Peter Rice
Opera and theatre designer whose love of art informed his lavish and atmospheric sets
PETER RICE, who has died aged 87, was a stage and costume designer who created the sets for Rudolf Hartmann’s staging of Arabella (1965) at Covent Garden and Anthony Besch’s production of Tosca (1980) for Scottish Opera, both of which remained in the repertoire for more than 30 years. He also created costumes and sets for Glyndebourne, Sadler’s Wells, Chichester Festival and numerous West End productions.
His were realistic, often lavish sets, full of charming detail in the oldschool tradition of Oliver Messel and Cecil Beaton. They would be artfully planned and full of atmosphere and colour, building on his passion for painting. Describing his approach to stage design, Rice explained how the director “decides on the psychological interpretation of the play and I interpret it visually”.
Rice was the designer for many new operas, including Malcolm Williamson’s The Violins of Saint-Jacques (1966) adapted from Patrick Leigh Fermor’s novel, Lennox Berkeley’s Castaway at the 1967 Aldeburgh Festival and Harrison Birtwistle’s Punch and Judy (1968, also at Aldeburgh), where he decorated the stage as a pop-art toy theatre with figures, symbols and coloured lights, as well as huge picture cards from the Tarot pack.
He and Besch were engaged by the New Opera Company for the British premiere of Shostakovich’s The Nose at Sadler’s Wells in 1973, after which one critic wrote that “Mr Besch, even more so his endlessly inventive designer Peter Rice, have taken full advantage of the text’s opportunities … The sets for the various scenes are a clever combination of deft miniatures and evocations of period Russia.”
Rice was equally enthusiastic about art beyond the stage. His sketch books were full of drawings of people, places and costumes, and he rarely ventured out without a notepad and pencil, lest something – or someone – should catch his eye. His first-night notes to company members were as lavish as his stage designs and his hand-crafted birthday cards were treasured long after the candles had been blown out, while his book illustrations, including A Book of Lions and Tigers and Other Catlike
published in 1971, brought joy to their readers.
Peter Anthony Morrish Rice was born on September 13 1928 in Simla, India, where his grandfather had worked on the railways and his father was in civil aviation. He returned to England when his parents separated and was educated at Wilson’s grammar school, Camberwell. Many a wartime evening was spent in a West End theatre, perched high in the gods.
He had hoped to study theatre design at the Royal College of Art, but the course was discontinued. He went there anyway, and his first stage work was in 1951 as the designer for Sex and Seraphim at the Watergate Theatre, which was then in Buckingham Street. The following year he created the set for Mozart’s Il
Seraglio at Sadler’s Wells. He came to wider attention by winning a competition to design Peter Ebert’s new production of Busoni’s
Arlecchino at Glyndebourne in 1954, which brought him into the milieu of Besch, William Chappell and Sir Frederick Ashton, all of whom he worked with on various operas, plays and ballets. He was equally at home creating a simple set at a small theatre, such as for Harold Pinter’s
Betrayal at Greenwich Theatre (1983) or Maureen Lipman’s Re: Joyce! at the Fortune Theatre (1988), as he was setting Tosca in Mussolini’s Rome or creating a huge staircase as the centrepiece of Arabella.
Later he worked on no fewer than 37 operas with the director Tom Hawkes, many of them for Sadler’s Wells, Castleward Opera in Northern Ireland and Opera Holland Park, for whom he was still working in his eighties.
Rice had little time for “hi-tech” machinery encroaching on his stagecraft. “I’m a designer of the pre-mechanical era,” he said, “and I like to know a simple way of doing things so that when something goes wrong – as it always does – I have some idea of what to do about it.”
He was passionate about silent movies and was often seen enjoying a screening at the National Film Theatre. Even in his eighties he thought nothing of trotting off, rucksack on his back, to enjoy a film festival in Europe.
Some 40 years ago Rice painted a large mural of Paradise Island in the Bahamas for friends who lived there. More recently he replicated the idea with a 12ft canvas of Stoke-on-Trent, the palm trees and Caribbean huts being replaced with chapels, pit heads and pottery factories.
He is survived by his wife Pat Albeck, a textile designer responsible for many National Trust tea towels, and by their son Matthew, also a designer, who is married to the potter Emma Bridgewater; his Stoke mural is on display in their factory.