Rose Revitt wins designer award with Robe
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The Stage Awards celebrate the very best breakthrough talent in theatre, including actors, directors, designers, writers, composers and lyricists making their professional debuts in the past year.
For Rose, this particular journey started with another prize-winning opportunity. Last year, she won the biennial Linbury Prize for Stage Design which offers 12 emerging designers the chance to work with some of the UK’s leading theatre, opera, and dance companies.
Newly graduated from the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama in Cardiff with an MA in Design For Performance (set & costume specialty), Rose applied for the Linbury Prize with her portfolio and as one of the 12 finalists, was linked up with Leeds Playhouse who gave her and two other designers a brief for Dr Korczak’s Example.
The Leeds Playhouse team chose Rose’s dramatic bombed-out, rubble-strewn set concept from the three options, and with a short lead-time, this challenging heart-warming yet bitterly realistic work in the time of the holocaust was realised and staged in February 2020.
This turned out to be exceptionally fortunate timing, just before the pandemic hit and shut down theatres nationwide and the actual turnaround time from drawings, photos and model box visualisation to full stage realisation was only a few weeks, galvanising all involved in the production.
Set in 1942 during the final days of an orphanage in the Warsaw ghetto, the emotive and enduring true story reveals the stark choices of Polish educator and children’s author Dr Janusz Korczak, who champions the rights of young people already leading tough lives in a time of war, intolerance, hate and totalitarian rule.
The design was for the Bramall Rock Void, a completely new, contemporary and fully flexible space at Leeds Playhouse with exposed brick and rock walls that Rose found a huge inspiration for her fragmented rubble and debris strewn world which set the scene for the action to unfold.
Before Rose studied in Cardiff, she was based at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester and trained as a technician and producer for their Young Company which fuelled her interest in stage architecture, set design and visuals.
Other nominees for the Best Designer category were Liam Bunster for set and costume design on The Taming of the Shrew at Shakespeare’s Globe in London and Andrew Exeter for lighting design on High Fidelity staged at the Turbine Theatre, also in London.
Theresa Gibson, head of marketing at Robe UK commented, “We were delighted to sponsor The Stage Debut Awards for the third consecutive year. Our involvement was more important than ever this year due to the challenges our industry is experiencing, especially the theatre sector and how it has suffered due to the pandemic. It was wonderful to have three strong nominations for Best Designer under such circumstances.
