Richard Pilbrow, who has died aged 90, was the doyen of British theater lighting designers and one of the last survivors of the team Sir Laurence Olivier assembled in the 1960s to design the new National Theater on the South Bank. He was also the author of the lighting designer's bible, Stage Lighting (1970), nicknamed "the Old Testament," and the 1997 revised edition, "the New Testament."
Pilbrow belonged to the first generation of lighting designers who were considered artists rather than electricians. By the early 1960s he had made a name for himself as a modernizer, pioneering the use of film projections on stage in the Peter Cook/Kenneth Williams revue One Over the Eight (1961) and the Broadway production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), which he subsequently brought to the West End as co-producer.
In 1957 he had founded Theater Projects, Britain's first theater consultancy, which started out by hiring out lights salvaged from under the Drury Lane stage, and which would become the largest supplier of theatrical lighting and sound in Europe, and would also shape the design. from hundreds of theaters around the world. The Stage called him "the Bill Gates of the theater world".
Olivier hired Pilbrow as his lighting designer, first at the Chichester Festival Theater and then, in 1963, for the National Theater Company, based at the Old Vic, where he lit Peter O'Toole's Hamlet (1963), Love for Love (1966). ) and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966). He clashed with O'Toole, who wanted to fire Pilbrow, but Olivier was impressed; he compared his own previous light show expertise to "flying before and during the war 'by the seat of our pants'", compared to Pilbrow's, which was the equivalent "needed for dealing with today's jumbo jets" .
The arrival of the National Theatre's permanent home on the South Bank, meanwhile, proved painful. The architect Denys Lasdun had been unanimously appointed in 1963 (partly because he was the only candidate who had not arrived with a self-aggrandizing entourage), but relations had subsequently deteriorated to - as Lasdun put it - a 'pretty good hell'.
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In 1966, Pilbrow joined the National Theater Building Committee and found it a pyrotechnic mix of egos. The 'theatre people', including Olivier, William Gaskill, Peter Brook and Peter Hall, clashed with each other and with Lasdun, who was on the verge of resigning. No one could agree on what the large new space (which was soon split into two rooms, the Olivier open stage and the Lyttelton proscenium arch) should look like.
"I was the only backstage person there," Pilbrow later told Daniel Rosenthal, author of The National Theater Story. 'Lasdun gradually got into the habit of asking my opinion as to which of the two opposing options might be more practical.' Pilbrow went with Sir Laurence Olivier to various West End theaters to measure how far, according to Olivier, the furthest audience member could sit. Based on these tests, they determined the limits for the two large theaters of the National Theater: 20 meters.
In 1967, Theater Projects were appointed as the National's official stage and lighting consultants. Pilbrow's most difficult task was to make the open stage of the Olivier Theater a success.
In 1973 construction was in full swing and he was on holiday on the Isle of Coll with sound engineer David Collison. On the beach they drew a life-size map of the Olivier Theater, which was top secret at the time. ("I hope a helicopter with a camera doesn't fly over us," said Pilbrow.) When they viewed it from the adjacent hill, they were stunned: "It was huge" - 2.5 times the width of the Old Vic .
Pilbrow came up with an innovative rotating drum, containing two semi-circular elevators. It was the world's first open stage that could accommodate virtually any set imaginable, thanks to a fully automated flying system of 127 cranes (though it was plagued by insects). Lasdun was initially furious: "I am the architect, how dare you! Your 'ears' on my flying tower will change the silhouette of my building and the London skyline forever!"
Pilbrow devised the more traditional Lyttelton (which he gloomily described as a giant Odeon cinema), so that entire sets could be wheeled in on trolleys, which he likened to 'great tea trays'.
After years of delay, Peter Hall, who had succeeded Olivier as NT director in 1973, commissioned plays to be produced in the unfinished theaters. Pilbrow had to make sure there was a floor for the actors to stand on, and electricity so they could turn on the lights. "Advanced computers for flight, light and sound arrived in rooms that were not plastered," he recalls.
The Olivier and the Lyttelton opened in 1976, but Pilbrow was never happy with either. "Brilliant theater people have overcome these challenging spaces, but my heart still aches that our National Theater will include more actor-friendly spaces," he said.
He got his chance in 1973 when he was asked to advise on the Cottesloe (now renamed the Dorfman), a huge hole under the Olivier's aft stairs. The outline design was created by Iain Mackintosh, a new recruit at Theater Projects, whose vision was for a courtyard, spartan in decoration but 'full of people on three levels', so that the audience would 'complete the furnishings as wallpaper does a room'. " as Mackintosh recalled.
The Cottesloe opened in 1977 and inspired many imitators. It was a disastrous moment for Pilbrow, who subsequently led the pushback against the fashion that had existed from the 1930s to the 1970s for huge, fan-shaped halls, and in their place the old-fashioned stacked balconies of 18th century breathed new life into opera houses. , to bring as many audiences as close to the actors as possible.
"Tradition has adopted intimacy as the chief desirable characteristic of theatre, and the best are marvels of compressed humanity," he said. The mid-century "rules" of perfect sight lines, no old-fashioned boxes and no balconies, were "wrong." "We had thrown overboard a rich tradition of theater design, which since the time of Shakespeare had emphasized the one essential thing: the contact between performer and spectator."
Richard Pilbrow was born in Beckenham on April 28, 1933, the son of Gordon, an Olympic fencer, and his wife Marjorie, a music teacher. He attended Bickley Hall preparatory school where he spent hours collecting data on West End shows and played at a Pollock's Toy Theater and then Cranbrook School. After serving as a corporal in the RAF, he studied stage management at the Central School for Speech and Drama.
After graduating in 1955, he began his theatrical career as an assistant director to Her Majesty; two years later he borrowed £60 from his father to set up Kendall Theater Projects Ltd with his assistant Bryan. He then made a name for himself with the Hammersmith Lyric in the late 1950s with a string of hits.
Harold Prince, the Broadway producer with whom he had brought A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum to London in 1963, asked him to handle the film projection aspect of Golden Boy (1964), the Broadway musical starring Sammy Davis Jr. in the lead. In 1968, Pilbrow became the first English lighting designer to be entrusted with the complete lighting plan for an original Broadway musical, featuring Zorba. He became one of the first English designers to be invited to join the United Scenic Artists and won Tony nominations, a Drama Desk award and an Outer Critics award for his lighting.
Meanwhile, in the West End - in collaboration with Prince - he produced Fiddler on the Roof with Topol, Cabaret with Judi Dench and Stephen Sondheim's Company and A Little Night Music, and also worked on Ian McKellen's Edward II and Richard II. am Not Rappaport with Paul Scofield, She Stoops to Conquer with Tom Courtenay, The Ruling Class by Peter Barnes and the fiasco that was TWANG!
In the 1970s Pilbrow began making films, most notably producing Swallows and Amazons (1974), filmed in the Lake District; a minor scandal arose when it emerged that a crew member had seduced local girls by claiming to be Richard Pilbrow.
In the early 1980s, Theater Projects almost foundered, but Pilbrow survived by selling the lighting services and keeping the consultancy business alive, which was thriving. As a theater consultant, Pilbrow designed the Barbican, the Royal Exchange Theater in Manchester and Glyndebourne; Theater Projects went on to complete more than 1,800 projects in 80 countries, including many major venues in the US, where Pilbrow lived from 1988.
He co-founded the Association of Lighting Designers, the Association of British Theater Technicians, the Institute of British Theater Consultants and the Society of British Theater Designers. In 2011 he published a memoir, A Theater Project. His latest book, A Sense of Theatre: The Untold Stories of the Creation of Britain's National Theatre, will be published next year.
Richard Pilbrow married first in 1958 Viki Brinton, a partner in the early days of Theater Projects, with whom he had a son and a daughter; and second, in 1974, the lighting designer Molly Friedel, with whom he had another daughter.
Richard Pilbrow, born April 28, 1933, died December 6, 2023