The standard colour scheme for hospital dramas is clinical white. You expect gleaming walls and antiseptic surfaces, institutionally bright. Mai Katsume takes the opposite tack.
In this co-production between Vanishing Point from Glasgow and Teater Katapult from Aarhus, Denmark, the designer dresses nurses, doctors and patients in black and lines them up across an ominously dark stage.
Only one is in white: Lærke Schjærff Engelbrecht stands alone as Flora, a hard-pressed nurse working an extra weekend shift because of short staffing. Even the flickering strip lights on the floor she paces are entombed in black. They seem to suck the light away from her. Simon Wilkinson’s austere lighting design adds to the atmosphere of monochrome terror. The effect, in Matthew Lenton’s high-precision production, is to turn a stressful night on the wards into something like gothic horror. [READ MORE]