Diary: Designer and director

Carol Ann Duffy's retellings aren't cute and pretty tales that have been Disneyfied. They contain murder and perfidy, lust and greed, and a whole range of powerful adult emotions and experiences. Getting the tone and language right is initially down to the writer and adaptors, but bringing sometimes earthy words and actions to the stage requires a whole new adaptation process by the actors.

Melly Still is both director and designer of Beasts and Beauties, and she is ultimately responsible for what the audience will see and hear. She works as hard on the creation of the right visual text as she does on that which is spoken by the actors. Already she has spent a whole day finding the right costumes to help the actors, and in the second week of rehearsals she spent another day working with the Head of the Wardrobe Department at the Old Vic on finding the right make up and wigs for the actors to try.

During this process, the actors come in one at a time to sit in front of an ancient and rather cloudy mirror in the Wardrobe to talk with Melly about their make-up and to try on various wigs. Make-up will be minimal in most cases, with one or two exceptions. Howard Coggins, for example, plays a cow with the minimal assistance of a pair of very long false eyelashes and a lot of lipstick. Bluebeard (Bill Nash) gets to try on his beard (real hair dyed with spray-on hair colour); and the North Wind (Elaine Claxton) puts on a splendid long dark wig that, together with her 'biker' jacket and an incongruous looking woollen bobble hat, gives her the appearance she is looking for. Throughout the day Melly is carefully assessing the "look" of the production as a whole. As the show's designer, she knows how the setting is going to work, in what period she wants each story to be located; as the director, she also knows what is likely to help the actors develop their roles and what might hinder them.

This dual focus as designer and director (not to mention co-adaptor of the tales) makes considerable demands. When the actors break for lunch, production meetings are often scheduled. These involve another team of people: the Production Manger, the Heads of Sound, Lighting, and Props and Construction departments, a specialist in pyrotechnics, the man responsible for the lifting of all the scenery onto the stage (the "fly-man"), plus the team of three stage managers working on Beasts and Beauties. They discuss the arcane technicalities of how to create the special effects Melly wants: how to find a liquid that looks like cream but when spilt (as it will be in The Husband) won't ruin the scenery, or the costume of the husband who has to roll around in it, and which won't smell for the rest of the run. In The Three Wishes a long string of black pudding has to drop onto the stage from the flies and, as the head fly-man remarked, it will be necessary to have a reserve string to "throw on from the wings" in case the release mechanism doesn't work.