As the lighting designer of choice for Alan Ayckbourn and Harold Pinter, Mick Hughes, who has died aged 79, had a subtle, almost stealthy artistry that drew attention to the play and players, not to itself. He lit actors ranging from John Gielgud and Judi Dench to the rawest drama school graduate, giving them all the same attention. At the National Theatre or in New York, the West End, Chichester or Dublin, he used minimal technology and never introduced a lighting cue simply for effect.
As Ayckbourn’s biographer, I saw him most often in Scarborough. Lighting designers only really get to work with the rest of the company at the technical rehearsals of a show – the days before the first performance when set, costumes, actors, sound cues and lighting are put together for the first time. They are notoriously fraught: the actors move and speak mechanically, needing an audience to reassure them that the jokes are funny, and nothing works the first time.
Mick joined in Ayckbourn’s satirical version of such a rehearsal, in A Chorus of Disapproval, creating an exploding lamp for a scene a director is lighting with two actors who have good reasons for hiding from him. But Ayckbourn’s own “techs” are famously smooth, and Mick endeared himself to the writer-director with the words: “My lamps are like whores. They’ll do anything we ask them to.”
The blunt language masked a creative sensibility. Ben Brantley in the New York Times wrote of Mick’s lighting for Pinter’s play, Landscape, at the Lincoln Center, that it was masterly, “evoking the clear, frozen sunniness that saturates the interiors of Vermeer paintings.”
Son of George and Mildred Hughes, Mick was born in London, where his father was a cemetery superintendent. He was educated at Chiswick grammar school, did well at O-levels and was a speedy winger at rugby but rejected parental hopes that he would go on to university.
Mick trained as a BBC cameraman and then (he said) was “a bum in Europe,” a funfair “heavy”, a bus conductor and a barman at the Mermaid theatre in London – because he read the New Statesman and Bernard Miles, the Mermaid’s director, advertised there.
Miles’s daughter, Sally, had taken over the Theatre Royal, Margate, and was running it as a rep, and Mick went there as assistant electrician. Later he would also direct plays, around 40 in rep in Worcester.
He was good company but a natural freelance, almost nomadic, and away from work was happiest with his boat, the Sherbet, which he kept in Chichester harbour, relishing the sea and seabirds.
He is survived by his brother, Geoffrey. His sister, Chris, predeceased him.
