The one about the design meeting

Hello, and welcome to the production blog of Doctor Faustus, the 5th Present Moment production. I'm Joss Bennathan, artistic director of Present Moment. I hope that this blog will be useful and interesting for teachers and students who are coming to see the show (Stratford Circus, Jan 12 - Feb 6 2010) or studying the play. Maybe it will also be interesting to anyone interested in understanding a production process.

We've be in pre-production for some time now. I'll write about that at a later date. But I'm going to write about what's happening now - there will be flashbacks later.

So - just had a very productive design meeting. David Crisp and I have worked together plenty of times before. We share a verbal short hand by now. He is resident designer at Birmingham School of Acting where I usually direct once a year. This is the first Present Moment show he has designed.

We have met and discussed the design for Doctor Faustus before, and spent some time just standing in the space where it will be performed. (In the education pack that goes with the show, you can see some of the images that inspired us. Sometimes it’s hard to know why an image works for you. Just let it. Don’t censor your imagination.) But now the time has come when we need to start making definite decisions.

A couple of days before the meeting, I annotated the script and sent it out to the creative team – explaining – or trying to – how the transformation of space and people might work.

Doctor Faustus, like many plays of its time, doesn’t specify where many scenes are set. Some have had stage directions added in (his study). Others can be worked out from how the first line of a scene sets the stage. But a lot of the time it ‘s about the collective imagination of the the actors, the director, the designer. It's about finding a location which will enhance the mood of a scene or help make the scene and play as clear as possible.

Any design meeting is a combination of artistic and practical issues. What will the set cost? When will it be ready? I want to have it in rehearsals so I can play around with how it works. I don’t want to say too much about the set at this stage but I’m excited about the possibilities!