Pluto costume by Gerald Scarfe for 'Orpheus in the Underworld', 1985

Gerald Scarfe is best-known as a savagely brilliant cartoonist, but he has designed several theatrical productions in his career as well as creating design and animation for Pink Floyd's concert tour and film The Wall. His first theatre designs were for English National Opera's 1985 production of 'Orpheus in the Underworld', and the blending of his talents with Jacques Offenbach's witty satire of the French Second Empire was an imaginative commission.

The costume for the character of Pluto, designed by Scarfe and made by Kandis Cook, resembles a traditional devil rather than the classical Pluto, King of the Underworld, but it is the devil seen as a fashionable mid-19th-century gentleman, which fits the period when the operetta was first performed. To achieve the effect, the tailcoat (the coat tails being literally forked tails) and hat are covered with alternating horizontal lines of red and green scales, the hat having devil's 'horns'. The green 'waistcoat', fixed inside the coat edges, mirrors the green scales, while the red trousers pick up the red. The dickey and cuffs are serrated to suggest flames and are made in red glittering Lurex fabric, which is also used to line the coat tails and cover the forked ends.

The scales on the coat could have been drawn onto the fabric and coloured in, but the designer and maker chose the more labour-intensive route of cutting and stitching rows of scales before attaching each row individually, which makes for a more lively effect. The outline created by the stiffened and shaped tails reinforces the idea that the wearer is not quite human. The tails can be fastened onto the front of the coat, unfastened to trail behind or become a useful actor's accessory, held by the wearer. The problem, which the maker has solved brilliantly, is getting them to fold and fasten without destroying their correct shape at the back.

Museum no. S.788:1 to 4-1991