Let's Talk About Sets: Jamie Vartan on The White Devil

Creating a world for Webster's The White Devil in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse has been strongly supported by the possibility to light the entire show with candles. Myself and the director Annie Ryan chose early on, in our first discussions about the piece, to suggest a period that's deliberately ambiguous, looking both back in time from today, as well as a suggested dystopian world, where electric light has been extinguished and has given way to candlelight.

This also provides a strong context for characters lurking in shadows, eavesdropping, plotting, ambushing etc.

We've all been discovering how an audience's eyes adjust to the lack of general light, how it becomes less of a priority to see every facial expression clearly and more enveloping and engrossing to peer through the darkness, aided by the closeness of the performers.

Choosing the costume fabrics has also been done in both daylight and candlelight, to get a sense of the extent of the effect on colours and tones by the reduction in light and the warmth of the candles. The reflective leathers and metallic detailing take the light well and a higher contrast between tones helps definition. Under candlelight a dark brown may still come across as black.

We've also had the opportunity to create our own style of candle fixtures, to help bring the setting forward from the 17th century, so the existing gold curved chandeliers, as well as a number of other steel candle stands, have been replaced by raw steel ones, incorporating straight metal rods, so the feel of the world in turn becomes suitably harder edged. The time and location shifts between the scenes are also aided by the time taken to extinguish and relight the candles.

The floor has been recovered with dark brown planks so the amount of reflection from the floor is reduced, and the darkness provides a deeper contrast, as an example, with the deep red of the Cardinal and the white of the Pope's costumes.

The resulting dark world we've created also provides a strong context both for the rich gold, ostentatious black and dark brown ornate back wall of the Wanamaker theatre, and for the characters within that world, with all the posturing, greed, demonstrations of wealth, cat and mouse power games, and the inevitable self destruction of their lives within such a small confined environment.

By designer Jamie Vartan

The White Devil opens at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse on 1 February, with previews from 26 January.