Bunny Christie has worked at the National Theatre before but not in the Olivier theatre – one of London’s largest stages. She began work designing
The Life of Galileo not by thinking about the practical challenges this poses, but, as she explains,
when she first started researching she visited an observatory to look at the night sky through a telescope.
One of Bunny’s first challenges was to respond positively to director Howard Davies’s expressed fear that the play was
a very wordy piece and possibly in danger of being lost in the vastness of the Olivier stage. To counter this, and to enable the action to move quickly from place to place in an exciting way, became Bunny’s first priority. She did not work in isolation from the director. Indeed, the working partnership between a director and a designer is one of the most intimate and significant of all the theatre-making processes. Bunny Christie and Howard Davies were
collaborating on ideas about how to stage the play and how the production should look right from the beginning of the project, long before rehearsals began. As Bunny says, it is very important at the start of a long creative process for a designer to feel uninhibited, free to suggest ideas to a director, to “
feel free to get it wrong ”. Following her initial research Bunny built a
white card model of the set, illustrating its main features. This became an important reference point for the continuing discussions she was having with the director and subsequently a
detailed scale model of the set was built including as much detail about furniture, colours, fittings, materials etc. as possible. This
detailed model of the set is a vital tool in creating the finished design to be used in the production, because, as Bunny explains, the more detailed the model is at an early stage, the more time it saves later on in the workshops and on the stage.
