Julia Trevelyan Oman, Theater Designer, 73
DGH
It was reported from London, England, that Julia Trevelyan Oman, one
of Britain's leading theater designers, died Friday, October 10, 2003,
in Herefordshire, western England, at the age of 73.
Trevelyan Oman, the wife of the writer Sir Roy Strong, joined the
British Broadcasting Corp. in 1995 and worked there for 12 years.
While designing Tony Richardson's film "The Charge of the Light
Brigade," she got a call from choreographer Frederick Ashton about
drawings she had done trying to interpret Edward Elgar's "Enigma
Variations" for ballet.
The 1968 production, choreographed by Ashton, was a major success, and
Trevelyan Oman's career took off.
Her sets and costumes were known for their attention to detail,
enhancing such productions as "La Boheme," "Swan Lake" and "The
Importance of Being Earnest." Other credits included "Nutcracker,"
"Die Fledermaus," "Eugene Onegin" and "Otello."
Trevelyan Oman was made a Commander of the British Empire, or CBE, in
1986.
T.
Hyfler/Rosner
Telegraph obit:
Julia Trevelyan Oman
(Filed: 13/10/2003)
Julia Trevelyan Oman, who has died aged 73, was one of the most imaginative
and intelligent theatre and opera designers in Britain, and the wife of the
writer and aesthete Sir Roy Strong.
Julia Trevelyan Oman's career in theatre design began when Sir Frederick
Ashton telephoned her about some drawings she had done which attempted to
interpret Elgar's Enigma Variations for ballet. She had discovered the music
as a student at the Royal College of Art when she attended a prom in 1955,
and had felt inspired to work out how the music could be made into a ballet.
She took her drawings to Sir Hugh Casson, Professor of Interior Design at
the RCA, and he arranged for her to leave her portfolio at the Royal Opera
House for the attention of Dame Ninette de Valois. When she collected the
portfolio a few weeks later, it seemed that no one had looked at it, so she
was surprised when, 12 years later, she received a call from Frederick
Ashton inviting her to tea. The Enigma Variations (1968), which Ashton
choreographed, was a triumph and from then on one success followed another.
Julia Trevelyan Oman's gift was to distil the essence of a period from a
myriad of sharply observed historical details. Her appetite for research,
powerful visual memory and magpie's eye for collecting ephemera which would
be of use meant that her sumptuous set and costume designs were always
immediately believable.
For the set of Brief Lives, Roy Dotrice's one-man account of the life of the
diarist John Aubrey, she helped to convey the atmosphere of his cluttered,
musty study with a jumble of books, relics, globes, armour, pewter and
half-eaten meals by wafting stale, cheesy smells into the auditorium.
Julia Trevelyan Oman brought her skills to play on the Nutcracker, Swan
Lake, Die Fledermaus, Eugene Onegin, Un Ballo in Maschera, Otello, La Boheme
and The Importance of Being Earnest among many other productions, chalking
up a prolific portfolio of successful ballet, stage, opera and television
credits both in Britain and abroad. Her ballet A Month in the Country was
chosen by the Queen Mother for a birthday gala at Covent Garden.
She first entered Roy Strong's life when her father, Charles Oman, Keeper of
Metalwork at the Victoria and Albert Museum, gave her a small engraving of
Elizabeth I. To find out more about it, she was sent to see "young Strong"
at the National Portrait Gallery.
When Strong asked her later what impression she had formed of him, "she said
it was of my back view disappearing down the Kafkaesque corridor at the
Portrait Gallery with one leg dragging slightly behind. Looking at that
lonely figure receding into the distance, she thought: he needs looking
after. She was right and in the end she did".
During a discreet courtship, they collaborated on the Pepys exhibition at
the gallery, for which she designed a series of stunningly evocative
17th-century interiors. "If Roy Strong is the modern version of Renaissance
man then his female equivalent must be Julia Trevelyan Oman," wrote a
Telegraph critic in November 1970.
Nonetheless, the arts world was astonished when Strong abandoned the
bachelor life and "eloped" with Julia Trevelyan Oman, marrying her at
Wilmcote church, near Stratford-upon-Avon, on September 10 1971 with a
special licence from the Archbishop of Canterbury. Julia Trevelyan Oman was
41 and her husband 35.
"I go this a.m.," Roy Strong wrote to a friend, "and then with Julia to the
church which is very Oxford Movement for me and reminds Julia of her ballet,
The Enigma Variations, and her Oxford background and the dynasties of Omans
and Trevelyans. Julia is going to wear a huge black velvet hat [in fact she
wore a straw hat] and beautiful skirt and blouse with masses of tucks and
folds made by the wardrobe at Stratford (who didn't know what they were
making). I will be in a beautiful pale grey velvet suit. Then off to a
Wellcome hotel for lunch and on to Brighton."
They enjoyed a belated honeymoon in Tuscany, where, Roy Strong recorded, "we
saw as few people as possible, apart from a trip to Lucca to see [Hugh]
Honour and [John] Fleming, the obligatory dinner at the Berenson villa, I
Tatti, and luncheon with divine, lovely Harold Acton."
Theirs was a marriage of true minds. "Marrying Julia was the best thing I
ever did," Strong said years later. Without her, he felt, he would have
become a "faded dandy, camping around, writing bitchy articles". Lady
Antonia Fraser observed that, by marrying, Strong had "swapped private
anguish and public happiness for private happiness and public anguish" (a
reference to his unhappy term as director of the V & A).
Julia Trevelyan Oman was a knowledgeable plantswoman and their marriage
focused on the joint creation at The Laskett, their house in Herefordshire,
of the beautiful formal garden which Roy Strong described as "a portrait of
a marriage, the family we never had or wanted, a unique landscape peopled
with the ghosts of nearly everyone we have loved, both living and dead". The
Laskett: The story of a garden was a tribute to their joint enterprise.
Julia Trevelyan Oman was born in Kensington on July 11 1930. Her father was
already working at the V & A; her mother was the historian Joan Trevelyan.
The writer Carola Oman was her aunt.
Julia was sent to various boarding schools, which she regarded, she said, as
"a distraction. I learned most of what I know at home". She went on to study
under Hugh Casson at the Royal College of Art, where she was Royal Scholar,
won the Silver Medal and took a First.
In 1955 she joined the BBC, where she remained for 12 years, working on sets
for Marriage Lines, Compact, Meet the Wife, Dixon of Dock Green and the
Billy Cotton Band Show, among other series. She worked with Patrick Garland
on the Famous Gossips series which flowered into Brief Lives.
Her sets for Jonathan Miller's Alice won her a Designer of the Year award
and caught the eye of Tony Richardson, who asked her to design his film The
Charge of the Light Brigade. She also designed the film Laughter in the
Dark. It was while she was working on The Charge of the Light Brigade that
she got the call from Sir Frederick Ashton.
Roy Strong once said that he could "never have married anyone who wasn't a
definite personality". His wife, he said, was "somebody in her own right.
When I go to the opera I trudge behind her being Mr Oman".
Indeed, Julia Trevelyan Oman did not care to be addressed as "Lady Strong"
and she was a stickler when it came to the pronunciation of her name: "Some
people," she told an interviewer, "are slack about the pronunciation of
Trevelyan which is 'Trivillion'. And it's not Oman like an oil-rich sultan.
Its pure Viking with the stress on the first syllable." Yet she was a warm,
kind, courteous and approachable person.
Julia Trevelyan Oman was named Royal Designer for Industry in 1977, and was
appointed CBE in 1986. She died at home in Herefordshire on Friday
afternoon.
Hyfler/Rosner
Julia Trevelyan Oman
Leading designer for theatre, ballet and opera
13 October 2003
Julia Trevelyan Oman, designer and writer: born London 11 July 1930;
designer, BBC Television 1955-67; CBE 1986; married 1971 Roy Strong (Kt
1982); died Much Birch, Herefordshire 10 October 2003.
Theatrical design, even if preserved in photographs, working drawings and
models, still - like the essence of theatre itself - remains an ephemeral
art, like sculpting in snow. But Julia Trevelyan Oman, whose work in
theatre, ballet and opera, and on cinema and television screens, established
her as a leading designer for over 30 years, also co-created (with her
husband, Sir Roy Strong) an enduring legacy in the remarkable gardens of the
Laskett, their house in Herefordshire, near Ross-on-Wye. She also wrote some
memorable books in partnership with her husband, one of them most
appropriately titled On Happiness (1998).
Their partnership worked so well, perhaps, to a degree because of their
preservation of their respective careers and identities (she was always "Dr
Julia Trevelyan Oman" rather than "Lady Strong", a reminder that her
background and ancestry yoked two of England's most distinguished academic
and literary families). The Trevelyans (from whom she was descended on her
mother's side) and the Omans had particularly strong Oxford links; some of
the Laskett's most prized plants - including Oman's much-loved quince tree -
came originally from the garden of Frewin Hall, the Trevelyan house in
Oxford where her mother spent her childhood.
Julia Trevelyan Oman, a studious child, showed very early artistic talent
and she gravitated naturally to the Royal College of Art, emerging -
somewhat to her own surprise - in 1955 with its Silver Medal and a contract
to work as a staff designer for the BBC. She remained with the Corporation
for more than a decade, working on an extraordinary range of productions,
from classy and star-laden classic plays to some of the more gritty work
slowly finding its way onto the British small screen in the 1960s.
By far her most original contribution to the BBC was her work with Jonathan
Miller on their mould-breaking version of Alice in Wonderland (1966).
Stripping away the Tenniel trappings to reveal adult faces and figures
beneath in what developed into a fantasy of repression and identity, Oman's
designs evoked all the overstuffed Victoriana of Lewis Carroll's world
within Miller's focus on Alice as having the context of a dream, an askew,
oneiric world with characters only a footstep away from lunacy in some
cases. She was inspired in her choices of location, including the use of Sir
John Soane's Museum for the scenes with the Caterpillar (a magnificently
bemused Michael Redgrave) in an odd, eerily sinister but elegiac sequence.
With Peter Sellers as the King of Hearts and John Gielgud, Leo McKern, Peter
Cook and John Bird also in the cast, this was a lustrous venture, although
at the time it was accused (mostly in advance, sight unseen) of perverting a
beloved classic and, extraordinarily, was described as the BBC as
"unsuitable" for children under 12.
With the success of Alice, followed by the impact of her lovingly detailed
recreation of John Aubrey's world (best described as stylised naturalism, a
dusty, cobwebbed womb of books, artefacts, food and fruit, complete with
smells - chamberpots and maps) in Patrick Garland's stage adaptation of
Brief Lives (Hampstead, Criterion and New York, 1967) with Roy Dotrice's
crumbling Aubrey, Oman was able to leave the BBC and take up a freelance
career.
Much of her early theatrical work was in the commercial sector. Again for
Garland she designed Alan Bennett's Forty Years On (Apollo, 1968) - the
perfect designer for the play's public-school-set mixture of revue and
elegy - taking greatly to Gielgud (as he did to her) and patiently coping
with his mercurial changes of mind ("Wouldn't it be less distracting to use
cardboard cut-outs for the schoolboys? Oh, dear me, no, what a silly idea").
She also did a superb job on Bennett's Getting On (Queen's, 1971), designing
a 1970s NW1 basement kitchen - piercingly authentic down to the last Asiatic
pheasant plate on the stripped pine dresser - to frame an acerbic play
fatally compromised by the refusal of its star (Kenneth More) to portray the
less charming aspects of his character, a somewhat blinkered Labour
politician.
A reunion with Jonathan Miller saw one of Oman's very finest designs when
they collaborated on The Merchant of Venice (Old Vic, 1970) for the National
Theatre. Updated to late 19th-century Venice with Shylock (Laurence Olivier)
as a frock-coated Rothschild-figure, she created a seductive Henry Jamesian
world of aqueous light and elegant settings evoking all the splendour of a
great mercantile community (money and opulent display were cunningly
suggested all through the evening).
Later theatre work included a 1980 Lyric Hammersmith season; a Hay Fever,
distinctly undercast, did Noël Coward's frivol no favours but she had a
happier time on Ibsen's The Wild Duck, featuring an undervalued performance
from Richard Briers, producing economical, suitably claustrophobic designs
on a tight budget. For John Dexter she created a bustlingly crowded,
brilliantly detailed working atmosphere for Thomas Dekker's The Shoemaker's
Holiday (National Theatre, 1981) and on Keith Waterhouse's delightful
recreation of the Pooters' world in Mr and Mrs Nobody (Garrick, 1986), her
crammed parlour of Brickfield Terrace, Holloway (cunningly opening out for
classic episodes such as the unfortunate Mansion House reception) was an
entrancing home for the performances of Judi Dench and Michael Williams.
The wide hexagonal stage of the Chichester Festival Theatre did not see
Oman's best work; her designs for a lumpy production of Robert Bolt's A Man
for All Seasons (1981), featuring a resolutely stolid (and peculiarly
wigged) Charlton Heston, were uncharacteristically cumbersome, although her
final collaboration with Garland on the solo play Beatrix (1996) - with
Patricia Routledge as Beatrix Potter - produced a beguiling domestic
interior, greatly aiding a more than slightly arch play.
Perhaps her finest later theatrical excursion was the challenge of Hugh
Whitemore's conversation-piece, The Best of Friends (Apollo, 1988) which had
to suggest the separate but interlinked worlds of Bernard Shaw, the Abbess
of Stanbrook and Sir Sidney Cockerell (Gielgud's valedictory stage
appearance). She solved all the technical problems with the most adroit use
of angles and perspective, also giving an extremely verbal piece striking
physical support and a crucial intimacy.
Oman was for her most active period also much in demand in the world's opera
houses and for ballet productions. Understandably, she was seen as an
inheritor of the great painterly tradition of design which, much inspired by
the verismo style of Franco Zeffirelli and the reclusive genius Lila de
Nobili, brought to the values of that tradition the changes in perception
inevitably generated by film and television. The style was especially suited
to the major opera and ballet classics and Oman came up with some
breathtakingly beautiful designs for several of the old warhorses, providing
ravishing, crowd-packed stage pictures, including those for Eugene Onegin
(1971), La Bohème (1974) and her whipped-cream Die Fledermaus (1977), all
for the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and a majestic, chiaroscuro Otello
for Stockholm (1983). She designed surprisingly little for Glyndebourne,
although her Arabella (1984 and much revived subsequently) was a genuine
stunner.
For many, the pinnacle of Oman's art was in the world of the ballet,
specifically in her partnership with another great English romantic, Sir
Frederick Ashton. Their collaboration on A Month in the Country (first seen
for the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden in 1976) was the ne plus ultra of her
refinement of the verismo painterly tradition; her backcloth, with miracles
of perspective and dissolving, exquisite pastels, framed Turgenev's
tremulous world of awakened love and sharp-edged jealousies on that mid
19th-century provincial Russian estate quite magically. It is a major
disappointment that she never designed the play.
In recent years Oman largely concentrated on writing and on the always
in-progress work on the Laskett's gardens. There had been no little surprise
in 1971 when she and Strong eloped to marry - suitably romantically, in the
church of Wilmcote, near Stratford-upon-Avon, the village of Mary Arden,
Shakespeare's mother - but it was and remained a genuine love-match, a
marriage of true minds and transparently happy.
Soon afterwards they found the Laskett which, 30 years ago, had only a
prosaically lawned garden with an adjacent two-acre field, unpromising to
most eyes but in fact, as a kind of blank canvas, the perfect space in which
to create a great garden from scratch. There were many setbacks - not least
a devastating frost in the early 1980s which wiped out large sections of
their planting, including most of their laurels - but, although constantly
changing (it would have appalled Oman to have had the garden described as
"finished"), their joint achievement is that in only 30 years they created
the beguiling paradise of a seemingly long- established garden out of, in
effect, a ploughed field.
Oman's temperament meshed ideally with Strong's in their work at the
Laskett. The garden both looks back to the classic English tradition and
forward into a new century. It has its formal symmetry, with box-edged
parterres, the Elizabethan Tudor walk, and classical plinths, sculpture and
statuary, but co-existing in perfect harmony are paving stones in bright
colours, with amber and blue glass chippings on pathways echoing the yellow
and blue house-front. Both understood - as Diana Vreeland did in fashion -
that a touch of vulgarity, even of "bad taste", would not be out of place.
Above all, for both Oman and Strong, memory was always a treasured attribute
in a garden, whatever the scale. Their affection for the garden and for each
other became inextricable. As Strong once said: "This is a portrait of a
marriage, the family we never had or wanted, a unique landscape peopled with
the ghosts of nearly everyone we have loved, both living and dead."
Alan Strachan