“The World is as Blue as an Orange”.

                  Paul Eluard, French surrealist.

My first response to designing Blue Orange was to delve immediately into the world of the Surrealist art movement. Their extraordinary visual commentary of the subconscious seemed the perfect backdrop. But, the pleasure and challenge in designing Joe Penhall’s play is that it requires very little visual embellishment.

The setting is contemporary London, a consulting room in a public psychiatric hospital. It is a wonderfully intense and dynamic actor’s piece in which the three characters engage in what could be described a verbal boxing match. When designing the set, the chief aim of director Adam Cook and I was to create a broad, unobstructed arena like space in which this contest could take place. With this in mind, a circular format was used and the stage bought forward to create a space as intimate as possible in the Dunstan Playhouse, literally giving the audience ringside seats.

Deciding not to create an actual description of the location, I have drawn on the typical materials and textures associated with such an institution, choosing for our hospital, concrete, glass and aging London brick. These visual elements are evocative of the deceptively solid forms that intersect so incredulously in many Surrealist images. Like the two doctors in the play, the old and the new are set uneasily against one another.

These hard elements offer no comfort to the patient, Christopher. For him the interior and exterior are equally hostile. He is trapped by the enveloping walls and haunted by half perceived forms beyond, both real and imagined. The use of glass was partially inspired by the 2007 art installation ‘Blind Light’ by British artist Anthony Gormley. Visitors to this exhibition entered a great glass box and became lost in the enclosed mist.

          Closer to home, the worn out brickwork dressed up with a new glass facade is an architectural trend that seems to be becoming more and more common. It is a familiar situation in which a desperately overstretched institution is given an expensive but superficial facelift. Shiny architectural additions are just one of the many forms these band-aid treatments can take. The Royal London Hospital itself is currently undergoing a one billion dollar redevelopment that includes among other things a ‘Health Mall’ housed within a huge, sparkling glass plaza.

Victoria Lamb 2008