Hein Heckroth at The Archers: Art, Commerce, Sickliness

Abstract

Hein Heckroth was born in Hesse in 1901. He trained as a painter in Frankfurt, and for economic reasons turned to the theatre, first meeting Kurt Jooss’ dance company in 1924. After a string of successful stage designs for Jooss, such as his prize-winning work for a Swiftian antiwar satire Der grune Tisch (The Green Table) in 1932, he arrived in Britain in 1935, having been blacklisted by the Nazi State because of his loyalty to his Jewish wife (for a slightly fuller biography see Surowiec 1992: 6). In that year he designed Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weil’s operetta, My Kingdom for a Cow at London’s Savoy Theatre. He went on to work with the International Ballet Company, and also designed costumes for opera. When World War Two broke out, he was briefly interned in Australia as an enemy alien, but was soon allowed back into Britain. He taught at Dartington Hall, the alternative arts school in Totnes, Devon. The school was a haven for European exiles, such as Walter Gropius from the Bauhaus, and from 1942 Heckroth’s old companion Kurt Jooss based his company there too. Heckroth’s surrealist paintings were exhibited in London. He designed a stage production of War and Peace, experimentally using moving film rear-projected onto a backcloth. This ambitious mixed-media design signifies the Brechtian strain in Heckroth’s work, and points to his eclecticism, but it was a notable failure. Thanks to fellow designer and painter Vincent Korda, he was taken on as costume designer for Caesar and Cleopatra (Gabriel Pascal 1945), where he worked under the art direction of John Bryan. Heckroth was soon employed by Alfred Junge at Pinewood, and thus commenced an association with Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger which ran for eight films (and afterwards he designed another two films for Powell without Pressburger: the ballet-short The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1956) and Bela Bartok’s camera-opera Bluebeard’s Castle (1964)). He had returned to Germany in the mid 1950s, where he died in 1970.