Until the advent of Richard Pilbrow, the lighting designer’s job in British theater was to illuminate the actors and beautify the scenery. Richard, who has died aged 90, realized that stage design had the potential to become moving architecture and that photographic projection technology could allow stories to be told in a different way.
Inspired by Czech “screenwriter” Joseph Svoboda and inventive American lighting designers such as Tharon Musser, Richard brought vision, technical expertise and talent to the craft, making stage lighting an impressive and important part of theater design. He played a key role in the building and design of the National Theater on London’s South Bank in the 1960s and 70s, and his legacy can be seen in almost every contemporary stage production around the world.
In 1957, with a loan of £150 from his father, Richard obtained a stash of lighting equipment stored under the stage of the Drury Lane theater and founded a company, Theater Projects, with his future wife, Viki Brinton, and Bryan Kendall. . They initially rented equipment, but the team gradually became the dominant sound and lighting designers of the 60s, 70s and 80s. They later became the leading consultancy in theater design, working on more than 1,800 projects in more than 80 countries.
Having made his mark as lighting designer at the 59 Theater Company at Lyric Hammersmith, Richard was asked by Laurence Olivier in the early 60s to first advise on the new Chichester Festival theatre, then become lighting director in 1963. At the newly created National Theater at the Old Vic, he lit the launch production of Hamlet and the world premiere of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967), among others.
Olivier later brought him into the advisory committee for the development of the future National Theater on the South Bank to help mediate tensions between practitioners on the committee and the architect Denys Lasdun.
Lasdun designed the seating areas and stages for the Lyttelton and Olivier auditoriums, and Richard oversaw the technology, including the groundbreaking Olivier drum rotation, by which two semicircular elevators could be raised and lowered independently and rotated on the lower stage when lowered. level. Its completion was long delayed, but it has been widely and successfully used since its entry into service in the 90s. Other innovations included computer-controlled power flight for the stage (adapted from television studio systems) and a computerized lighting desk.
Richard and Lasdun managed to establish an effective working relationship, and Lasdun later invited him to collaborate on a competition for the Genoa Opera House. But when the Lyttelton and Olivier theaters opened in 1976, Richard realized that this was difficult even for the most successful, due to the disproportionate volume of the venue, the remoteness of the balconies and the unfriendly material of concrete. When actors make their voices heard without raising their voices, it frustrates both audiences and practitioners.
As a result, when the design of the Cottesloe (now Dorfman) theater was handed over to Theater Projects, Pilbrow encouraged his colleague Iain Mackintosh to design the theater with the audience packed tightly around the stage; advisory committee. The building, called the “courtyard theatre,” became the model for many Theater Project buildings around the world.
Born in Beckenham, Kent, Richard was the son of music teacher Marjorie (née Hayward) and Gordon Pilbrow, a property developer and Olympic fencer who participated in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Gordon desperately wanted his son to follow in his fencing footsteps and arranged tuition fees from the national coach. It was all in vain: Richard was more interested in playing with the Pollocks toy theater and the charms of the Beckenham Children’s theatre. He later told me that his interest in lighting might also have stemmed from growing up during the Second World War and watching floodlights, flashes and lightning from south London.
After attending nearby Bickley Hall preparatory school, then Cranbrook school in Kent, Richard did his national service in the RAF and became a corporal. He attended the Central School of Speech and Drama, where he met Viki and together they helped transfer the school’s show from their graduating year in 1955 to Her Majesty’s Theater (now Her Majesty’s Theatre) in the West End. They married in 1958.
Her Majesty offered Richard a job as assistant stage manager on the Broadway play The Teahouse of the August Moon. There he was introduced to the work of Peter Larkin (who designed the original lighting in the US) and George Schaefer (who adapted it for the West Coast) and began to see the possibilities of a discipline that was still in its infancy in the 1950s. United Kingdom.
In 1963, American director Hal Prince brought A Funny Thing That Happened on the Way to the Forum to London and asked Richard to do the projections. This led to Richard becoming involved as co-producer of a number of Prince-directed musicals that transferred from Broadway to the West End, including She Loves Me, Cabaret, Company, A Little Night Music and Fiddler on the Roof. In 1968 Richard lit the musical Zorba in the US for Prince, making him the first British lighting designer for a Broadway show.
Richard also produced the film Swallows and Amazons (1974) and the 1977 TV series about popular music, All You Need Is Love, with Tony Palmer. A tireless organiser, he was co-founder of the British Association of Theater Technicians and the Society of Lighting Designers.
He wrote Stage Lighting (1970; revised 1997), an indispensable guide to his craft, and A Theater Project (2011), a memoir. In the last years of his life, Richard was working on a history of the building of the National Theater which will be published this spring; to be published this spring, and argued at the time that he was wrong to see this challenge. that they were technical rather than theatrical terms, and that his work over the next fifty years led him to advocate a return to the model of Victorian and Edwardian theatres; Horseshoe-shaped auditoriums that embrace the stage and tiered seating at various levels create meaning, he said. unity between actor and audience.
For all his interest in design and technology, Richard was always passionate about the medium itself: he thought that the human element – the actor – should be at the center of the event, and that in all undertakings the whole should be at the center of the event. the sum of their parts, technicians as well as artists.
His marriage to Viki ended in divorce. They had a son named Fred and a daughter named Abigail. In 1974, he married Molly Friedel, also a lighting designer, and they had a daughter named Daisy.
Molly and her children survived him.
• Richard Pilbrow, lighting designer, born April 28, 1933; Died December 6, 2023