Let's talk about sets: Tom Scutt on Elegy

Nick Payne has just walked into tech rehearsals with Josie Rourke, jokingly putting words in her mouth: "Ugh, I bet you can’t wait to direct a show where people actually finish their sentences". We’re laughing, but he’s got a point. It chimes with a note I’m writing about the unrest that is at the heart of his new play Elegy. It’s rare that the characters are able to deal in absolutes – uncertainty and incompletion abound. It’s this friction that makes it so exciting to design Nick’s work.

Elegy explores the scientific advances that map our existence and the impact they might have on the soul. In the play, a couple – Lorna and Carrie – encounter a new procedure that cures degenerative brain illnesses by eradicating the ‘corrupted files’ and taking with it whatever associated memory necessary. Is a cure always better than the disease itself? What defines who we are? What is there to guide us if we choose instead to walk the path of endurance?

As with Constellations, the world of Elegy operates on two very different levels. The first is a familiar place – real people, identifiable relationships, recognisable language. The second is something more removed. In Constellations, this second world was expressed in the existence of parallel universes; with Elegy, it is about a world not yet reached, a future-place in which we learn about characters in reverse. In theatrical terms, these two worlds act as goalposts for the design to shoot between. It is both imagined and real, epic and banal, both alive and dead. Elegy ‘half-exists’.

In straddling these lines, Nick has made a poem of a play (or a play out of a poem). The vocabulary of solution-finding and problem-solving was refreshingly absent in design meetings. Instead, it was a pure process in which I felt I was starting, independently, from the ground up – inspired and propelled by the play I read but not slave to a televisual recreation of it.

The vocabulary of solution-finding and problem-solving was refreshingly absent in design meetings

What results is a kind of Venn diagram of visuals, at the centre of which the eventual production sits. Hospitals, schools, churches, burning, ashes, dissection, analysis and loss all feature in some way. The design continues to find meaning as the play unfolds, but never answers the questions that Nick is putting out there. To this end, it is a transitional ‘non-place’ – a purgatory – that chimes with a central character whose mind is failing to piece together her surroundings.

For myself and Rosie ElNile (with whom I designed the show), the dominant dynamic in Elegy is the tension between togetherness and separation. We became really interested in what happens to our identity when bound to a relationship. At what point do two individuals become ‘We’? When are You an extension of Me?

How to visually express the idea of being eternally bound to another, and yet entirely alone? We were also intent on only using real materials in the design, to be as light as possible on false scenic intervention and to allow the authenticity of the characters to be reflected in the world around them. It was very important to us that the centre-piece to the design was a real object, and until we found That Thing, we wouldn’t be able to build the rest of the world. Our thinking was patient and methodical, contrary to many other experiences. Finally, a fortuitous walk in Highgate woods released the rest of the process.

I often think about this chain of artistic response in theatre. Somebody can create a piece of art in literary form and someone else might use it as source material to write a play. The next person takes that play and creates their own piece of art out of it in production. Someone else views that production and continues their own strand… be it another piece of fine art or even a review (I recall a haiku review of Constellations that struck a chord at the time). In this way, Elegy is a rolling fog of thoughts and questions moving from artist to artist to shed continued and varied light on the same subject, only getting richer the more people it passes through.

By Tom Scutt

Elegy runs at the Donmar Warehouse until 18 June.