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| Filename |
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DS_RK_vi17.mov |
| Short Desc |
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Seventeenth video interview clip with Theatre Designer Ralph Koltai |
| Description |
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Oh yes, I do look for the metaphor, nearly all my work is based on a metaphor. Finding the metaphor is nearly always an accident, I don't try and find the metaphor, the metaphor, when I'm lucky, happens. When, which I have said at times before, whatever talent I have is recognising the accident when it happens because you are very much on your own as a designer, the fact that I said a minute ago, the fact the director says ''It's wonderfulå? doesn't mean its wonderful, it means he says so. You have got to feel yourself that it is as good and as right as you can achieve at that moment in time. It's frequently an accident in finding the metaphor for the piece, I don't look for it, I have an idea, I work along with my idea and in the middle of it all something happens, unexpected. Then I think 'good heavens, that's rather good'. It's something that happens totally by chance. If you want to I can give you a couple of examples of that, for instance, quickly, the production, when you try and find if you can and it doesn't always apply and is not always possible, but if you can arrive at the definitive way of doing a play, that's wonderful. In 200 and something productions that I have done, I think I have only once, to my way of thinking, found what I consider was a definitive answer for doing the play and that was the Royal Shakespeare Company's play, The Representative by xxxxxxxxxxxx, an accusation of Pope Pious the 12th for his non-intervention of the holocaust. Well the production was put on the Aldwych stage, now what you are dealing with is the murder of six million Jews at Auchwitz in the gas chambers, now you put this on the Aldwych stage, now what do you do not to trivialise the subject matter? Robert David MacDonald (?),whom you may know, was the official translator of the piece. We talked about the play never mind the set, we talked about the subject matter for three weeks, just the subject matter nothing to do with what it should look like. One was literally talking about the subject matter as being so major that actually everything else was trivial. But because we talked it for two or three weeks, it suddenly, one day, hit me that the metaphor for the play was the gas chamber, because that's what the play was about, so that became the set, the set for the play became a gas chamber and the scene in the anti-chamber to the Papal throne room had the throne in the centre, a totally realistic, Papal throne on a red dais with a carpet coming from the gas chamber down to the dais in the middle of the gas chamber, that is what the play was about. I do think I got pretty near to that's how you should do the play, or at least at that time, maybe today, somebody 25-30 years later, might do it differently. At the time I thought this was okay and you can't be as expressive every time, the play won't let you, but it's quite nice when occasionally you can get sort of somewhere near that. |
| Source |
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DS_20_06_01 (mini DV tape) |
| Format |
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Quicktime Progressive (video) |
| Type |
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Resource Movie |
| Rights |
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This clip may be used for educational purposes only, any commercial use of this material requires permission from the copyright holders. Misuse or misrepresentation may result in legal action. Copyright holder: Christie Carson, COMPH, Royal Holloway University of London. |
| Length |
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4 minutes 43.01 seconds |
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Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS). Copyright 2003-5.