So after much work finally Ursula is dead and I kind of see where Placida was coming from. I am of course talking about the production of Ursula that we have just finished working on. As a team of stylists we were asked to collaborate with the live production course at Southampton Solent University and create a new interpretation of the Howard Barker play Ursula. Tasked with creating a heavily stylised look for the 11 actresses and 1 actor involved, we were given 3 weeks in which to pitch the idea with a following four to create/beg/borrow and steal whatever we needed whilst keeping within our tight budget.
The collaboration was organised between the director, Matt Fletcher, and Fashion Styling course leader Andrew Markham. Matt came to us with a few ideas of his own regarding the overall presentation of the play, having it somewhat traditional in it’s appearance, but asked that we essentially fill in the blanks. We were to take into account the source material as well as the location, the performers requirements, staging, time restraints, script restraints and of course our budget. With all this we got to work.
We started out by reading through the script several times in order to get to grips with the complexities of the story as well as the language. We also used this time to pick out key points that we felt could be interpreted through the use of styling. Within Ursula there are a lot of themes that could be used such as the nature of religion, virginity, death, fear, betrayal and beliefs. When researching Howard Barker, the writer of Ursula, he writes he plays with the idea that they are set within the realms of his ‘Theatre of Catastrophe’. He talks about theatre as if all stories told should not have a happy ending, ‘nobody likes a happy ending’, and he’s right. Catastrophe creates far more of a spectacle than happiness ever did. With that in mind we set out trying to create a look that captured all these elements, as if the styling was another character in the performance.
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