This speculative design project was for William Shakespeare’s classic play ‘Hamlet’. We designed for the Nottingham Playhouse Main stage, which is a proscenium setting but can be altered in different ways. We were asked to design a set and costumes for the play, a set of technical drawings and a storyboard. This project was to understand the process for designing for a proscenium stage, we where asked to make a 1:50 scale model of our set which is a lot smaller to what we have done in previous projects.

After analysing the play and the themes I thought about different ideas, some of them are; Death, Skulls, Grave-yard, Soil, Flowers, Plants, Wood, Prison, and Caged. The main themes that I wanted to continue with and explore further where the feeling of trapped and Life/ Death. I looked into chess because I noticed that a lot of the characters could be shown in the different pieces but also because all the chess pieces are trapped on the board until the have been ‘checkmated’ (killed). Just before the play is set there was a battle between Hamlet’s father and Fortinbras’ father which ended with king Hamlet killing King Fortinbras, this links to chess as it is all one big battle to see who’s king and queen is left standing. I wanted to have the feeling of being trapped within the set, so for this, I played around with the idea of being in a corridor with a lot of doors leading to nowhere.

I wanted to show the theme of life and death more throughout the design, to do this I investigated having the trees furthest upstage to be the most alive and as they get closer downstage they get progressively more and more decayed and dead.

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