A life designed by serendipity
Raymond Boyce
Wtheatre designer b May 20, 1928 d August 1, 2019
hen director Richard Campion telegrammed English designer Raymond Boyce to offer him a job with New Zealand’s first professional theatre company, Boyce asked advice from his mentor Margaret Harris.
‘‘Of course you must go,’’ the Old Vic Theatre School tutor told him. ‘‘It’s only 18 months. Make all your mistakes in the colonies and come back and work for us.’’
It was 1953 and this was Campion’s second attempt to lure Boyce Down Under, to design for his nascent theatre company the New Zealand Players. Living in London and busy designing two productions destined for one of the world’s most famous theatre districts, Boyce had already politely declined.
But then funding for those projects fell through, and Boyce found himself without a job.
‘‘I had to find out where New Zealand was,’’ he told friend and film-maker Peter Coates, in his documentary Serendipity. ‘‘I tossed a coin, it came down heads and I decided to come.’’
Eighteen months became a lifetime as Boyce settled in New Zealand, changing its artistic landscape through his involvement in the early years of professional theatre, ballet and opera, helping design New Zealand’s pavilion for the 1970 Expo in Osaka, and shaping the stage setup at Wellington’s Hannah Playhouse.
In 2007, after designing sets and costumes for more than 200 plays, ballets and operas, he was named an Arts Foundation Icon.
‘‘His influence was like a flash of lightning,’’ arts administrator Bill Sheat said in Serendipity. ‘‘It’s impossible to overestimate his influence on the whole of theatre design.’’
From his earliest memories, Boyce wanted to be involved in the theatre. Growing up in London, on the edge of theatreland, his parents and grandparents would take him to shows. He would be as fascinated by the machinery behind the action as the shows themselves.
He began building scenes and minitheatres, complete with moving scenery, and then fashioned marionettes to bring stories and life to his creations. Aged about 10, he joined the Model Theatre and Puppet Guild, unlocking expertise and idols to feed his enthusiasm.
But then war hit and he was evacuated out of London, billeted to a series of reluctant host families. A role as the heroine in a French play had him dreaming of an acting career, but a disastrous audition for the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art put paid to that.
Boyce enrolled instead at the Slade School of Fine Art, but was conscripted before he could begin.
‘‘My army experience was of disorganisation, corruption and boredom,’’ Boyce wrote in his memoir, Serendipity by Design.
Boyce did eventually study at Slade, and then at the Old Vic Theatre School, where he learnt theatre design.
For Boyce, design was about interpretation, not decoration.
‘‘The whole business of design is so much a discovery, because you have to find the intentions of the playwright. Not what the playwright wrote on the page, but what is behind it.’’
He would read a play four times before beginning to sketch. Once without interruption, like a novel. Once with care, to understand its shape. Once to understand the traffic of the play – where characters come and go. And once as an in-depth character study, from which he would produce storyboards with a precis of every scene.
That meticulous approach spanned all his work. For a production of Madam Butterfly, choreographer Dawn Sanders remembers being tasked by Boyce to research how Japanese people wore their traditional long-sleeved garments, to ensure authenticity.
‘‘He really made me go the extra mile
. . . He was always appealing to people’s upper reach, not the common denominator level.’’
Boyce said his career was shaped by serendipity. He left The New Zealand Players in 1957 to set up a touring puppet theatre with Geraldine Kean, who became his wife. Gerry built up 15cm cork soles so she could manipulate the puppets at the same height as Boyce, and they took their enigmatic shadows and glove puppets on sticks around the country, from Porirua Mental Hospital to a cinema in a paddock in Te Kaha, on the East Cape.
Always skint, Boyce took odd jobs house painting or gardening. On one job, the homeowner mentioned the bloke opposite was starting an opera company. That’s how he began designing for Donald Munro’s New Zealand Opera. He had already started designing for the fledgling New Zealand Ballet Company, through an introduction from Richard Campion.
Boyce’s work traversed the traditional and the modern, from the tutus of Les Sylphides to the geometric costumes of Prismatic Variations.
He brought three dimensions to formerly flat stage design and introduced such innovations as stage projectors.
When Sheilah Winn wanted to build a modern theatre for the capital, Boyce connected her with young theatre company Downstage. Boyce went on to help design the novel flexible stage area of what became the Hannah Playhouse.
He served as chairman of Downstage and designed for a succession of directors from Sunny Amey to Colin Mccoll. He directed his own opera productions and, as a member of the design committee, spent months in Japan helping oversee the installation of the New Zealand pavilion at the 1970 Expo.
In 1986, Sanders commissioned him to design 3.5-metre hangings that would be
embroidered by 500 New Zealand women and would be used as the first scenery in the new reproduction of Shakespeare’s Globe theatre in London. The project took about five years, from research into the look and use of such hangings in Shakespeare’s time, to experimenting with ways to make the yarn look antique.
Boyce was awarded an MBE in 1977 and in 1990 was given an honorary doctorate in literature from Victoria University.
He retired from theatre design in 1999, but briefly re-emerged to stage one of his favourite ballets, Petrouchka, in 2011.
He never did return to work for Margaret Harris. When Downstage director Sunny Amey met her years later, she asked after Boyce. ‘‘If he’d stayed in England, he would have been world famous,’’ she said. – By Nikki Macdonald
‘‘It’s impossible to overestimate his influence on the whole of theatre design.’’ Arts administrator Bill Sheat about Raymond Boyce, above
Sources: Dawn Sanders; Peter Coates; Serendipity by Design, by Raymond Boyce; Serendipity, by Peter Coates