Treasures In The Attic

As I'm taking the June production off, I have time to do all those things in the wardrobe that I never get to do whilst working on a show.

Today's job was to begin sorting what I 'affectionately' call 'The Charity Shop Attic'. It's basically where all the modern stuff gets stored along with the hats and some of the skirt overflow. It always makes me a bit cross because I can never find what I'm looking for. Any order that once existed has gone right out of the window and I never normally have the time to address it.

It looks like this

one can never have enough hats

It's looking a lot tidier since Suzanne has organised the hats. You should have seen it before! But now, all the skirts are nice and tidy too and subdivided into - Historic plain, peasant, Shakespearean, 18th C, Victorian. Modern formal, leather, maxi, mini and shorts, tweedy and wool, floral, hippy etc.... OCD? Me? Never!

...or skirts

It may not look it but this is a MASSIVE improvement.

I found some absolute treasures in my excavations. Just look at these Victorian beauties....

Heavy black satin with crimped black satin frill circa 1895

Close up of the fabric self pattern. Vaguely Art Nouveau in design.

Black satin with full train circa 1902

Close up detail of decoration.  Double row of sequins and beads with  crimped chiffon frill

Black crepe embellished with pin tucks and lace inserts circa  1905

Black satin, overlaid with beaded tulle

Black taffeta with small train and bustle circa  1880

Detail of the crepe and taffeta frills at front

Detail of train

Considering their age and the conditions they have been kept in, they are in remarkably good condition although the fabric is very fragile. I won't be able to use them on stage but they are a valuable resource for research. The level of detail is incredible as is the workmanship (probably workwomanship).

The last skirt was probably worn in deep mourning. It's larger waistline also suggests it was worn by an older woman.

They will all go into storage now, after some restoration, but will be available for viewing and research if any one is interested.

Playhouse Creatures Part Three

Better late than never, here are some dress rehearsal images with costumes almost, but not quite ready. Just a few last minute tweaks to be done.

Photography by Matthew Potter - matthewpotter007@yahoo.co.uk

Dot Binns as Doll Common

Becky Sweet as Mrs Betterton

Emily Deere as Mrs Farley

Libby Waite as Mrs Marshall

Rebecca Wass as Nell Gwyn

Amazons

Libby Waite as Mrs Marshall

Mrs Farley concealing her bump!

Mrs M and Nell as boys as girls!

Mrs F fallen in the gutter

Becky Sweet as Mrs Betterton

Doll in full flight

Mrs M and Mrs B as Amazons

A scene from Antony and Cleopatra

Mrs F and Mrs M

Mrs Betterton studying her parts

Nell in her first role

A scene from the Provok'd Wife

Mrs F in trouble

Nell in more splendid clothes

Nell and Mrs B

Cast

Nell Gwyn - Rebecca Wass

Doll Common - Dot Binns

Mrs Betterton - Becky Sweet

Mrs Marshall - Libby Waite

Mrs Farley - Emily Deere

Director - Lucinda Bray

Set and Lighting Design - Rhett Davies

Costume Design - Amanda Greenway

Wigs styling - Mary Elliot

Hair and make up - Bella Allain

Stage Manager - Verity Roat

Back again soon with more tales from the wardrobe................

Back again soon with more tales 

Playhouse Creatures Part Two

We had our work cut out on this show. January productions are usually quite light on the design side as the Christmas show is always so full on. However, this one proved an exception to the rule with many costume requirements. Apart from Doll Common who only has the one costume, Mrs Betterton has 7 changes, Mrs Farley has 7, Mrs Marshall has 6  and Nell Gwyn has about 9. I would have loved to update our collection by making some more dresses for this show but time was not on our side.  In fact, mention is made in the play about the slightly shabby state of the costumes so some of our well loved 17th century gowns fitted the bill quite well. This time I just have to content myself with making new corsets and updating and tarting up some or our existing frocks.

When we first meet Nell she is a grubby little barmaid and is wearing an unadorned muslin chemise and a calico corset (this was actually the trial corset we made for fittings and to work out the pattern, but waste not want not!)

Pretty Nell in the dressing room sporting calico corset 

 By the second act, she has found favour with the King and is sporting altogether more beautiful garments like this brocade corset and lace adorned chemise.

Detail of Nell's pretty corset. Probably a pressie from the King

Lace sleeved chemise

As you can see, the corsets are pretty low cut. In fact, it was quite the fashion for ladies to expose a great deal of bosom. But for the sake of modesty, I didn't insist on this for our actors!

The real Nell Gwyn displaying a fair amount of cleavage!

As I mentioned earlier, we do have rather a lot of costume at the Maddermarket so quite often I can reuse items. It's always fun to completely renovate a garment. Bring it back to life. We also are lucky in that we have an abundance of vintage haberdashery which makes such a difference to the look of a costume. Modern materials just don't cut it. Too much polyester and the colours are too harsh.

Before - In need of some TLC

After - Looking much more like it.

This is Mrs Marshall's final dress in which she collects the theatre shares for herself and Nell. It is a shot purple/black silk with a pink satin stomacher and has a separate white underskirt. Whilst rummaging around for some black lace for the waterfall sleeve trimming, I came across a bag full of this purple taffeta crimped trimming. It was the perfect match so it went around the sleeves and the bodice. I made some little bows of graduating size from some lovely worn black and white grosgrain ribbon and finished the edges off with some   narrow black ladder lace (very useful stuff. I've used loads of it over the years but have nearly run out now!).

Well, the show went up last night and was a great success and next week I will post some pictures from the final dress rehearsal. All that is left for me to do now is clear up this chaos!

Aarrgghhhh!!!

I would also just like to say a huge thank you to all my volunteers without who this would not be possible. At all! So thank you to Romilly for corset wrangling, Julia for saving the day in the snow, Eileen for being amazing and always there and to Judith, Behira, Clarissa and Sarah. Also a big thanks to Mary for re styling Nell's and Mrs B's wigs and to Bella for doing the hair and make up and not forgetting Chrissie and her army of dressers.

Back next week for production piccies...................

In the meantime, do come and see the show if you can.

Playhouse Creatures at the Maddermarket Theatre

Playhouse Creatures Part One

2013 kicks off at the Maddermarket Theatre  with Playhouse Creatures by April de Angelis. It is a modern play about some of the first women on the British stage in the Restoration era ( late 17th century) including most notably, Nell Gwyn.

It is set in the tiring room (or dressing room) of a theatre where the actresses live their lives between the scenes on stage and the action off stage. It is a pretty costume heavy production but because the action on stage is swift and flowing, I didn't want it to be hampered by lots if unnecessary costume changes. For the most part, the actors will be wearing a basic costume of chemise, corset and petticoat. This is their undress state. Costume changes will be done on stage as part of the action and dresses and symbolic pieces will go over the basic costume.

The first thing I do as costume designer, after reading the play, is to do my research. This has become a lot easier of late thanks to Pinterest. I use this to create mood boards and find appropriate images and it creates an on line pin board that I can update and show the director and actors.

Playhouse Creatures mood board

Next job is to go through our enormous costume collection (over 50,000 items - one of the largest collections in the country) and select costumes for each character.

Just seen here is Nell's wig pre styling, her  pale blue silk shoes and  a sea green satin bodice

Often a colour palate will suggest itself. Lots of dusky pinks, greys and greens in this show

Now the fun starts. The fittings with the actors. The easiest to costume was the character of Doll Common. Unlike the other characters, she remains constant and unchanged throughout the play and only needs one costume. Doll is like the spirit of the theatre, almost a ghost. Timeless. She is also a grubby old woman who doesn't change her clothes or wash! I wanted her to look like she had fallen into a basket of dirty costumes.

Dot Binns as Doll Common complete with long , straggly wig. Washing machine optional!

The Railway Children (or Train Kids!)

I'm back!!

Sorry it's been an age but I've been rather busy. Several enormous plays and not an awful lot of spare time. I'm also trying a different approach to this blogging malarky. Little and often is where it's at, I think.

Anyway, it's coming up to Christmas and our seasonal production this year is E. Nesbit's 'The Railway Children' adapted for the stage by Mike Kenny.

I love working on the Christmas show at the Maddermarket. It always feels so cozy (metaphorically speaking - it's bloody freezing in here).  

Have the first fitting today with the actor playing The Old Gentleman. This will be fairly straight forward Edwardian city gent attire and will only require a few small alterations, hopefully.

Major work in progress though is a sailor suit for Roberta

Ancient and Modern Part 2

Modern


It's not all beautiful period dresses at the MMT!




People often assume that it's very difficult to costume a period piece and that a modern play is a piece of cake. It's just clothes isn't it? Well, that's why it is so tricky. With a play like our last production, Priestley's 'When We Are Married' it was very straight forward. The date was 1908, the action took place on one day and in Yorkshire and we had some upstanding members of the community and their staff and some lovely 'salt of the earth' characters. We had a lot of turn of the century costume in stock so the only tricky bits were getting clothes to fit and finding the right accessories

The Rev Mercer and Lottie Grady

Annie Parker, Clara Soppitt, Maria Helliwell and Herbert Soppitt

Fabulous wigs ladies!

However, with a modern play there isn't so much to go on. Audiences are very used to modern clothes and a lot of the costume/character shorthand often employed just doesn't work. A further layer of complexity is added when the designer reduces your palate to black and grey!

This is the current challenge I am faced with on this Summer's Christie 'A Murder Is Announced' The director and set designer are breaking with tradition and are bringing Miss Marple bang up to date.  The main problems I have to overcome are the fact that we have quite a limited stock of modern clothes so I'm having to scour the local charity shops. Also, the family at the centre of the play are quite wealthy in an 'old money' kind of way. This is quite hard to achieve on a limited budget and a diet of Oxfam and Primark so I will have to unleash my inner Gok and do some crafty styling.

I don't very often ask actors to bring in their own clothes. It is important for an actor to get into character and one way of doing this is by getting into costume. But for this play I may be calling in some of the actors own clothes to mix with items from the wardrobe.

50 Shades of Grey!

There is the odd occasion when the cut price clothing emporium is the costumiers friend. Earlier this year we put on an amazing piece of theatre by Shelagh Stephenson called '5 Kinds of Silence'. It is about domestic violence and the director staged it in a very stylistic way borrowing from Japanese Karuko theatre methods. He also had a very firm idea of how he wanted it to look. Again a limited palate of black, white red and grey. The father in black trousers, white shirt and red tie and at one point, a black overcoat with a red lining. His wife and two daughters were to be dressed identically in grey dresses that represented their repressed situation. The script also called for them to wear identical red coats to be in their fathers 'little army'. As luck would have it, a certain high street store had three military style red duffle coats reduced in their sale along with some grey jersey dresses that fitted the directors specifications exactly.

Production photographs from Peter Ashmore Visuals

It was one of the very few occasions that I virtually costumed a play in a day from one shop!