Let's talk about sets: The Ballad of Robin Hood

When Tacit Theatre decided to re-work the tale of Robin Hood as their Christmas show, we soon realized that recreating the Tabard Inn would make the perfect setting for our show. Tacit had previously created its own storytelling style of theatre set in an immersive tavern for their production of Canterbury Tales, using the medieval coaching inn that used to be on Borough High Street as the inspiration. Greg Freeman’s script for The Ballad of Robin Hood uses some of the same characters from The Canterbury Tales and is written as a very loose sequel, so it gave us the perfect excuse to reinvent our ‘Tavern Theatre’ for the new show.

Creating an immersive set design, and in our case also a fully working bar is a real challenge. We wanted to give the audience the experience of entering a real tavern, but the space would have to still work for the play and its multi-layered storytelling, creating numerous locations without big set changes, not forgetting preserving good sightlines, seating capacity and disabled access.

For a set like this, finding the right venue is crucial and Southwark Playhouse was the obvious choice; in their temporary home at Elephant & Castle they’ve created one of the most interesting and versatile studio spaces in London.

The key design feature that the whole creative team agreed on was to recreate the medieval galleries that one could see in an old tavern, such as the Tabard Inn.
Such galleries were common both on the outside and the inside of a medieval coaching inn, so we could use that feature to suggest both an indoor and outdoor setting.

In addition to creating the truly immersive experience, one of the big reasons for having a fully functioning bar in the space was the smell. One of the strongest human senses is smell: our brain instantly connects a smell to a specific location suggested by our imagination. Therefore, having the bar serving mulled wine and decorating the space with real dried hops, gave that extra dimension for the audience experience.

Once we felt that our design concept was strong enough, we moved our focus on to the practical elements of show. There is a huge amount going on: from live music and sound, to fully staged fights with period weapons. Everything about the space was designed to be functional and enable the actors to interact with it (and without giving too much away, they have certainly managed to find some interesting ways to climb up and down from the galleries).

Once all the practical requirements of the set were met, we were conscious not to over-design the show: our aim was to create a fun, informal and flexible performance space that enables the audience members to sit back with a pint and enjoy all the other wonderful elements of our show.

The Ballad of Robin Hood runs at Southwark Playhouse from 26 November until 26 December.