TANYA MOISIEWITCH: The move towards a clear stage, opening up plays to the audience's imagination, was the great innovation of 20th-century theatre design. Tanya Moiseiwitsch, who has died aged 88, was one of the most imaginative figures in this progression: her work in Britain, Ireland, Canada and the US was a thrilling combination of austere sets and opulent costumes in deep colours.
Tomás MacAnna says of her important contribution to the Abbey in the 1930s that she gave the theatre's dull design "a stage image from then on". "She rose to the challenge of Hilton and Michael in the Gate, and was wonderful at getting the mood of a play in her staging," he says.
Equally influential was her design for new theatres, creating the open thrust stages for the Stratford Festival, Ontario and the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis.
Her parents were both prominent musicians. The pianist Benno Moiseiwitsch, born in Odessa, settled in London and married Australian-born violinist Daisy Kennedy. Both parents later remarried. Tanya played the piano and was encouraged to study music, but preferred the visual arts. She studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London and as an apprentice scene painter at the Old Vic.
After her professional debut in 1934 with John Masefield's The Faithful at the Westminster Theatre, Hugh Hunt invited her to Dublin's renowned but visually fusty Abbey Theatre in 1935. Moiseiwitsch transformed the repertoire's naturalistic tenements and poetic Yeatsian landscapes.
She would return to Dublin in 1969 to work with Tyrone Guthrie on two productions, the Ulster Theatre Company's MacCook's Corner by George Shiels, and the Abbey's own Swift by Eugene McCabe, starring Miceál MacLiammóir as Swift. In 1980 she designed Hugh Hunt's production of O'Casey's Red Roses for Me.
Having designed more than 50 Abbey productions, she had returned to England in 1939, working at the Oxford Playhouse, where she fell in love with Felix Krish, an assistant stage manager, who had been called up to the Royal Air Force. They married in 1942, but he was killed in action.
Moiseiwitsch moved to the Old Vic in London, where her early sets were full of atmosphere. Uncle Vanya (1945) was misty with careworn ennui, while Cyrano de Bergerac two years later provided swashbuckling, candlelit theatricality.
By this point she was already experimenting with a cleaner stage picture. In 1947, she designed Guthrie's Covent Garden production of Peter Grimes, stretching the dank fishing village across a wide stage. Her innovative, uncluttered style was fully achieved in Henry VIII at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1949.
At Stratford in 1951 she designed a remarkable permanent setting for a series of Shakespeare's history plays (Richard II, Henry IV Parts I and II and Henry V). Unvarnished oak fashioned a central floor with galleries, corners, staircases; and the set's several levels could heave with soldiers, courtiers or Eastcheap boozers, or provide patches of isolation. It also suggested the "wooden O" of the first Globe.
The disputed throne sat at one side of the stage like a politician's temptation, provocatively swathed in ermine for Michael Redgrave's languorous Richard II and plainly dressed for guilt-ridden Henry IV.
Meanwhile, Guthrie was invited to Canada, to establish a Shakespearean Festival in Stratford, Ontario.
He and Moiseiwitsch designed a natural wood stage that allowed an intimacy between actors and audience, while encouraging a swift anti-illusionist style. The five-sided stepped stage was studded with entrances, most notably the "vomitoria", tunnels designed for speedy clearance.
"Like every good designer," wrote Guthrie, "Moiseiwitsch knows not only what she wants a thing to look like, but why; and she also knows how it is made." Their fruitful partnership built an aesthetic of austere sets surging with activity - Guthrie was a great swirler.
The work which achieved widest exposure was Oedipus Rex, performed at Stratford, Ontario, with James Mason in the title role in 1954.
It subsequently visited the Edinburgh Festival and was filmed, and Moiseiwitsch reworked her ideas in a 1978 production of the Oedipus plays in Adelaide.
Oedipus had the majestic force of ritual theatre. The actors wore elevated soles and magnificent abstracted masks, one-and-a-half times life size: Guthrie and Moiseiwitsch described these as "impersonal but not inexpressive". Oedipus appeared like a great golden sun, while the prophet Tiresias, recorded the novelist Robertson Davies, "suggested the boney head of a bird, ivory-white, beaked and sightless", with a necklace of broken eggshells.
The collaboration with Guthrie continued when Moiseiwitsch designed another thrust stage for the new Tyrone Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. Two immense doors that could slide apart or close to form a corrugated wall, pierced with apertures, dominated the back wall.
Despite her original aesthetic, Moiseiwitsch fell out of fashion in Britain during the 1960s and her finest work during the decade was in north America. Alongside many Minneapolis productions, for the Metropolitan Opera she designed a second Peter Grimes (1967), and later Rigoletto (1977) and La Traviata (1981).
In Britain, she designed the stage for the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, which opened in 1971, and her most distinctive work during the 1970s was for the National Theatre in London.
With John Dexter, she created a dazzling modern-day environment for Moliere's The Misanthrope in 1973. She won several design awards and honorary doctorates, a CBE in 1976 and a retrospective exhibition at the Chicago Art Institute. Moiseiwitsch's final West End production was The Clandestine Marriage for Anthony Quayle (1985). Her relationship with Stratford, Ontario continued through to Tartuffe in 1983 and The Government Inspector in 1985.
Just a few weeks ago she was awarded the Order of Canada.
Tanya Moiseiwitsch: theatre designer, born December 3rd, 1914; died February 19th, 2003