Mister Heracles
by Simon Armitage
West Yorkshire Playhouse (2001)
Directed by Natasha Betteridge and Simon Godwin
Lighting designed by Nigel Edwards
Heracles’ tomb-like house is boarded up during his absence, surrounded by wire fencing and covered in a briar-like wall of floral tributes.
On his return the briars disappear and the house comes back to life, only to accommodate his madness and the murder of his family.
After the slaughter, the entire facade fell forwards to reveal the interior – a floating blood-red carpet littered with bodies and toppled, axed furniture.
TMA AWARD for Best Design 2002
“Laura Hopkins’s superb design combines exterior and interior, boarded up crumbling mansion with a modern scene-of-the-catastrophe setting where floral tributes lie rotting.”
The Guardian
“Superb staging gives the last phase of the drama a shocking immediacy. The boarded-up facade of the mansion slowly tilts forward, exposing a crimson-floored scene of domestic carnage, wrecked elegance and a hero bound and insensible.”
The Independent