Tanya Moiseiwitsch

Tanya Moiseiwitsch, theatre designer: born London 3 December 1914; married 1942 Felix Krish (deceased); died London 19 February 2003.

In an era of theatrical design remarkable for a number of visionary women, Tanya Moiseiwitsch's work ranks extremely high.

She could turn with great versatility from conventional West End drawing rooms to musicals, but her best work was in Shakespeare and classical plays at Stratford-upon-Avon, the National Theatre and overseas. She was particularly associated with the director Tyrone Guthrie, with whom in 1953 she created the first stage for the Shakespearean Festival at Stratford, Ontario, in its temporary home, a giant canvas tent, and subsequently designed a host of outstanding productions in the permanent building. Many post-war theatres in the UK and abroad owe much to her pioneering work on the thrust stage with Guthrie.

Tanya Moiseiwitsch was London-born, the daughter of the celebrated pianist Benno Moiseiwitsch. Her artistic talent was evident from an early age and she studied theatre design at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. The apprenticeship she served in Dublin at the Abbey Theatre – some 50 productions over five years – when she was still in her twenties was invaluable, giving her a chance to work on every kind of production from Sean O'Casey, Lennox Robinson and Yeats revivals to new plays and musicals.

On leaving Dublin, Moiseiwitsch worked in British repertory at the Oxford Playhouse and for the Old Vic in its brief co-existence with Liverpool Playhouse, in 1944-45. Her work in Liverpool, which ranged from an impressive Bosch-influenced Dr Faustus to the humid Maughamesque tropical verandas of Noël Coward's Point Valaine in its British premiere, brought her work to wider attention.

Tyrone Guthrie was especially impressed by her Liverpool School for Scandal and gave her a major opportunity in London working for the Old Vic at the New Theatre (now the Albery) just after the Second World War, when the Vic's Waterloo Road home was still war-damaged. That historic season included Uncle Vanya (1945) with Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson and Margaret Leighton and the legendary Guthrie production of Cyrano Bergerac (1946) with Richardson in full glory and with an unforgettable autumnal last act of exquisite beauty by Moiseiwitsch.

Moiseiwitsch's freelance work, mainly in the West End, covered Wendy Toye's exuberant production for C.B. Cochran of Vivian Ellis's musical Bless the Bride (Adelphi, 1947), with Moiseiwitsch's beguiling pastels enhancing such post-war favourites as "This is My Lovely Day", and light comedies such as Treasure Hunt (Apollo, 1949) set in the peeling grandeur of an Irish Ascendancy household. She also designed a ravishing A Month in the Country (Old Vic, 1949), the first British post-war production by Michel Saint-Denis with Michael Redgrave as Rakitin and Angela Baddeley as Natalya, the garden set particularly striking in its freshness.

Moiseiwitsch was a vital contributor to the Festival of Britain season at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1951 when Anthony Quayle presented a history cycle of Richard II (with Redgrave), both parts of Henry IV (Quayle as Falstaff, Redgrave as Hotspur) and Henry V with a young Richard Burton. Because the Stratford governors insisted on including The Tempest as a "safe" choice, Quayle's dream of opening the plays consecutively in repertoire was unrealised and the whole venture was critically undervalued at the time.

Moiseiwitsch's permanent set, a relatively simply wooden split-level arrangement with a bridge above and stairs at either side, was superbly versatile for both court and Eastcheap scenes and was very much a forerunner of the kind of fluid, adaptable design she would develop on open stages later, but it disappointed many traditionalists craving colour and spectacle. The season, however, did record business, its creators thrilled by The Variety headline: "Stratford Bard Boff Biz".

With Guthrie at the helm, Moiseiwitsch was an early pioneer at Stratford, Ontario. She, Alec Guinness and Irene Worth all joined the project when it was little more than a hole in a field and without Moiseiwitsch constantly adapting plans to fit the first tent auditorium, the Festival would never have opened on time.

As it was, both Richard III and All's Well That Ends Well in that first 1953 season saw the Guthrie- Moiseiwitsch team at its very best. They complemented each other extremely well, with her deceptively quiet demeanour contrasting wonderfully with his mixture of barking Field Marshal Montgomery and a giggling scoutmaster, greeting any setback with an unexpectedly high-pitched "Oh, fucky-poo!" before, inevitably, "Rise above. On! On!"

Over the subsequent years in Canada, Moiseiwitsch designed many productions, including a magical Cymbeline (1970). She also worked many times with Guthrie at the Guthrie Theatre, Minneapolis, where they took the principles learned from Ontario with them.

She returned to Stratford-upon-Avon to design Guthrie's imaginative, updated All's Well That Ends Well (1959), working with him again at the Old Vic on a fizzing The Alchemist (1962).

For the RSC, she came up with a superbly aqueous world for Giraudoux's play Ondine (1961), with Leslie Caron as the eponymous water-sprite. She remained remarkably adaptable in later years, when she worked regularly at the National Theatre in its Old Vic era, reunited with Guthrie on a Volpone (1968) to which she gave a golden shimmer but which sadly saw Guthrie well below his best.

For John Dexter at the National, she did some of her finest work, principally on Tony Harrison's versions of Molière and Racine. For The Misanthrope (1973) she designed a chic but deliberately somewhat sterile Gaullist-era chamber, beautifully scaled to the corrosive glamour and wit of the production. Phaedra Brittanica (1975) was less successful critically and at the box office, but it was one of her very best designs. Relocated to the world of the Raj, it was based on louvred shutters and streams in a shaded, pillared interior while through the slats, the baking Indian heat gleamed.

As with all her work, it framed the play and actors in an ideal tension.

Alan Strachan