INTERVIEW: Alex Lowde on designing the elaborately costumed School for Scandal at the RSC, and why gossip and pink rule the show
After Shakespeare but long before Bridgerton, there was The School for Scandal, Sheridan’s brilliantly biting comedy of manners. The show boasts some of the most elaborate costumes seen at the RSC. Designer Alex Lowde tells Gill Sutherland about his work, and why gossip and pink rule in the production.
How did you become a theatre designer?
It’s quite a while ago now, so I think it was easier for me than people coming up now. I did a drama degree at Hull, where I studied the history of the dramaturgical canon, then I did a postgrad where we just studied set and costume design, which was a very intense year where you designed about six plays, making a model box, presented it and got critique back.
Then I started working as an assistant, basically, to much more established designers.We used to make a lot more physical models, whereas people use CAD and computer models.I think it’s still really helpful to make a physical model for people to see, and for the actors to understand the space that they’re going to inhabit, in a way that you don’t really get with a computer-generated image.
The interesting thing about your work is the contrast between the big and open sets and – well, in this – more lavish costumes. Tell us about that.
I’d say I always like to work in quite an architectural way, but also quite a minimal way because I feel that ultimately, you know, the actor is the thing. And I always feel with my design, I always try to make it about the actor in this space and that they always resonate above all else. So I always try and keep the surround or the architecture around them fairly simple, never overpowering the actor.There are different schools of design, like in America, the designs are often much busier. There’s much more to look at, but I always personally just prefer to put the emphasis on the actor and the prop and the costume and sort of serve them essentially. It all depends on the piece in a way and what your resource is.
What’s it like seeing the world through a designer’s eyes?
I think as a designer you have a heightened sense of looking.
At the moment I’m doing another piece, The New Real, which is at The Other Place [the new political play by David Edgar].So we’ve been looking at lots of brutalist architecture as the play is set in a fictional Eastern European country, so we’ve been looking at lots of Soviet era buildings. Which are kind of incredible.
You’ve worked with The School for Scandal director Tinuke Craig previously, how do you start the work process?
We always vigorously read the text, and what’s interesting about this one is there’s so many versions. Sheridan was constantly updating and changing the text, so we read around it a lot, and then we have a conversation about what we want to extract. It’s very funny and very frothy, and it also has this really neat parallel between the 18th century world of gossip and letters, to a more contemporaneous world of newsprint through to X and the sort of Twittersphere. It feels both set in 1777 and contemporary, so we want to really mine that.
So the world we’ve got is a sort of fusion, it’s like a collision of the 18th century pushed into a kind of contemporary world.
What is the set is like?
It’s essentially a grid on the floor, with traps within it, and then at the back we have a very simplified Georgian room facade – with moulding from the era in a very swollen, exaggerated form, and then the whole set is this fluorescent pink colour. The set, the props, all the costumes, basically everything is pink, because it felt titillating and scandalous, befitting of a world where scandal is ripe, and everyone’s sort of lusty, or longing for somebody that’s unavailable.
The costumes look lavish, but kind of punky – tell us about them.
We tried to follow the 18th century silhouette, but we’ve then done things like cut the dresses very short. We’ve used lots of contemporary fabrics; in the 18th century it would have been all sort of natural things, like wool and a lot of silk, and we’ve basically followed that, but we’ve gone for various super-saturated wools, because obviously now with contemporary dye you can get those hot colours, whereas back then everything would have been a bit more pastel. We’ve upped the ante on everything, so everyone is a bit more sort of throbbing essentially. Then we’ve done things like digital printing, where we’ve printed some of the dresses using a toile de jour pattern, which again was very popular in the 18th century, showing village life within the illustration.
How was it seeing it all come together on stage during a performance?
Obviously we’ve done fittings individually with everybody, but then suddenly you see everybody there at once. So we make dressing notes as to how people are wearing things. There’s so much fabric in all these clothes, some of them have up to about 22 metres, so there’s a lot of fabric that can go awry. It’s looking at how it moves around the body, making sure it all sits in a sort of controlled way on the person on stage. Because we’ve gone so hard with the pink, my concern has been will we be able to tell who anybody is, because pretty much everyone is in pink. But we put so much work into the silhouettes and the characters, and actually when I saw it on stage I was very relieved, because I think it does really work, you can really tell people’s status and where they sit in Sheridan’s ranking.
Is doing period a different approach to a modern production?
If you’re doing something modern it’s very different, there’s much more talk back and forth about what the character is and stuff. But with the 18th century, because we don’t know it, it doesn’t have that sort of nuance in a way. So, very crudely, if you’re top dog you have the biggest dress, and it sort of scales down from there.
The actors have been absolutely joyous to work with, because they’ve all been so excited to wear these amazing costumes that are made in-house at the RSC. The costume workshops are credible and have amazingly skilled people that can make all this stuff.If you walk around something like the Wallace Collection in London, you see amazingly crafted clothes, so it’s really interesting that those skills still exist in places like this. Here they can still make those amazing dresses and the wigs. We’ve even got someone who has worked on the 18th century shoe shape, it means we can create a complete aesthetic.
Did you have to do a lot of research before starting work?
I spent a few weeks trying to immerse myself in the 18th century. Places like the V&A and the Met have got very good online resources where they have lots of old costumes which have been photographed and it’s in their library. So you can look at them in a two-dimensional form.
And I also just watched a few films: Marie Antoinette by Sofia Coppola and Barry Lyndon, which is a Kubrick film and more English, and the Hogarth end of the 18th century. It’s good to see how the clothes move, rather than just a picture where they are static.
How do you start with a costume design? Do you make an intricate sketch?
It sounds really silly, but I always try and place myself in the position of the character.
With costume design, it’s always like a game of character and hierarchy. So you always have to try and work out with the director who’s the highest in the food chain and work back from there. I always start with lots of references and then I always do a really detailed sketch, although I don’t often colour them. And then you go out and start looking for fabrics, that’s when you start to piece together the colouration of it.We have a sketch of the silhouette, and then we do a lot of walking around, sourcing different fabrics, looking at different fabrics, doing endless sampling, and then allocating bits of fabric to each of the drawings, so you can sort of see how it’s going to work out.
Who’s got the biggest costumes – is it Lady Sneerwell (chief manipulator)?
I would say Lady Teazle, she is a complete spendthrift – her husband is older and has substantial wealth, and she is just constantly buying new clothes. So she has an awful lot of different clothing, which has been really fun to work on. And then Sneerwell wears the mantua shape, which is about two metres wide, which is the maximum size it could be for her to be able to come through the traps.
The play is set in a world of gossip – what will audiences get from it?
Obviously, it is about gossip. But it is about trying to, you know, essentially live your life and be less concerned with the lives of others.
I hope that that’s still present in our piece. Theatre’s still not really fully back to where it was before Covid. As well as the message, I hope people just have a joyous time bathed in the fluorescent pink of the show. I still think the play really speaks to us. There have been a lot of productions, but I hope this just gives a slightly sideways take on it and offers something new that still serves that which Sheridan cleverly encapsulated in his writing – the kind of the game of it.
You mentioned social media, and it’s been said compared to Sheridan we have lost the art of gossip – there is no wit, just cancel culture. Is that taken on board?
Personally am not a big fan of social media, but it is definitely not just a kind of cancelling, detrimental thing – it’s witty and it’s playful and it’s all done in good humour.
It’s not vicious and it’s not unpleasant. Sheridan is always on the right side of scathing.
The School for Scandal is on at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre until 6th September.