Edward Gordon Craig Lecture: Lizzie Clachan

In a conversation with fellow designer Joanna Parker, Lizzie Clachan reflects on her performance design across theatre, opera and devised performance. Reflecting on the speculatively imagined spaces of the model and drawings as three-dimensional images that prefigure the work within the rehearsal, she offers a remarkable insight into her working process. These images do not prescribe; more they offer up imagined spaces for playful inhabitation, laying down the foundations for the designer’s relationship to an evolving dramaturgy that lives beyond the image.

Lizzie Clachan is an award-winning stage designer whose recent credits include Life of Galileo (dir. Joe Wright, Young Vic 2017), The Suppliant Women (dir. Ramin Gray, ATC-Lyceum Edinburgh, 2017) and Yerma (dir. Simon Stone, Young Vic 2016). Working across different scales with classic works, new writing, devised work and adaptations, Lizzie Clachan is quite simply one of the most influential designers at work in Europe today.

Joanna Parker is an international designer, artist and movement director working in opera, theatre and dance. She co-wrote (with Dr. Simon Donger) and tutors part time on the MA Scenography at The Royal Central School and Speech and Drama, University of London.