Choose a production you have seen during your course in which design played an important part. Discuss, in detail, the strengths and/or weaknesses of one scene or section. You will need to give reasons to justify your answer. You will need to explain in what ways the design contributed to the production.
The play that I have chosen to write about is The House of Usher, based on the theatre production in the Redbridge Drama centre, on the 18th of October. The scene that I have chosen to write about is when Madeline soon dies, and Roderick decides to bury her temporarily in the tombs below the house. I was impressed with the way the actors used the set in many different ways to incorporate their needs, showing when the set acted as one thing or another and I thought that the set was particularly effective.
The set was a combination of two bamboo baskets, one behind facing towards the audience, in front of the basket there were two one meter wooden poles, with two wooden chairs on the wings of the stage. They also used the wooden poles as a window frame and stair railings, Hess was a material used for the coffin. The two bamboo baskets could be rotated or flipped at different times to represent a tomb, bed, painting frame, bath, chairs and tables. It could be fixed into place at different levels of steepness. There are three images of the "tombs" "The Fall of the House of Usher." The house itself is shut off from the daylight, its echoing rooms turned into spacious vaults, in which characters who never seem entirely alive. Second, Usher's painting is of "an immensely long and rectangular vault or tunnel," foreshadowing the third image of a tomb, the real one of Madeline's temporary burial. Ironically, though, the one painting of his that the Narrator describes portrays a tomb, and everything is finally destroyed by the House's collapse. Last of all they create an archway in front of the vault which was covered with copper, as was the huge iron door opening into the vault.
