor to ceiling windows looking out an a vast estate, grand and alone, isolated and exposed.

Victoria Lamb.