directed by Phyllida Lloyd :
designed by Anthony Ward :
lighting by Rick Fisher :
sound by Paul Arditti :
music by Gary Yershon :
Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester
Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre opened in 1976. Its auditorium was an unmistakably modern three-storey arena plopped in the middle of ‘the biggest room in the world,’ the massive trading floor of the 1921 Exchange building. You can read about its interesting history here. In just under 15 years, its theatre company had grown an enviable reputation nationally. It was considered a prestigious place to work.
Among an excellent cast, Phyllida’s eye for talent lighted on young Adrian Lester to play Prince Florizel, and Myra McFadyen to be Autolycus the rogue. Adrian was stunning; handsome, charismatic, a superb speaker of verse. Myra was dynamic, engaging, seductively funny. In their different ways, they were pleasures to watch and listen to.
There is a lot of music required for The Winter’s Tale, but there wasn’t much of a music budget. Paul Arditti, the sound designer with whom we’d worked on A Streetcar Named Desire at Bristol Old Vic the previous year, offered up the possibilities of synthesisers and newly-affordable digital samples. That seemed an interesting route to follow, so that’s what we did. My memory is that I was still rather stuck in conventional instrumental writing, not revelling as freely as I might have done in the sounds of the new world — which were actually not so new. There had been digital samples since the 1970s, and I’d bought a DX7 synth in the mid-80s. But compared to how I would use them today, in The Winter’s Tale I didn’t really exploit them fully. It took another decade of collaborating with Paul, and other such excellent sound designers, that I was able to do so.
