Staging Wilde's Society Plays: A Conversation with Philip Prowse (Glasgow Citizens Theatre)

Abstract

Philip Prowse (b. 1937) is something of an anomaly in contemporary British theatre, a director who comes to his craft from a design rather than a performance background. Trained at London's Slade School of Art, Prowse worked briefly in the model rooms at Covent Garden before becoming stage designer at the Watford Palace in 1967. Two years later he moved on to the Glasgow Citizens Theatre, where he has continued to serve as part of the triumvirate (together with Giles Havergal and Robert David MacDonald) responsible for that company's artistic direction. Over the past two decades Prowse's aesthetic has come to dominate the Citizens, helping to make it unique among Britain's regional troupes, both in its European outlook and in its sumptuous, exuberant theatricality. Through the period Oscar Wilde has been a mainstay of the company's repertoire. In the 1970S Prowse twice designed Havergal's stagings of The Importance of Being Earnest, including a 1977 mounting of the play's four-act version. During the following decade he both directed and designed his own productions of all three of Wilde's society plays, A Woman of No Importance (1984), An Ideal Husband (1986), and Lady Windermere's Fan (1988), claiming to have found them "comedies" and left them "dramas." The accomplishment — regarded by critic Michael Coveney as "the glory of Prowse's work ... in the 1980s" — has led the Guardian's Michael Billington to credit Prowse with "completely revis[ing] our notion of how to play early Oscar" (9 May 1988). In 1991 Prowse made his Royal Shakespeare Company debut with a new production of A Woman of No Importance. Much indebted to his Citizens' staging, it played to full houses at the Barbican, before transferring to the Haymarket for an extended West End run. The following interview was conducted in Prowse's London flat, shortly after the Glasgow opening of his 1993 adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray.