Alan Tagg

Alan Tagg was one of several outstanding theatre designers who served a valuable apprenticeship under Cecil Beaton (pupil and master became lifelong friends). However, although he did on occasion provide sumptuous settings in the Beaton/ Oliver Messel style, Tagg was drawn to design as more than decoration and his career was to cover work of a remarkably catholic range.

He was a key early contributor to the revolution in British theatre design coinciding with the upsurge of new playwrights writing for the English Stage Company under George Devine at the Royal Court Theatre: John Osborne's Look Back in Anger was Tagg's first production there. He also often worked with great success on the demanding open hexagon of the Chichester Theatre stage (graveyard of not a few designers), and for a large number of prestigious productions in the West End and on Broadway, as well as at the RSC and the National Theatre, where he worked on some of the most memorable productions of his era.

Tagg was born in 1928 in Sutton in Ashfield in Nottinghamshire. By his own admission a quiet and somewhat isolated child – although his contemporary from schooldays, Carl Toms (who also became a leading designer) was a friend from the start – he was attracted to design and the theatre at an early age. His training at the remarkable but sadly short-lived Old Vic Theatre School in the early 1950s marked him for life.

The training covered all aspects of theatre and Tagg's early mentors there included Michel Saint-Denis and, most crucially, George Devine. The Devine credo – as fervent as any religious belief – that every single artistic decision taken on any production must stem from the author's text coincided with Tagg's own quiet morality of work within his profession; it marked his entire career and his modus vivendi with collaborators.

In addition to happily assisting on various Beaton projects, most of Tagg's early work was in the commercial West End sector. He started at the top, working on several shows for the then-mighty H.M. Tennent management under Hugh "Binkie" Beaumont (a Beaton intimate), on what then passed for "quality" drama. He designed productions including Charles Morgan's mandarin The River Line (Lyric, Hammersmith and Strand, 1952) with Paul Scofield, as well as frothy escapist fare glossily mounted, such as John van Druten's witchcraft comedy Bell, Book and Candle (Phoenix, 1954) directed by and starring Rex Harrison, which became a long-running hit.

Although he could have easily capitalised on his early success and settled to a lucrative career designing Knightsbridge drawing rooms and New York duplexes for Shaftesbury Avenue for years to come, Tagg was ambitious to work on more challenging projects. He designed a highly praised Merchant of Venice (Stratford, 1956) before immediately accepting the invitation from his old teacher Devine to join him and his associate Tony Richardson, along with a predominantly young acting company, on a new venture in Sloane Square with the English Stage Company.

The Royal Court's first significant success – after a sticky start – was Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1956, and at the Lyceum, New York, 1957) directed by Richardson. Tagg's set was cunningly angled to make Jimmy Porter's provincial digs look genuinely claustrophobic.

As the ESC flourished so Tagg's work bloomed, as he responded to the brief of each project with quiet enthusiasm, delighted to be part of this new movement working alongside other Royal Court designers such as the Motley team and the emerging Jocelyn Herbert. He joined forces again with Osborne and Richardson on The Entertainer (Royal Court, 1957, and Lyceum, New York, 1958), starring Laurence Olivier, finding in his design the ideal tension between the Rices' seedy digs and the peeling gilded grandeur of the declining provincial touring circuit. Other key productions for Tagg included the darkly crowded realism of John Arden's Live Like Pigs (1958), a classic example of the now almost-forgotten belief in the subsidised theatre's "right to fail" (Devine's phrase) in bringing on new writing.

Now established as a major talent, Tagg was in demand for many West End productions. He contributed an ingenious design on varied levels for the smash-hit version of Billy Liar (Cambridge, 1960) for Lindsay Anderson, starring Albert Finney, and a colourful, witty background to frame Robert Morley (unlikely casting as a Japanese businessman) in the American import A Majority of One (Phoenix, 1960).

He continued to design at the Court: another run of ESC productions included the Osborne double-bill of Plays for England (1962), with Tagg designing a lavish royal household and a suburban sitting-room with equal flair; Henry Livings' beach-set Kelly's Eye (1963) with Nicol Williamson; and the surprise programming of the classic Ben Travers farce Cuckoo in the Nest (1964), its rare cast including Williamson, John Osborne and Alan Bennett, the several sets crowned by an especially fine detailed country-pub parlour.

Tagg first worked at Chichester on a memorable production by Desmond O'Donovan (with an unaccredited assist by John Dexter) of Trelawny of the "Wells" (1964), Pinero's valentine to the passing of the old Victorian theatre and the arrival of domestic realism. To a degree this was a contradiction in terms – to stage a play about the development of the proscenium-frame theatre on an open stage – but Tagg answered all the play's demands brilliantly, with synchronised scene-changes involving rolled carpets and precision-timed moving furniture, his contribution proving a vital element in a richly funny but also oddly moving evening.

That production subsequently transferred successfully to the fledgling National Theatre at the Old Vic (1965), as did his ultra-trendy split-level set for Peter Shaffer's Black Comedy (Chichester and Old Vic, 1965).

Under the regime of Sir John Clements, who followed Olivier at Chichester, for a while Tagg became virtually resident designer at the Festival Theatre. Work for the RSC included two David Mercer plays – Belcher's Luck (Aldwych, 1966) and the absorbing After Haggerty (Aldwych and Criterion, 1970), the latter enhanced by Tagg's predominantly monochrome setting. At the other extreme, his larky Regency designs, in boldly sharp colours, for Ronald Eyre's joyous rediscovery of Boucicault's London Assurance (Aldwych, 1970, New, 1972 and Palace, New York, 1974) beautifully complemented the performances of a vintage RSC company headed by Donald Sinden at his rampant best.

Tagg proved the ideal designer for many of Alan Ayckbourn's plays, well attuned to the playwright's redefinitions of theatrical space and time. Tagg's first Ayckbourn was his subsequently much-imitated overlapping rooms design for How the Other Half Loves (Lyric, 1970). Later work included the pond and gnome-decked suburban garden of Time and Time Again (Comedy, 1972); the three class-defined kitchens of Absurd Person Singular (Criterion and Vaudeville, 1974); and Confusions (Apollo, 1975), an evening of five linked short plays for which Tagg came up with a design which not only ideally framed each piece – ranging from slatternly lounge to posh restaurant to village fete (complete with exploding microphone and collapsing marquee) – but also solved all the technical challenges with insouciant legerdemain.

His workload only reduced slightly when he acquired a barn in France. He and his long-time partner, Charles Colville, converted it over the years and began to spend increasingly longer periods of time there. Tagg continued to alternate subsidised theatre work with West End productions. For the RSC he designed Graham Greene's The Return of A.J. Raffles (Aldwych, 1976), set in an elaborately detailed Albany chambers design. For Michael Frayn's Donkey's Years (Globe, 1976), he provided what seemed an entire Oxbridge quadrangle which then turned into a set of college rooms. He also created a superbly fluid world of Berlin decadence moving to the death-camps for Martin Sherman's Bent (Royal Court, 1979).

His Ayckbourn connection continued when the author began directing his London productions after Scarborough, although they had disastrous luck on Way Upstream at the National Theatre (Lyttelton, 1982). Tagg, as usual, had carefully calibrated the technical aspects of the play, which involved a cruiser on a stretch of river – so much effort was involved in the mechanics that his main riverbank set was uncharacteristically dull. However, flaws in the water-tank construction led to much-publicised delays and a distinctly anticlimactic opening.

The team had a much happier time on A Small Family Business (Olivier, 1987), on which Tagg responded with interest to the challenges of a multi-level, multi-location and frequently mobile set for one of Ayckbourn's finest plays. Their collaboration also produced thrilling results when Ayckbourn directed Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge (Cottesloe and Aldwych, 1987), with Michael Gambon's haunting Eddie Carbone backed by Tagg's skyline with the Brooklyn Bridge soaring into infinity.

One of his final designs was, typically, an ingenious solution to the logistics of a three-set play with some lightning changes, involving a stately pile, a Whitehall office and an eccentric basement flat, all meticulously realised, for Shaffer's Lettice and Lovage (Globe, 1987 and Ethel Barrymore, New York, 1990).

He was stricken with Alzheimer's during his final years, and lived latterly in a London nursing home. A soft-spoken man of understated elegance and infinite courtesy (although he could be flinty if he felt his work was being compromised), Tagg was a favourite collaborator for many directors. All the leading production managers of his day, from Bernard Gordon of H.M. Tennent to Joe Scott-Parkinson of Michael Codron, and those at the subsidised houses brightened when they knew that an upcoming set of production designs would carry the distinctive Tagg signature.

Alan Strachan