set and costume design

Eugene Onegin
music by Tchaikovsky
Clonter Opera; Royal College of Music - the Britten Theatre and the Buxton Festival
1997

team

director: Netia Jones
design and costume designer: Pippa Nissen
lighting designer: Zerlina Hughes
musical director: Leonard Hancock

description

The set is a corner of a room, which is made up of rusty metal panels, which gradually gets broken down throughout the opera to reveal a gold wall behind.   Within the set there are hidden doors, cupboards, 2-way glass, and panels that get fixed on and taken away, so that each scene is a different configuration of the walls.

The set structure is made up of layers of both natural weathering of the metal, and artificial painting and words scratched into the rust. These represent both a landscape for some of the scenes, and interiors of rooms for other settings, as well as being a metaphor for the emotions for the action played out in front. The lighting begins realistically, and gradually becomes more abstract as the set disintegrates, until the set is purely light.   The costumes are historically faithful to the original time that it was written, but the set takes the emotions of the characters into the present.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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