Model Box

This is our model box ladies and gentlemen, designed by our designer Charlotte Neville. I am absolutely over the moon about it as, not only does it look beautiful, but it will do many exciting things.

I'll explain a bit about the brief and about what this all means.

Firstly, as the play deals with a referendum, I was interested in incorporating the idea of democracy into the set. And I wanted the audience to experience something different and to take them away from their conceptions of studio theatre. I knew there had to be no black walls, no unambitious set and, despite our budget (!!!) I wanted to work with the kind of scale that one would attribute to great classics.

And as well as this the space has to be a number of locations: an office (which is the primary location), a park, a press conference, a living room and another park. And me and Charlotte share a hatred of people carrying sets on and off and we certainly couldn't fly anything off the stage! So we needed a structure that would allow for multiple locations without changing sets, give the audience a new experience, be large in scale (and hide black walls), beautiful to look at and symbolise democracy.

And what Charlotte has come up with is this: a modernist amphitheatre. The audience will sit along the rows as they would have in ancient Greece and so will be totally 'in' the same space as the play. It also, of course, resembles the new plenary meeting room at the new assembly building. Charlotte will, no doubt, publish something with more details and greater explanation soon....