The White Plague

The White Plague by Karel Capek

My interpretation of this play is to create an eery promenade performance that transforms into its own world and takes the audience with it.

The location chosen to house this play is the Willington cooling power stations in Derby built in the 1950s. The towers smother you in size which in themselves gives a powerful effect when in its presence, as well as stunning acoustics. This location allows me to have a dramatic large set hanging above the audience as well as using the towers features as part of the set.

I have achieved the sense of loneliness and community by separating the audience in their own personal space linked with having to wear hazmat suits throughout the play. This forces the same daunting feelings to emerge from each audience member.

The snippets of humour in the play will be introduced in the main characters face and movements. Masks inspired by Commedia dell’arte will be worn by certain actors which will enhance their personality’s and status.

I have designed the play to be shown within a journey in the towers, moving from one to the other, noticing the slight difference in the set and lighting to enhance the deterioration in the play caused by the plague and human behaviour. The audience will be invited into a quarantine building where they require the suits and ‘vaccine’ shot. The nurses then guide them through the tunnels filled with the shadows of death to the first tower glowing in yellow and white light. The audience access each tower within these tunnels, never seeing the outside world till the very end of the play.

The middle tower slowly shows the damage and danger that occurs in the play by the breakage of the sets and glaring red beams. While the last tower reveals the chaos the plague has done to the world resembled in moving entrapment balls and a blue cold atmosphere.

The end of the play will be shown outside, resulting in the towers being consumed by red blood and smoke, symbolising the death of humanity.

Costume Design

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My costume scheme includes a main colour palette of yellow, red, blue and black. These match with the colour scheme of the set design which i tried to make its own parallel world.

The marshals and Barons costume changed into a bland stripped down version with their chest exposed, showing the words 'I am human'. This costume change happens when these characters are coming to the end of their life. I chosen this design to show how there are just like everyone else in the play to which even the most powerful of people cant escape death.

I have added lose up images of the Commedia dell'arte masks that are worn by certain actors to enhance their personality and add humor to the play.

Inspiration for Costumes

The Lepers

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Set Design

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1:200 scale model

The design scheme for this play was the colour palette of yellow, red, blue and black. I wanted to connect feeling and atmosphere to each colour which would enhance the emotion within certain sections of the plays and towers.

When I picked the certain colours of the scheme, I know how to direct these colours like I mentioned before with the first tower being yellow, second being a red and the third being blue. The yellow represents the joy and goodness in us all but also resembles heaven. This connects to the hope in the characters on how a vaccine will be made and distributed to everyone. The red resembles the danger that is soon to come with in the story line which exposes the death that is slowly being spread through the characters. I wanted to have the cold blue colour in the last tower to create a hollow soulless atmosphere which mirrors the destruction of power and large pile of soulless bodies.

I chose to create an open world with hardly any set because I wanted the audience to feel uncomfortable, vulnerable and somewhat incomplete. Like I said before I wanted the audience to have some sense of community which the hazmat suits gives. I chose these suits because it connects to uniforms that are used in real life quarantine and around people that are contagious. I wanted this to not only make the audience feel part of the plays world but to also try and create a sense of reality to the disease.

I did some initial sketches of a storyboard for how i wanted the set to look like. These sketches were hand done but my final storyboard was done on procreate because i wanted to create a more realistic piece to enhance my design.

I took inspiration from nature, especially the spiders eggs which looks like a hanging cotton ball. These balls i used in the third tower to frighten the audience in being entrapped inside them.

I visited four different locations for this play to which i found an old WW2 base. This base had a range of building sill left standing and bunkers. The bunkers gave me an idea to create tunnels that lead to each of the willington towers. The audience will move from each tower through-out the play which will create a haunting atmosphere and connect to the war time aesthetics.

Once i knew The basic set shapes i then used sketchup to figure out the measurements against the locations towers as they are extremely large. The towers are 90 meters tall and 60 meters wide from the bottom.