Obituary: Jocelyn Herbert
Jocelyn Herbert, who has died aged 86, was one of a tiny group of people who could safely be called a conscience for the British theatre. This virtue, as well as her great talent and achievements as a designer, meant that she was very widely loved and respected.
Her natural home was George Devine's Royal Court Theatre, London, where, in 1956, she joined the English Stage Company as a scenic artist. In 1957, she designed Eugene Ionesco's The Chairs, the first of her 40 productions for the ESC. She wasa passionate champion of a play's text and its author's intentions. The Royal Court's fame as a respecter of writers is widely celebrated: Jocelyn Herbert made that respect visible.
She worked in a small space with little money, but was undeterred. Her mental and emotional preparation over the years were gifts to Ann Jellicoe's The Sport Of My Mad Mother, Ionesco's The Lesson, Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape and Endgame, Arnold Wesker's Roots and The Kitchen, and John Arden's Serjeant Musgrave's Dance, all designed within 21 months, in 1958-59.
In this first group of designs, Herbert established attitudes which remained with her to the end of her working life. An edited naturalism appeared for Roots, the first play of the Wesker trilogy; and for The Kitchen, abstraction: plates, simple structural blocks and sound and light effects were enough to make the audience see a workplace.
However, it was in Serjeant Musgrave's Dance that she first showed her gift for an epic narrative. So much was required by this fable of retribution in a snowbound canal town that an economy of means was essential on such a small stage if the action was to flow unchecked. The hungry eye was guided by fragments towards a poetic whole: a few weeds summoned up a towpath, a single flat created a public house. The style resembled that of the Berliner Ensemble, but something of the atmospheric premise of the piece and the designer's roots in the English watercolour tradition took it beyond social observation into lyricism.
Between June 1960 and November 1962, Herbert designed Shakespeare's Richard III for the Royal Shakespeare Company, the film of Tom Jones, and at the Royal Court, Wesker's Chicken Soup With Barley, I'm Talking About Jerusalem and Chips With Everything, Christopher Logue's Trials By Logue, Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's The Changeling, John Osborne's Luther, Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Beckett's Happy Days. It was a time of expansion on the British stage; and these productions were the pick of the bunch.
Happy Days was her third collaboration with Beckett, to whom she and Devine were close. Their friendship endured until Beckett's death in 1989: Herbert could mediate with great effect between his adamantine side and the actors labouring under the burden of performing his work - Devine himself in Endgame, Brenda Bruce in Happy Days and Billie Whitelaw on many occasions.
Beckett said that Herbert became his closest friend in England: "She has a great feeling for the work and is very sensitive and doesn't want to bang the nail on the head. Generally speaking, there is a tendency on the part of designers to overstate, and this has never been the case with Jocelyn."
Baal, an early play by Bertolt Brecht, which opened at the Phoenix Theatre in February 1963, had never been performed during his life. It was staged fluently with elegant fragments of reality and evocative projections abstracted from nature. Maybe, however, the beautiful designs and Peter O'Toole's determined charm made the play seem more romantic than it was meant to be.
In six years, Herbert's work, based on a spare poetic aesthetic tending to abstraction, had become the style of Devine's Royal Court. Professionally and personally, the relationship between Herbert and Devine was phenomenal. It is hard to appreciate and poignant to grasp how brief was its fulfilment, just 10 years of opportunity; and, although his influence was in all her work at the Court, by the time Devine died in 1965, they had worked together as director and designer on just four plays by Beckett, one by Jellicoe, and another by Ionesco.
By now, Herbert was very much in demand, but she was careful in what she chose to do, and loyal to people who had first worked with her at the Court. For most of her life, she worked with a handful of directors, notably with Beckett twice, William Gaskell four times, Anthony Page five times, Tony Richardson 11 times, Lindsay Anderson 13 times and John Dexter 21 times.
Her disdain for irrelevant effects, her concern for a full collaboration appealed to this mixed bunch of temperaments. With Lindsay Anderson she had a brawling relationship, which was a false front for a true professional interdependence.
Between 1963 and 1967, she designed many well-remembered shows: Laurence Olivier's production of Shakespeare's Othello (National), Osborne's Inadmissible Evidence (Royal Court), Brecht's Mother Courage And Her Children (National) and Osborne's A Patriot For Me (Royal Court). From 1967, she began to work more outside the Court, and her influence increased, so that designers were increasingly ready to examine the relevance of their work to the production's intentions and to understand the collaboration involved.
Other films followed the design of Tony Richardson's 1963 Tom Jones: Isadora (Karel Reisz, 1968), If (Anderson, 1968), Ned Kelly (Richardson, 1970), O Lucky Man! (Anderson, 1973), The Hotel New Hampshire (Richardson, 1984), The Whales of August (Anderson, 1987) and Prometheus (Tony Harrison, 1998). But Herbert made no secret of the fact that film was not her medium, since she had so little control over the images, which remained the natural property of the director and his lighting cameraman. The exception was Prometheus, a low-budget, small-unit pilgrimage across eight countries, from Doncaster to Greece, a process evolving in the mind of poet Tony Harrison as the days passed.
The operas Herbert designed included Gluck's Orpheus And Euridice (Sadler's Wells, 1967), Verdi's La Forza del Destino (Paris Opera, 1977), Kurt Weill and Brecht's The Rise And Fall Of The City Of Mahagonny and Mozart's Die Entführung Aus Dem Serail (both at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, 1979) and Harrison Birtwistle's The Mask Of Orpheus (London Coliseum, 1986). She brought to the form, which for much of her working life lay across a gulf from the theatre, her sense of dramatic purpose. Conventions are strong in the opera house, but she was undaunted. At the Met, she adjusted its huge space for Die Entführung so that it remained a chamber opera brought part way over the orchestra pit towards the audience.
Over her long career, a pattern of collaborations appeared. Two principal strands, taking her in differ ent directions, were the plays of David Storey, and ancient Greek drama. She and Lindsay Anderson first worked with Storey at the Royal Court in 1970, on the production of Home.Herbert wrote: "David Storey's plays reveal the utter frailty of people and how caught they are in their own particular worlds ... in a strange way he's near to Beckett. I suppose I find these people are the ones I respond to most, the ones who are isolated and alone with whom you have rare moments of communication."
He in turn appreciated her, saying: "Her great gift ... is her identification with the material ... I suppose her gift as a designer, quite apart from her personality, is, in literary terms, her lyricism. It's a visual lyricism which is the unifying element in all her designs, even in those which are simple and austere."
With John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson finding new freedom, Home was a success. Herbert designed six more of David Storey's plays: The Changing Room (1971), Cromwell (1973), Life Class (1974), Early Days (1980), The March On Russia (1989) and Stages (1992). The last was also the final production she did for Lindsay Anderson.
The English theatre has often failed Greek plays through a misunderstanding of the way they work. But Herbert took pains to discover how seemingly archaic conventions were vitally related to the material. A modern actor would complain that a mask prevented him from voicing the text. Herbert would demonstrate that, if he wore the mask, the text would voice him. A modern director, seeking to charge a moment with horror, might call for blood; and Herbert, observant of the convention in which the play was written, would achieve more with one red silk glove and the words.
It was when working with Peter Hall on his production of The Oresteia at the National Theatre in 1981 that she met Tony Harrison, and found a creative partnership that animated much of the remaining 20 years of her professional life. At the start of it, she was 64 years old and yet she worked in an energetic and concrete way, habitually with her own hands, on much that was needed for Harrison's The Trackers Of Oxyrhynchus, Square Rounds and The Kaisers Of Carnuntum.
Jocelyn Herbert's life had been fortunate in many ways. Born in London, she was the daughter of the writer Sir Alan (AP) Herbert and his wife Gwendolen. Her father was a national character and an independent MP from 1935 till 1950, famous for his campaign to liberalise the divorce laws. After leaving St Paul's Girls' School, Hammersmith, Jocelyn studied painting with André L'Hote in Paris, went to the Slade School of Art to study stage design, and moved on to the London Theatre Studio at the age of 19.
There she met and worked with Michel Saint-Denis, George Devine and the three designers - Sophia Harris, Margaret (Percy) Harris and Elizabeth Montgomery - who worked collectively under the name of Motley. Throughout her life, Herbert was grateful to the ideas and example of this group of people. In 1937 she married Anthony Lousada and began a family; two years later, the war came and the London Theatre School closed.
Between the ages of 22 and 39, her daily life and her work developed privately. She was a confident and sociable young woman, but her good fortune did not blinker her as an artist.
In her work she protested her weaknesses, while exhibiting her strengths. She said that she could not draw, but her drawings illuminated her purposes admirably. Diffident technically, she none the less doggedly pursued the detail of the execution of her scenery and costumes: she got what she needed.
She gave and exacted respect; and everyone knew that she was not vainglorious or self-seeking. She never turned aside from what she wanted to do to accept shows that might have made her rich; and she was resistant to awards and honours. She was an associate of the Royal College of Art (1964), was elected a Royal Designer for Industry (1971), and became an honorary fellow of the Royal Academy (1991).
From the days before the war at the London Theatre Studio until her wanderings through Europe with Prometheus over 60 years later, her greatest gifts to others were her integrity, her intuitions and a total commitment to the matter in hand. All who worked with her drew on her strengths. Real submission to the imperatives of good theatre work is hard and very rare. Enormous moral energy is needed, and Jocelyn possessed it.
Her marriage ended in divorce in 1960, and she is survived by her son and three daughters.
Tony Harrison writes:
For Jocelyn's 80th birthday, I wrote a poetic toast that listed all the wines we had toasted each other in on what she called, with an always undiminished enthusiasm, our "adventures" - our collaborations on theatrical projects in the ancient stadium of Delphi, a Roman amphitheatre on the Danube, and back to a mountainside in Greece with a chorus of concrete-mixers. And this was before, at the age of 81, she rode in a truck with me across Europe for our film together, Prometheus.
At the end of long, punishing days on the road, while the rest of the crew, a third of her age, would be grumbling about the schedule or the accommodation, she would be with her wine, reciting a lyrical litany of the sunflowers she had seen on the journey, or the storks' nests. We had a month's filming in Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and our favourite place for adventures, Greece, and the retsina she loved to drink outside in the sun.
Which is exactly what we did on her last day, watching woodpeckers in the copse in front of her cottage, and remembering our adventures together; up to an hour before she died, we were planning a new one, and she was excited that it might include a recce to the Arctic Circle to view the aurora borealis .
She reminded me how I'd filled my straw hat with mulberries I'd picked from a tree, while setting up a shot in Bulgaria, and brought them to her. There are not many people who would inspire a man to fill his straw hat with mulberries. But Jocelyn was the sort of muse you made those kinds of offering to. They were received with her unique joy. I will go on toasting her forever for all the beauty of her work, all the profound things she taught me about theatre, and for her free, adventurous, joyful spirit that taught me about how to live.
· Jocelyn Herbert, theatre designer, born February 22 1917; died May 6 2003