Thursday 14 May 2009

Phaedra's Love - The Set

This was my initial set idea.






Whilst researching for the play I found the work of Joel-Peter Witkin very inspiring, I liked the broken down quatlity to his photography and the way all the people in his work looked distorted in some way. I also think his work totally captures the themes and feel of the play. Here are some exaples of his work.



When I was considering set ideas I had already looked closely at the themes of the play, which are sex, death and religion. I looked closely at all three. I found in my research on death that the Victorian used to take photo's of the dead. This really fascinated me so I looked into it further. I found out that they did this to represent lost memories. The photo would be a constant reminder of there loved one but also of things that could now never happen. I liked the idea of having photos over the stage showing post mortem photo's as I thought this could symbolise how everything is getting worse in the play, the more photo's there are the more the audience knows that things are getting worse. Also when Phaedra kills herself I wanted to have a huge photo frame with her in it, but obviously she would be dead. At the end of the play when all the characters die I would have a spot light put on the large photo frame which would have been changed to a family portrait of all the characters dead. I thought this linked nicely with the last line in the play which is " if only there could have been more moments like this." Here are some examples of Victorian postmortem photos.



The Finished Set box









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