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I first noticed set designer Peter Hartwell when I saw the Shaw Festival's 1995 production of John Druten's Voice of the Turtle. Thanks to Hartwell's eye for ingenuity, The Royal George Theatre became a character in itself, dripping in art deco and chic costumes of 1940s Manhattan.
In addition to Shaw, Stratford and other great stages across North America, Peter Hartwell has designed for theatres in Britain including The West End Coach Satchel, The National, and The Royal Shakespeare Company. He has also designed at London's Royal Court for my faves Caryl Churchill (Top Girls, Cloud Nine and Serious Money ) and Wallace Shawn (Aunt Dan and Lemon).
Hartwell referred to the Pirandello's piece as “Six Characters in Search of the Shaw Festival." Rather than a 1920s theatre troupe, Hartwell masterfully brought the piece into the present coach wedge shoes, having some of the company play themselves as actors in daily garb at Shaw’s intimate Court House Theatre. The story is a cross between fantasy and reality as this troupe of characters, both modern players and costumed traditional ones, search for their stories.
Hartwell’s Glass Menagerie at Stratford was memorable for the show’s candlelit glow blended with unusual set pieces, some taken from director Miles Potter’s homestead.The dining room table, though set back from the Avon Theatre's main stage action Baby Handbags clearance, added to the authenticity and cohesiveness of the piece – a calculated risk that paid off.
Hartwell's Court House Theatre set designs are always intriguing, and the set for Henrik Ibsen's Rosmersholm, with its melancholy beauty and modern photographic nuances at show's end joins the impressive list.
Tennessee Williams' Orpheus Descending at Stratford's Tom Patterson Theatre was another example of Hartwell's spare sets and a choice of less is more. Hartwell envisioned Williams' idea of hell as “cold” and a created a Victorian looking mercantile store with plain dress characters à la Norman Rockwell in what he called a “non-naturalistic, unreal setting.”
Hartwell also had great fun with Shaw’s 2003 production of George Bernard Shaw's Misalliance at the Festival Theatre displaying pages of opening script directions from the show – heady wallpaper festooning the set walls and floor while displaying GBW and Henrik Ibsen’s busts in the set alcoves to accentuate “a play about ideas.”
After 15 years of seeing Hartwell’s set designs, the gigantic wheel and chain rack in 2006's The Crucible will stay with me ( just thinking about the clanking sound is disturbing), yet the 1995 veiled-hats-and-cocktails-at-five savoir faire of Druten's Voice of the Turtle remains in my mind's eye – a cool visual paradox.
Peter Hartwell returns to Shaw in 2007 to work with director Neil Munro (Tennessee Williams' Summer and Smoke) and colleague Tadeusz Bradecki ( Brian Friel’s A Month in the Country After Turgenev.) Hartwell also returns to Stratford to work with colleague Miles Potter for Shakespeare’s Will.
Hartwell takes a play, and then through endless research, finds a unusual way to illustrate his visual idea – sometimes bigger than life (as in the Shaw Festival’s Heartbreak House or Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee at the Stratford fFestival) and sometimes spare (as in Brecht's Happy End or Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of An Author at the Shaw Festival ).