KESWICK theatre designer Martin Johns (pictured) worked on a wide range of plays and musicals for regional and London theatres, but his globetrotting ended 11 years ago when he began work at the Theatre by the Lake.

Whilst based in the south he went travelling on a world tour with  West End show Me and My Girl.

But with the opening of William Inge’s Bus Stop at the lakeside theatre, the resident designer has completed work on his 59th show since the theatre opened in 1999.  The total will hit 60 in November when the curtain rises on his designs for Tom’s Midnight Garden, Theatre by the Lake’s 2010 Christmas production.

He says: “Part of the attraction is the variety of the work I do at Theatre by the Lake but I also like working in a smaller environment in which people are much more hands-on. We know how each other works.

“The West End work and travelling the country on tour became boring in the end. It’s nice to belong to a family. You know in moments of stress that someone will come along with a paintbrush and offer to give a hand. I like the idea of people coming up and saying ‘why don’t we do it like this?’ Budgets are small here, but it’s extraordinary what we manage to do on them.’’

Martin usually designs up to five productions a year, three in the Main House in the Summer Season, plus shows at Christmas and Easter, and he has played a significant part in building the theatre’s reputation for the quality of its work.
The creative process begins with reading, pondering, discussions with the director and meticulous research. But Martin rarely makes preliminary sketches.

“I prefer working in two dimensions, so I do a ground plan and then make a model in white card. At that stage you can tear it up and throw it away if it doesn’t work. It’s a good way to get people involved and shows what we want to do. Then we have to ask, ‘how do we do it?’ After that, I’ll make a final model.”

Theatre by the Lake has no scenic workshop so Martin sends his model, a full brief and scale drawings to contractors in York, travelling there every week to check on progress as the set takes shape. His costume designs go to a network of tailors and dressmakers around the country.

 Budgets are not the only constraint on set design. Because Theatre by the Lake’s summer plays run in repertoire (by August audiences can see a different play every night of the week), thought has to go into how best to manage the change from one play to the next. 

This is particularly important in the Main House because of the size of the sets. So one of the three plays there will always be a “flying show”-- one whose sets are lowered and raised from the flies, the large area above the stage.

This year the flyer is Northanger Abbey. Sets for Bus Stop and What the Butler Saw are built on trucks, low wheeled platforms that can be shifted easily on and off stage.

“I arrived at the shape for the Bus Stop set because our sightlines are tricky -- the auditorium is quite wide. But sightlines create a natural triangle shape and that’s what I decided to keep because it meant that we had the door, the window and the whole of the bar in view.

“I watched the film [made in 1956 with Marilyn Monroe] and there was a lot of period detail I liked. So I just nicked it. I had to get the detail right. I was ten at that time and can remember the period quite clearly and a lot of our audience will know if we have got it wrong.’’

Martin and the team also spent a lot of time on the wind that batters Bus Stop’s diner on a snowy night in the Mid West. “It was just a question of finding out what would blow through the door and in what direction.”

Martin claims Northanger Abbey, adapted by Tim Luscombe from the novel by Jane Austen, was straightforward. “I wanted to present the action against big gauzes and paintings of the period. We were lucky in finding a couple of really strong images to create Bath and that extraordinary Gothic house. And things like Northanger Gothic I can do standing on my head.”

But Butler was the big challenge. Martin groaned when he heard the play had been chosen because it demands not just four robust doors, through which characters sprint in various states of undress, but also a skylight through which a trouser-less police officer has to descend down a rope ladder.

 Martin created a perfect office for the director of an asylum who is madder than most of his patients and the doors have stood up to over-energetic use by the manic characters of Orton’s play.

 His favourite productions since 1999 have been Les Liaisons Dangereuses (2005) and last year’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which proved hugely popular with audiences. “People kept using the word magical about the Dream, which is what I had hoped we would achieve.”

The Dream’s hunting scene backdrop is evidence of a technical revolution in theatre design. Instead of being painted, the image was digitally printed, a process Martin first used for a giant street map in Alan Bennett’s The Lady in the Van in 2008. Martin says digital printing opens up endless possibilities for a designer.

Having trained at Wimbledon School of Art and the Motley Design Course, Martin started his career at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry and became Head of Design for the Tyneside Theatre Company, York Theatre Royal and Leicester Haymarket Theatre.

During the latter period he designed the set for the West End production of Me and My Girl at the Adelphi and subsequently Berlin, Broadway, Japan, Australia, South Africa and the British and American tours.

Other West End shows include Master Class (Old Vic and Wyndham’s); Passion Play (Wyndham’s); West Side Story (Her Majesty’s); The Hired Man (Astoria); The Entertainer (Shaftesbury); Brigadoon (Victoria Palace); A Piece of My Mind (Apollo); The Secret Lives of Cartoons (Aldwych); Rolls Hyphen Royce (Shaftesbury); Let the Good Stones Roll (Ambassadors Theatre); Mack and Mabel (Piccadilly Theatre) and the set for The Romans in Britain (National Theatre).

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