When the feted stage designer Maria Björnson was asked to do the decor for a revival of Plenty with Cate Blanchett in the West End in 1999, she admitted to me there was little she could do but recycle her memory of Hayden Griffin's original designs for the premiere in 1978. Indeed no one who saw Hayden's images either for Howard Brenton's Weapons of Happiness, which ended in a heart-stopping snowstorm, or for Plenty, with a darkened Blackpool hotel room flying apart to reveal the fields of France, was ever likely to feel they could be bettered.
I first fell in with Hayden in 1973, when together we toured my production of Trevor Griffiths's play The Party on a portable platform which he also designed. For the next 15 years, in Australia, in the UK and in the US, we formed a little team, nearly always with Rory Dempster seamlessly providing lighting and Nick Bicât music. The period of our collaboration coincided with the opening of the new National Theatre on the South Bank. Almost alone among his colleagues, Hayden loved designing for the cavernous Lyttelton, where he felt his ethical priority of showing actors to best advantage could be elegantly advanced. It was he who first stripped the stage back to its steel dock doors, and revealed it as a spectacular industrial chamber. Yes, of course, he had inherited from Jocelyn Herbert and Percy Harris a basic respect for the dramatist – he was, alongside John Gunter, the first designer of choice for many living playwrights – but he extended the tradition by making one great directional space after another for gifted players to shine in.
When called upon, he could also be decorative. His Vuillard-inspired designs for our production of Total Eclipse were ravishing. But the work we did together on A Map of the World, on Plenty and on Pravda, which I co-authored with Howard Brenton, and finally on a defiantly European King Lear, inspired by Caspar Neher, always moved towards some defining image which the audience would take home: unforgettably, in A Map of the World, of the novelist Victor Mehta standing alone in a lit square at the door of a film studio; in Tony Bicât's Devil's Island, of the whole Royal Court stage turned into a white-clothed dining table; and in Lear, of a seated angel hovering above Tony Hopkins at the centre of the action.
In person, Hayden was a spirited contrarian, loyal to his co-workers and pupils, and brutally dismissive of bureaucrats and time-servers, of whom, inevitably, in a director-led National Theatre, there are always a good few. Tempest passed through him at lightning speed. By putting himself up against rootless prettiness and lack of strong feeling, he seemed better able to assert his own virtues: a utilitarian economy, inseparable from beauty, and a deep personal solidarity which resonated, democratically, not just in what he made, but in how he made it.
