When I was at an art school, there was a theatre, a very good repertory theatre in the town where the art school was called, and the town’s called Ipswich. It had a wonderful, this wonderful, repertory theatre, and I used to go on the holidays and help in the scene painting department, and it was absolutely wonderful because you had these huge great backdrops.
And not just little things of paint but buckets of paint and big brushes
and you sloshed the paint on. And I thought this is for me, and that’s why later, after I finished a general course at art school, I specialized in theatre design in London which was a three-year course.
Then I got some work as a scene designer in another repertory theatre. I don’t know whether you know what repertory theatres are. Well, repertory theatres produce a play a week, and it’s very, very demanding and very tough on the poor old actors and on the scene designers because you have to be very quick in changing the scene for the next week.
So that was like square bashing. It was a wonderful training. A better training, I have to say, than actually being at art school. And then I went to Israel, and I worked in a theatre in Israel after I had been
I taught English for a time. And I was an au pair. And then I got work in the National Theatre there called the Habima Theatre which was in Tel Aviv.
And I designed quite a few sets for the National Theatre of Israel. It was an amazing opportunity. A beautiful theatre, a new theatre. They got me to design a lot of English plays like Billy Liar and The Long, The Short, and the Tall, and some of the Hebrew plays. I of course, I didn’t know what was going on so I couldn’t design it. But it was a wonderful experience.
And then I came back to England, and I worked in television for quite a long time which I actually didn’t enjoy terribly. It was sort of sitting at a desk all day doing
working drawings really, I suppose.
So I left there and went to work at a film studio — Shepperton Film Studios — and I worked on the very last film of Judy Garland called
I think it was called I Can’t Help Singing. And, my goodness, that was fun. That really was a great, great time.
