Early on, at the beginning of my career, I really wasn’t interested in painting at all. Quite simply I was stagestruck and for a long time that’s really all I wanted to do, I just wanted to work in the theatre, I was mad about the theatre. That seemed enough for a few years, or perhaps for ten years, and then I became terribly conscious of the fact that I was working in a medium that you can never be wholly in charge of as a designer or a producer or a choreographer; you’re one of a number of collaborators working together on a production. And I became more and more interested in the idea of painting because that seemed to me to be something where I could be in charge of a medium and express myself in a way that, much as I love working in the theatre, I would never have that final control about what the statement was. So I started to try and paint and I worked terribly hard. I took myself out of the theatre because I could see that the only way of developing a technique and trying to find a direction as a painter was really to get right out of the theatre for a few years. I did that, and people in the English theatre thought I was mad, but I felt it was something I absolutely had to do.
The paintings I did for the first few years were really not good at all. But I worked very hard, I developed a technique. I simply work in the theatre when I’m offered work that I want to do and when I’m not doing that, I’m up in the studio painting for all I’m worth.
I know that this work I do as a painter nourishes all my theatre work, the colours even that I’ve used in the Sleeping Beauty which are very – particularly in the prologue and scenes like that – absolutely strong, chromatic colours I know I don’t see in other theatre. I can only use these because of all I’ve learned as a painter. Anyway, the thing is that both forms of activity now are absolutely necessary to me. People don’t particularly want you to work in two different media but it’s something that I absolutely need.
