Let's Talk About Sets: Isla Shaw on The Witches

The world of Roald Dahl creates a heightened and extreme environment, which allows the designer to play more freely with creating the space. The script for The Witches is very compact, essential to the scenes and moves swiftly. From the beginning the director, Nikolai Foster and I realised it needed to be a conglomerate space, a world, where anything could happen serving multiple locations, eclectic in its nature. A magical world for an unsettling story to unfold.

We broadly set the action in the 1950s but borrowed what was useful from other eras. There is a feeling that the sea itself has washed over the space, leaving pebbles, bunting and fairground lights which spread into the audience. This is a heightened world of dilapidated Victorian grandeur. The seaside hotel 'Magnificent', with its peeling wallpaper and faded beauty, is redone in the slightly kitsch 1980s style.

Three portals frame the space, sprayed with shades of blue; these are angular and arch out of the space. The set literally creates a framework for the story to unfold, it is immersive with seating on three sides so that the audience becomes part of the space.

I found an image of a strong blue tree that resonated with me. This became the focal point of our world; radiating out from this, blue floorboards push up at the edges. Musical instruments are central to the design, and so the tree has grown through a sunken piano, exploding splintered wood pushes up around its trunk, and instruments and objects are hung all over the space. A Victorian spiral staircase leads up to a platform, which adds another level to the playing area, whether it is the tree house, the Grand High Witches podium, or Grandma’s balcony.

The details that define each scene are very important. A chair and a lamp create Grandma’s house, but the lamp when tipped on its side with a life buoy attached, becomes the railing of a ship as they leave Norway, awash in a sea of projection.

Projection helps to define new spaces. But it also helps with scale when the boys are turned into mice: a large cat jumps out and the skirting board is scaled up. We also play with the scale of oversized food and wool: a large red ball is pushed around by a human size mouse. It was challenging to make the illusions work on a very open stage, but this made it more exciting and magical, as there are fewer places to hide. It is essentially a musical; a world of storytelling and hidden surprises where everything is exaggerated.

The witches’ 1980s punk glamour offset the overall 1950s feel. The costumes and props are the colour highlight to the set, bright pinks and yellows jumping out of the blue space. The costumes themselves juxtapose the set and together they create the world as a whole. The balance was to create a piece that was scary, and a little bit wicked but not too scary as this is Dahl’s darkest story!

The Witches runs at Leicester Curve until 10 January.