Design Is Not Decoration: Theatre Thinks in Space, Light, and Sound

Design Is Interpretive

Before I trained as an actor, I studied set design for two years. I never intended to become a designer. That period permanently rewired how I understand theatre. I learned to read space as text, material as meaning, structure as pressure. The set was not background. It behaved like another character: sometimes resistant, sometimes generous, never indifferent.

That sensibility bled into how I think about every design element. Set, lighting, costume, sound — and increasingly video and projection mapping — each operates as another thinking presence in the room: responding to the text, the director's inquiry, the actors' choices, the evolving rhythms of rehearsal. Design does not sit downstream from interpretation. It is one of its primary engines.

Design thinks.

It shapes how an audience understands a moment before a word is spoken. It determines how tension accumulates, how emotional beats land — or refuse to land. It adds subtext, clarifies relationships, and amplifies stakes through physical and sensory means. It is analytical and imaginative at once — translating ideas from the page into material, spatial, auditory, and visual form.

Forty years in rehearsal rooms, production meetings, and technical rehearsals have confirmed this. A production's success or failure is determined long before an audience arrives. It depends on how seriously design is invited to think alongside every other creative element.

Out at Sea by Slawomir Mrozek. Design by Kerry Reid

Theatre Does Not Exist on the Page

A play is a proposition. Not a finished object. Theatre comes alive only when that proposition is translated into space, time, rhythm, and action — and design is central to that translation. It applies weight before a word is spoken. It defines relationships. It tells the audience how to read the world before language confirms or contradicts it.

Film offers a resolved image. Theatre does not. Theatre remains openly constructed. Audiences are always aware — consciously or not — that what they are watching is being made in front of them, in real time, by real bodies in real space. That awareness is not a flaw. It is theatre's power.

I was reminded of this directing House by Francis Italiano at the Perth International Fringe Festival. One character, living with mental health challenges, compulsively wrote letters and lists and pinned them to his refrigerator — behaviours developed collaboratively with the people the text portrayed. Film would have given us the fridge, the notes, a complete visual record. We made a different choice. The man lived inside his refrigerator, physically surrounded by his lists. Design did not illustrate behaviour. It embodied it. The audience did not observe his inner life. They entered it.

In my production of Howard Barker's Victory, a single costume choice carried the argument of the scene. As Devonshire confronted King Charles II, the actress wore her illegitimate, unborn child visibly on the outside of her body. Not realism. Interpretation. The costume refused privacy and made consequence unavoidable. The child — unacknowledged, politically inconvenient — was already present, already demanding recognition. Power, neglect, and responsibility were no longer abstract. They were carried in space and form. Nothing needed emphasis. The design did the thinking.

In Exile by Francis Italiano, design began with the site. The Fremantle Arts Centre — once an asylum for people deemed mentally and physically unfit — was not a backdrop. It was a thinking partner. The promenade performance moved through the building and its courtyard, each space operating as both metaphor and reality. The courtyard and its trees were wrapped in white cloth, reduced to a clinical landscape. A single hospital bed at its centre. Care and confinement on the same ground.

Inside, a small gallery that had once been the dining room — marked by histories of violence and institutional cruelty — was transformed into a room of toilets. The choice was not decorative. It gave physical form to the filth beneath institutional order, to what the building had absorbed and concealed. The audience, dressed in white coats, became part of the design. Projections landed on their bodies as the action moved through the space in traverse. Meaning did not remain in front of them. It moved across and through them.

At the end of the play, the audience sat in a park facing the rear wall of the building. Across it appeared a single projected crack, slowly splitting the structure apart. The building did not survive the play intact.

Design did not frame Exile. It authored it.

Every design choice offers a proposition rather than an answer. A tilted table, a shaft of light, a recurring sound, a jacket slipping from a shoulder — each signals intention without explanation. The audience completes the image, filling gaps with their own experience. Meaning is not delivered whole. It is assembled in the act of watching.

Aladdin and his Wonderful Lamp by Lakhinandan Boruah and Glenn Hayden. Mapping Design by Jasson Heffer and Los Angeles-based VFX artist Walid Feghadi

Interpretation, Faithfulness, and the Brief

Interpretation is the playground of theatre-making — the space between what the text says and what it can mean. Directors and designers operate here not as problem-solvers but as co-investigators.

In my practice this begins with a strong brief. A director's responsibility is to articulate a clear and rigorous inquiry from the outset: the central questions of the play, the pressures operating within it, the territory we are entering. This is not a concept or a visual idea. It is a declaration of intent.

Early in the process I meet designers multiple times before any concepts are proposed. These conversations circle the text — its contradictions, resistances, ambiguities, provocations — without narrowing possibility. Once the brief is clear, I step back. Designers, like writers, need autonomy to generate, discard, and refine ideas. Models, sketches, lighting experiments, sound tests then enter the room as postulations — things to argue with. Interpretation is genuinely co-authored. Not managed.

Some plays are precise. Even prescriptive. Beckett's Rough for Theatre II includes meticulous instructions for lighting, positioning, and rhythm. Following them is not restriction. It is dialogue with a playwright who wrote through design — for whom light, space, duration, and arrangement are narrative devices embedded in the text. To treat these instructions as optional is to misunderstand where the storytelling happens. The same is true of writers often labelled difficult or conceptual. In Waiting for Godot, An Inspector Calls, and Blasted, space carries moral pressure, light structures time, and environments embody psychological and political states. Design is not an addition. It is a continuation of the playwright's argument.

Faithfulness is attention, not obedience. Read the play until it resists you. Then argue with it honestly, and commit to what you find.

Chafed by Sunny Sharma. Design by Glenn Hayden

Design Carrying Narrative Weight

There is no neutral design decision. How a shadow falls, how a costume restricts movement, how sound lingers or cuts — each choice proposes meaning. Design does not merely support action. It generates it.

In my production of Romeo and Juliet, set in 1970s Bombay, the environment was constructed almost entirely from metal scaffolding. Not illustrative. Argumentative. The scaffolding suggested a city under construction — unstable, provisional, volatile — mirroring the social and emotional pressures in the play. Actors had to negotiate this terrain physically. Their bodies absorbed the metaphor.

Props are instruments of storytelling. I often invite actors to choose personal props — a wallet, a handkerchief, a coffee cup. These objects accumulate behaviour. In my 2026 production of Romeo and Juliet, actors selected their own guns. Tybalt chose a flashy weapon. Mercutio selected something plain. Tybalt's hand went to his hip immediately — proprietary, almost vain. Mercutio barely touched his. Character arrived in the body before a word was spoken, not explained intellectually.

Costume can guide discovery in the same way. Jackets that restrict, frocks that swirl, shoes that destabilise — these are provocations, not aesthetic flourishes. Many actors wait for permission to explore this, which limits discovery. In my training we were required to own stock items for rehearsal: dress shoes, character shoes, even a cape. Costume locates characters under pressure — social, emotional, physical. It can confine and liberate simultaneously.

Light and sound operate the same way. In Prayer to an Iron God, lighting designer Joe Mercurio showed how shadows could provoke actor behaviour without a word of direction. In The Visitor, cellist Julia Kent's live music and soundscape conveyed narrative and emotional truth beyond what dialogue could reach. Design is an actor on stage, with its own timing, gesture, and presence.

House by Francis Italiano. Designed by Bryan Woltjen

When Design Thinks: Collaboration as Creation

There is a rare joy in finding a designer with whom a director truly works. Not ease. Not agreement. Shared appetite: the willingness to think rigorously, risk disagreement, and let ideas be challenged rather than defended. When that alignment exists, silence becomes productive, disagreement sharpens, and responsibility for meaning is no longer yours alone.

I experienced this most clearly with the late set and costume designer Kerry Reid in Adelaide. Kerry was also an actor, and her dual practice shaped every aspect of our collaboration. Design decisions became dramaturgical acts. Any early sketches or thoughts I offered as part of a briefing were never meant as literal solutions. Kerry took them on board for their intent, not their depiction. Her responses — models, lighting experiments, costumes — were often entirely different from what I had imagined. Invariably more precise. The original impulse remained, but it had been tested, interrogated, and transformed into theatrical intelligence.

Even provisional design elements in rehearsal — stand-in shoes, jackets, hats, set pieces — begin to generate behaviour. They shift weight, restrict or release movement, and provoke choices that text alone cannot create. An actor arrived wearing a jacket far too large. No instruction was given. Instantly, the excess fabric reshaped their physical life. Gestures softened. Posture shifted. Movement became more cautious. Vulnerability and self-protection appeared in the body before a word was spoken. The jacket did not illustrate character. It provoked it.

Directing Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp, I worked with projection mapping to an extent I hadn't before. The cast stepped onto what appeared to be an empty stage and were suddenly surrounded by illusions that responded to the text. Unlike traditional video, projection mapping interacts with the set and actors in real time — it doesn't provide a backdrop, it defines surfaces, shapes movement, and becomes part of the physical world the performers inhabit. Initially the technology felt unfamiliar. The collaboration itself was not. The mapping became another thinking presence onstage.

This shared language between director, designer, and actor creates trust. Briefs become invitations. Notes become provocations. When designers pursue what is necessary rather than what is expected, momentum builds, risk becomes sustainable, and the work gains density. Audiences may never know why a production feels coherent, alive, or unsettling — but those qualities emerge from artists thinking rigorously, arguing honestly, and trusting one another enough to let the work lead.

Design will not resonate with everyone. It should not try. Like direction, design must choose. Consensus leads to vagueness. Hesitation stops clarity. Theatre does not need agreement. It needs commitment.

Victory by Howard Barker. Image by Jon Green. Design by WAAPA Design Department Students

Conclusion

When design is treated as decoration, it arrives after the thinking is done — asked to smooth edges and beautify decisions it did not help to make.

But design does not wait quietly.

It presses.

It insists.

It thinks.

Space argues before a word is spoken. Light decides what may be seen and what must remain hidden. Sound bends time, unsettles rhythm, alters breath. These are not effects layered onto meaning. They are acts of meaning themselves.

To work this way requires courage. A director must willingly invite uncertainty. Designers must accept authorship. Actors must listen beyond the text. The rehearsal room must allow space, light, and sound to speak while the play is still undecided.

When design is kept at the margins, theatre becomes illustrative — safe, legible, and forgettable. When it is allowed to think alongside us, it becomes something else entirely. Theatre succeeds when responsibility for meaning is shared.

That is where its enduring power lives.

That is where its enchantment begins.

My Sister Violet by Sean Riley. Design by Dean Hills

Reading

Every theatre artist will benefit from reading:

The Empty Space by Peter Brook. A foundational theory book on what theatre is — emphasising presence, action, and space rather than text alone.

The Viewpoints Book: A Practical Guide to Viewpoints and Composition — Anne Bogart & Tina Landau. Not strictly a design text but invaluable for understanding space and time as creative elements in performance.

Theatre and Performance Design: A Reader in Scenography — Jane Collins & Andrew Nisbet. An anthology of critical essays on space, perception, and design practice featuring voices from Appia to contemporary theorists — excellent for deeper conceptual grounding.

Event‑Space: Theatre Architecture and the Historical Avant‑Garde — Dorita Hannah. Explores how performance space has been conceptually reshaped by avant‑garde practices — useful for thinking about theatre beyond the proscenium.

Between the Lines: A Philosophy of Theatre — Michael Y. Bennett. A contemporary philosophical treatment that examines theatre as an art form — including the metaphysics of space, the empty stage, and how theatrical properties emerge from performance rather than text.

The Poetics of Space — Gaston Bachelard. Though not a theatre book, this phenomenological classic examines how place and spatial experience shape imagination and perception — conceptually essential for thinking about theatrical environments and how audiences inhabit them.

Prayer to an Iron God by Caroline Reid. Design by Niven Barlow

The Vistor by Sean Riley. Design by Kerry Reid

A note from the author: the ideas, arguments, and experiences in this article are entirely my own — drawn from forty years of working in theatre, film, and actor training. I used AI tools during the writing process to assist with spelling, grammar, and the verification of facts. What it cannot do — and did not do — is think for me, feel for me, or replace the professional experience from which every observation in this article comes.