The English Stage Company at the Royal Court is world-renowned for having launched a radical phase in English playwriting in the mid-1950s. But equally significant was the concomitant overhaul in British theatre stage design, and William Dudley, who has died aged 78, was one of its outstanding new stars.
The age of painted backcloths and front cloths was now the sole preserve of pantomime, and exquisite costumes and furniture were replaced with rough, raw material and free-standing functional objects. The change, rendering stage design more architectural, more “art school” and certainly more muscularly poetic, had been instigated by Sean Kenny in Oliver! and John Bury at Stratford East and the Royal Shakespeare Company.
The transition was supervised by the “Motleys”, three sisters, Margaret and Sophie Harris, and Elizabeth Montgomery, John Gielgud’s design collaborators, who launched an influential design course in 1966. Their mantra was design, not decoration.
Dudley emerged in Sloane Square, under the aegis of the Motley-influenced great minimalist designer Jocelyn Herbert, consort of George Devine, the ESC founder, alongside such other luminaries as Hayden Griffin, Deirdre Clancy, John Gunter and John Napier.
They would all go on to work in the major companies, in new plays, operas and musicals around the world, transforming the idea that mainland Europe had of British theatre design as the province of such throwback decorative geniuses as Cecil Beaton and Leslie Hurry.
In a prodigious career, Dudley started at the Court with a stark design for Peter Gill’s revival of The Duchess of Malfi in 1971 and embraced a reputation-enhancing design for Mozart’s Die Eintführung at Glyndebourne in 1979; Jonathan Pryce’s Hamlet at the Court in 1980, where Pryce spoke the words of his own dead father in a medical cabinet setting of skulls; and, in 1985, the triumphant National Theatre staging of the medieval Mystery plays, a trilogy in a Yorkshire dialect version by Tony Harrison, directed by Bill Bryden (a key collaborator in Dudley’s career), beneath a glittering constellation of dustbin braziers, domestic utensils and hurricane lamps.
Dudley’s designs from the get-go were immersive and environmentally organic long before such terms were fashionable and deadly. He was an elfin, impish curly-headed presence in the preparatory theatre, bedecked with tools and flecked with paint, seemingly unmindful of sleep or recreation outside of his obsessive dedication.
In 2006, in a collaboration with his future wife, the director Lucy Bailey (they had been together since 1984 and married in 2008), he designed Titus Andronicus, starring Douglas Hodge, one of the most memorable productions seen at Shakespeare’s Globe on the South Bank. He transformed the space into a theatre of death, decking the pillars in funereal black and re-energising the whole arena, said Michael Billington, in “an astonishing makeover.”
Bill, as he was generally known, was the son of Dorothy (nee Stacey), a school dinner lady, and William Dudley, a builder and decorator. Born in Islington, north London, he studied at St Martin’s School of Art and the Slade. On a Saturday job in the Canonbury bookshop, he stumbled across the amateur Tower theatre nearby in 1963 and found himself painting, then building, sets, while still training.
His first design, in 1966 at the Tower, was for Machiavelli’s Mandragora, with costumes by Sue Plummer, with whom he worked and lived for the next decade or so. He warmed up for The Mysteries (which opened in the first part of the trilogy in 1977) with other Gill productions – notably Edward Bond’s The Fool (1975) about the country poet John Clare, and Gill’s own beautiful Cardiff memory play, Small Change (1976), both at the Court, and a stunning National promenade production by Bryden of Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise to Candleford (1978, adapted from the novels by Keith Dewhurst).
Dudley responded inherently to such a piece of work set in rural communities at the end of the 19th century. His design for Peter Hall’s production of The Ring at Bayreuth in 1983 sought a direct naivety in the confection of naked Rhine maidens in a soft tank reflected vertically in a suspended mirror, while Siegfried wandered in an Arthur Rackham-like tawny forest.
Dudley was the first designer fully to exploit the amazing double-drum revolve in the new National, when, for Howard Davies’s magnificent 1988 revival of Dion Boucicault’s Irish melodrama of the 1866 Fenian uprising, The Shaughraun, he conjured the whole of county Sligo, mythical and realistic, with its crumbling ruins, abbey arches strewn with ivy, virgin statues and peasant cottages, with a glittering band of starlit sea beyond.
After The Mysteries, his biggest theatre projects were in Glasgow with Bryden. Having commandeered the old Harland and Wolff engine shed in Govan, they produced two of the most spectacular and sensational productions of the past century. The Ship (1990) told the drama of the last great liner built on the Clyde, as the hull slid, literally, from its timber supports away from the audience … who were left to lament and celebrate the end of an era.
Then, in The Big Picnic (1994), they recreated the terrible beauty of first world war trench warfare, night-time eeriness, searchlights and star shell tracer bullets. The hallucination of the Angel of Mons appeared over the western front, and the audience. The “show” was rooted in the fate of local Govan lads, with a live soundtrack of anthems and folk rock.
In 2004, Dudley’s range expanded into designing not only David Hare’s brilliant documentary drama, The Permanent Way, about the scandal and tragedy of railway disasters, and a superb revival by Roger Michell of Pinter’s Old Times – a mirrored floor and gauze surround expressed exactly the sexual and social ambiguity in the play – but also an ingenious, kaleidoscopically shifting projection setting for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Woman in White, directed by Trevor Nunn.
Personally, I worried about this intrusion of video and CG imagery into design, but Dudley had no fears about it and had taken it one step further in his panoramic designs for Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia (2002), a nine-hour trilogy investigating the seeds of the Russian revolution and the conflict between individual liberty and ideological prescription, directed by Nunn at the National.
His last work – before a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s – included a wonderfully agile design for Turgenev’s Fortune’s Fool at the Old Vic in 2013, starring Iain Glen and Richard McCabe, and Bailey’s brilliantly conceived 2017 production of Agatha Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution in the old County Hall, former home of the Greater London council on the South Bank.
Dudley always reminded me of the Artful Dodger. There was something cheeky and subversive about him. He played the accordion, and the spoons; a real north London lad. He won seven Olivier awards – only Judi Dench can match him in that number. He was appointed OBE in 2021.
His younger sister, Jeanie, died in 2006. He is survived by Lucy and their sons, Ollie and Billy.
• William “Bill” Dudley, theatre designer, born 4 March 1947; died 31 May 2025
