Malcolm Pride; Theatre designer
Hyfler/Rosner
Theatre designer
15 December 2003
Robert Malcolm Pride, theatre designer: born London 5 July 1930; died
London 24 October 2003.
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Malcolm Pride was a designer whose costumes leading ladies liked - notably
Vivien Leigh, Kay Hammond, Edith Evans, Constance Cummings and Gladys
Cooper.
The productions he found most exciting to work on included Twelfth Night
directed by John Gielgud and starring Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, to
open the 1955 Stratford season; The Father, directed by Caspar Wrede at the
Piccadilly Theatre in 1964; Orpheus in the Underworld, directed by Wendy
Toye at Sadler's Wells, which ran for many years from 1960; The Chances,
directed by Laurence Olivier for the opening of the 1962 Chichester
Festival; and Catch My Soul, the rock opera, directed by Jack Good and
Braham Murray at the Prince of Wales Theatre in 1970.
In 1965, after 50 or 60 productions, Pride also started teaching. In 1973 he
succeeded Richard Negri as Head of the Theatre Department at Wimbledon
School of Art which during his 27-year tenure became, and still is, the
largest and one of the most prestigious Theatre Design departments in
Europe. Pride enjoyed teaching and saw it as a way of repaying his own good
fortune.
Born in London in 1930, he had been interested in theatre design from the
age of seven or eight. He was very conscious of the imaginative world the
stage presented and liked to picture how it might appear beyond the range of
the audience's eyes.
I thought it simply continued out of sight. I remember seeing Jack and the
Beanstalk at Drury Lane Theatre in the 1930s and being fascinated by seeing
only part of the Giant - a huge hand - or when he had fallen down the
beanstalk his body, the top half of which only filled the entire huge stage.
Where was the rest of him - were his legs there in the wings?
He pursued this direction fervently and went to Bryanston School because of
the support for the arts there. From Bryanston, aged 17, he went to the
nearly new Old Vic Theatre School in London, at the bombed Old Vic Theatre
in Waterloo Road - he was interviewed by Margaret "Percy" Harris (of Motley)
and Glen Byam Shaw in a freezing conservatory at the Sadler's Wells Ballet
School in Baron's Court.
The Old Vic School then was a mix of ages and nationalities due to the
recent war. After a year, Pride left for National Service in the Army,
returning 18 months or so later when the school had moved to Dulwich. There
was no formal "graduation" but he went immediately as designer to Exmouth -
along with several of the actors from the school.
A few months later Pride and the designer Carl Toms, his contemporary at the
Old Vic School, were asked by Orson Welles to work on designs for a
production of The Merchant of Venice. Pride worked on costume and Toms
worked on sets and they got quite a long way before Orson Welles allegedly
"vanished", along with the designs, to Copenhagen, where he was acting as a
magician in a night-club.
That was the end of that, but before long Pride was working both at Sadler's
Wells on Cavalleria Rusticana (1952) and at Stratford-upon-Avon for George
Devine as designer on Volpone (1952). Pride was very generously supported as
an artist by Devine, Byam Shaw and Harris. He worked twice with Devine, at
Stratford and Covent Garden - new and important venues for them both. Percy
Harris continued to act as tutor and to a certain extent mentor to Pride.
He was still very young - not quite 22 years - but he had lots of energy,
was a quick student and was bursting with ideas and eager to succeed. He was
also very shy but that didn't seem to matter. He loved designing and helping
to build up the production, and worked happily and luckily as a designer for
a number of years. His last designs for the stage were in the early 1980s.
Pride belonged to a culture that did not particularly value the actual
designs on paper, so he kept very few of them - he said that it was the
ephemeral nature of the theatre that attracted him. The designs that do
remain, however, are destined for the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden.
Peter Farley