Our Arabian Nights is a mirror image of London

Designing London Bubble’s Tales from the Arabian Nights has been a bit of a homecoming for me. After a few years of being away from London, I felt like a traveler.

The playwright Farhana Sheikh has intricately woven the story of Shahrazade with the tales she told king Shahrayar to intrigue him to spare her life day by day, and there is an underlying sense that these stories, however far from us, are still very much present in our daily lives today.

My journey on design started from collecting feelings, colors, and images that resonated with each story, and this is how I normally start my process. I talked with the director, Jonathan Petherbridge, about how we can imagine this is a group of traveling storytellers and they have been traveling for a long time from country to country to tell these stories.

So the next step I took was to sit in Trafalgar Square, just observing people and imagining who could be in our troupe, and what makes me think that. These people had stories to tell but not very well kitted, and they might have collected pieces of props or costumes as they traveled from country to country. It’s a bit like a question of "what will you take on a journey, if you are only allowed to take one suitcase, and you are not returning home forever?"

Imagining what items they would choose to tell these stories with was a tangible starting point of finding connections between what I freely imagined from reading the play and the world we live in. There were points at which Edward would say "No, that’s you designing it, not these people designing it," and the whole process was finding a meeting point of the characters inventing ways to tell the stories and how I stand in that process, and who these people are, which still continues as we move on to rehearsing in the park.

This piece is very much devised and many design elements also came out of the rehearsal room. We have a very interesting company of seven actors, each of whom has a strong character and comes from different backgrounds. I felt this is a mirror image of what London is for me, the mixture of cultures that make this city so rich, and this is the gem I found as I sat in Trafalgar Square watching people. We are all travelers on our own journey finding and telling stories of our life, and the richness becomes visible when you shed what you don’t have to have. As we are performing in nature, whose beauty and completeness you can’t compete with, borrowing the environment and making honest connections is what I’m doing with my design.

Having said that, we do let our imagination play and "cheat" a little to put more of our own spices into the play. So this is theatre at the bare minimum at its maximum.

By Yasuko Hasegawa

Tales from the Arabian Nights runs at Southwark Park until 6 August and then Greenwich Park from 9 to 19 August.