Set designers are the invisible stars of theatre, creating worlds for the actors to inhabit. One of the best, Eileen Diss, tells Arminta Wallaceabout her art and inspiration
It's a weird occupation, being a set designer for the theatre. You spend your life imagining vivid spaces which, at the end of the day, don't really exist: you beaver away at colours and fabrics and shapes and textures, and yet when the reviews come out, it's kind of a compliment if they don't mention the set at all.
"Well, it is, as a matter of fact," says Eileen Diss, who's in town to design sets for a new production of Noel Coward's Private Livesat the Gate Theatre. After a slight pause she adds, "I mean, the greatest accolade, really, is if the author likes it. I think that's quite an achievement - if you manage to realise what's in somebody's head." And after a lot of prompting, head-shaking and a gulp or two, she finally admits that the author she's thinking of is Harold Pinter, no less.
For more than 50 years, Diss - approaching 80, though she doesn't look it - has carved out a career as one of the top designers on the UK film and TV scene. She has worked on a host of small screen classics, from The Railway Childrento Longitudeand Jeeves & Wooster- both of which earned her Bafta awards - via Ken Loach's landmark TV drama Up the Junction, as well as the feature films 84 Charing Cross Roadand A Handful of Dust. Yet she's almost pathologically modest. She seems astonished that anyone would want to interview her and tries, every chance she gets, to deflect attention to her theatrical colleagues.
Private Liveswas the first play Diss ever designed for the Gate, about 15 years ago. "I did get the old drawings out, actually," she says. "But the difference is that this time, the director wants to turn the first act around."
The play opens when a divorced couple, both of whom have now remarried, check into a chic French resort with their new partners. Naturally, they find themselves on adjoining balconies - with hilarious results. "You always have the hotel in the background with the characters looking out over the sea - into the audience, in other words," Diss explains. "Alan Stanford has done it so that we're actually looking out to sea. Which is much more difficult to achieve, of course. I hope it's going to look all right."
If it doesn't, it will be the first of Diss's designs ever to look less than "all right". She favours cool colours - whites, creams and neutrals - and elegant shapes. "Wood colours," she says. Since original art-deco furniture is difficult to get hold of and costs a bomb, they're making it all themselves, she declares, with obvious delight.
"The great thing about that period is that it's very easy to make - the lines are so simple. It's really nice furniture, actually. I'm thinking of setting up a business."
This, she adds hastily, is all down to the skill of the Gate's construction department. She admits, however, that she's particularly drawn to period design. "From an early age I've always liked history, and read social history - especially from the 19th and early 20th centuries. I love archive stuff and looking at old photographs."
Are there any places, or particular rooms, which inspire her designs? Diss looks alarmed. "Oh, no," she says. "Absolutely everything comes from the text. It's what the play's about that matters. It's not about imposing something that you particularly like on to the play, but about reading what's there."
What about the private life of a designer, then? Is Diss's own house as cool, beautiful and collected as her gorgeous set for, say, the Gate production of Lady Windermere's Fan? "Well it's not designed in any way at all," she says, with a fond smile. "I've been in the same house for 50 years and I think there are very few things that have been consciously selected - they've arrived by some means or other, you know? Children and dogs and God knows what. It's not a showpiece, by any means."
A recent visit to the home of the architect Richard Rogers in Chelsea prompted a design blowout chez Diss. "He has gutted two very beautiful Chelsea houses," she says, "both laterally and vertically. So inside, it's just this great space with beautiful windows and a great metal staircase which looks absolutely fantastic, though it's terrifying to walk on. When I got home I just wanted to throw everything away." And did she? She emits a throaty chuckle. "No. I got rid of a few little bits. But the trouble was, when I started to look at things, I realised that one of the kids made this, or so-and-so gave me this, or my husband was really fond of that. So it's still as cluttered as ever."
Private Lives, directed by Alan Stanford, opens at The Gate Theatre on July 17th