Set Designer, Sonia Tong

The tricky thing about touring set for King Lear is that you have to produce 3 palaces, 2 military camps, 1 hovel and various rural landscapes that can flatten to fit into a coach at the end of each performance The concept for the production was to have arches that frame the actors and represent the monarchy in its prime and triumphant splendour. These would then crumble away With the increasing feral nature of the play the arches became trees

‘King Lear’ marks the fall of a man from the highest pedestal to a broken and humbled creature. The literal crumbling of his surroundings is a popular interpretation for design, but by no means an exhausted concept. The purpose of the set is to emphasise the director’s vision for Shakespeare’s text and give it a strong visual context for the audience to relate to. So how do you move from a burnished palace to a rain-soaked heath? A prevailing image presented itself in the similarity between ornate candlesticks and nature’s ornament of trees. Side by side they form arches: frames to define the exterior and within, physical and psychological; disconnected, they isolate lonely moments across the stage floor. Gold filigree, decadent embellishment and extravagant drapes are physically stripped away by the characters themselves, exposing cold, twisted skeletons and a shroud of ghostly leaves that scatter across the ground. A feral and decrepit hovel, alien to the king’s former glories, emerges from the depths of his palace and waste sprawls across the stage as locations, actions and consequences flow into one another. Concealed above on the high platform, the characters watch the events as spectators, overseers, perhaps even facilitators in the on-going drama. Finally, we mustn’t forget that after the tale is spun and laid out along the ground, the grand palaces, military camps, forests and beggars shack must be quickly swept up and folded away, when we will retreat to our travelling wagon once more.