In the show within a show called ‘Noises Off’ a troop of actors perform a show called ‘Nothing On’ and so the set for ‘Noises Off’ is actually the set of ‘Nothing On’.
Vicki Smith, Set Designer for ‘Noises Off’ at The Denver Center, had to pack a lot of design into not a lot of space but she did it with room to spare.
Two inches, to be exact.
I spoke with Smith on the day of the show’s dress rehearsal and she sounded off about 'Noises Off'. Read what she had to say after the jump.
Drew: What are the challenges of designing the set for ‘Noises Off’.
Vicki: Because this is the classic door-slamming farce we’ve got all these doors, actually seven doors, a window, and a curtained entrance, and they all have to be in a very specific order. I’s very inflexible and it was meant to be in a proscenium space which this isn’t. I’ve put in a phony proscenium here but the problem here is that we don’t have much depth at all so trying to get this unit to revolve, well, it’s very tigh. We have maybe two inches of space before we hit the back wall when this turns.
Given my druthers, I would want more parts of the set on the turntable so that people wouldn’t have to pick up and carry things but I just cannot do that here. There simply isn’t enough room and the doors can’t flex so they are where they are.
How long has this project taken for you from start to finish?
I think we met on this in March for the first time and I had my first sketches to the director in April and a model of it in May and then I’ll be leaving here in four days so this has been a long project.
How did you become a professional set designer?
I was an artist at first, a sculptor, and I wasn’t making any money. I’m one of the few people in the world who went into theatre to make money. Most people do not. But I had been living in Seattle at the time and working with a film director who did film animation and I met a bunch of people from the theatre program and I thought maybe this is for me. So that’s how I got into it.
For those of us who don’t know what a set designer does can you give it to us in a nutshell?
Well the way the whole thing looks is completely my doing. The ground plan is what’s given to you to let you know that you need to have the certain door arrangement on two levels but beyond that you can kind of do with it what you will.
How would you describe the set you’ve come up with for this production of ‘Noises Off’?
It’s a 16th century building that’s been ‘extensively remodeled’ and we wanted this kind of Tudor style with the cross timber and that’s a fairly easy style to research. I have a number of books on English architecture that show you both the paneling and the cross timbering. The specifics of I wanted to do was not get so pushed by the technical demands that it didn’t still look like a house and didn’t still have furniture and things on the wall. I did a bunch of English countryside cliches - dog pictures, antlers, fish on the wall, big flowered chintz. That’s english country style and I just did ‘em all.”
Were you influenced at all by the movie version of ‘Noises Off’?
I had never seen the movie or a stage version before but it is certainly the most complicated script I’ve ever read because in Act 2 it rotates and now we’re backstage.
And backstage we have the classic backstage construction - dumpy. Through the window you see the actors performing theirplay and a million things going wrong backstage even though everybody is trying to be quiet and hushing each other so in the script there are a a series of lines that are the play within the play and there are lots of stage directions and there’s as much of that as there are in the script and I’ve never seen a script like that before. I just read it and thought ‘oh my goodness that is extraordinary’. Why would a director want to do that to himself? It’s so difficult.
What’s the difference between good set design and bad set design?
Um, boy that’s a hard question to answer.
You should generally be coming away with the whole picture because the first thing is to tell the story and scripts vary wildly about location and specificity and what the director wants to say and you need to be able to tie that to the script and augment it, not distract from it.
'Noises Off' opens tonight at The Denver Center in The Stage Theatre. For tickets or more information visit www.DenverCenter.org.
