David Walker (July 18, 1934 - December 27, 2008) was a prolific British designer whose work encompassed film, theatre, ballet and opera.. The work of Broadway's
gay and lesbian artistic community went on display in 2007 when the
Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation Gallery presents "StageStruck: The Magic of
Theatre Design." The exhibit was conceived to highlight the achievements of
gay and lesbian designers who work in conjunction with fellow gay and lesbian
playwrights, directors, choreographers and composers. Original sketches,
props, set pieces and models — some from private collections — represent the
work of over 60 designers, including David Walker.
Walker was born in Kolkata, India to British parents and grew up in London. He studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts under Jeanetta Cochrane.
After working as a cutter in the Glyndebourne wardrobe, he initially took jobs that involved the grittier end of theatrical innovation - first of all with the pioneering director Joan Littlewood, at the Liverpool Theatre Workshop and at the Theatre Royal in east London, and then at the Royal Court for
Tony Richardson's 1961 production of The Changeling. He would later design costumes for Richardson's film The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), starring Trevor Howard.
Glyndebourne 1934–1994 1994
David Walker (1934–2008)
Glyndebourne Archive Collection
He soon began a fruitful partnership with the Czech-born set designer Henry Bardon. Both men studied with the designer Lila Di Nobili and were greatly influenced by her vein of wistful fantasy. This emerged in
Frederick Ashton's ballet The Dream (1964) for the Royal Ballet, a delicate, Victorian vision of Shakespeare's play, viewed through a misty gauze. The designers referenced a celebrated pre-war Old Vic production and Romantic ballet's fairy scenes, twining Titania's headdress with leaves. When Bottom was turned into a donkey, he danced on point in black slippers that looked like hooves. Ashton then created a pas de deux for Bottom and the Fairy Queen, both on pointe.
Ashton's Cinderella (1947) is a lyrical ballet with a strong streak of panto. Bardon and Walker's 1965 redesign placed it among rococo woods and terraces. Richard Buckle found Walker's costumes for the dance of the seasons "ravishing ... drifting wisps from high Empire no-waists, dusted with poppies and leaves". When Walker redesigned both sets and costumes in 1987, without Bardon, the effect was less magical, the costumes more fussy.
Critics resistant to Walker's pictorial charm called it chocolate-boxy. Working alone he created sets as well as costumes, drawing on his painterly finesse for layered backcloths that produced a three-dimensional shimmer. He was the sole designer for the Royal Ballet's 1977 Sleeping Beauty, in which he had the heroine fall asleep in the 17th century and waking in the 18th. Arlene Croce, in the New Yorker, praised designs "of an exceptional delicacy", especially a panorama depicting the prince's boat crossing the mouth of an ocean cave, "a lovely effect that is over too soon".
Mounting full-scale productions of ballet classics can be a logistical challenge, balancing practicalities with visual splendour. Colleagues admired Walker's pragmatism and ability to produce the effect of luxury on a tight budget. He was also popular among the wardrobe staff, happy to reconsider if a costume was hampering a dancer.
Walker was a walking repository of the visual arts from the mid-18th to mid-19th centuries. Attuned to ballet's Romantic repertory, he produced a softly moonlit Giselle (1971) and La Sylphide (1979) for the London Festival Ballet under Peter Schaufuss. He worked increasingly in the US, frequently with the choreographer Ben Stevenson. Their striking Swan Lake for Houston Ballet had Romantic swans in full white tutus, and dressed the prince's mother like Queen Victoria. Walker nudged the ball scene into nightmare, as the demonic Odile lifted her black veil to reveal a bird's beak.
Later in his career, Walker designed an Olivier award-winning Cinderella for English National Ballet (1996, also produced at Boston Ballet). In contrast to Ashton's version, the choreographer Michael Corder conceived it as a romance, overseen by a moon that glimmered from the front curtain and through each act. Corder remembers Walker as astute and initially reserved beneath a tonsure-like haircut, but gradually revealing a quirky humour. He was notably modest: Corder recalls that he refused to join the customary first-night curtain call for the creative team: "There was no way that I could drag him onstage."
Although dance was at the heart of his work, Walker also designed for opera and theatre. The V&A museum in London holds his sumptuously decorated costumes for Der Rosenkavalier (English National Opera, 1974), which demonstrate how he created 18th-century silhouettes without constricting singers in corsetry. The young heiress Sophie wears a white-on-white confection, a fantasy of floating layers, the surface trailed with floral trimmings and bows, pistachio leaves curling around the blooms.
Other opera designs included a scarlet La Traviata for San Francisco Opera, Carmen at New York's Metropolitan Opera, and Semele at the Royal Opera, its errant immortals dressed as if painted by Tiepolo. On screen, he won an Emmy award in 1971 for a television production of Hamlet starring
Richard Chamberlain, and also dressed
Katharine Hepburn in The Corn is Green (1979).
At the National Theatre he costumed Undiscovered Country (1979), Tom Stoppard's bittersweet version of Das Weite Land by the Austrian playwright Arthur Schnitzler, and Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman (1981), directed by Christopher Morahan.
In 1971 Walker had made his debut with the Royal Shakespeare Company with London Assurance, a Victorian comedy by Dion Boucicault starring Donald Sinden as Sir Harcourt Courtly, the laboriously upholstered suitor, and a young Judi Dench as Grace Harkaway. His cheeks rouged and his black wig extravagantly curled, Sinden gazed at himself in the mirror and mused: "Am I the thing?" When it came to period enchantment, David Walker was quite the thing.
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