The collection consists of material created by Stefanos Lazaridis including annotated scripts, plans, research notes, programmes, reviews, articles, designs, posters and other supporting material.
Administrative and Biographical History
Stefanos Lazaridis (1942-2010) was one of the most influential theatre and opera designers from the 1970s until the 2000s. He worked throughout Europe, but especially at English National Opera (ENO) during the 1980s, where he created bold, theatrical, argumentative designs. "I never start from the visual," he said, "the stage picture has to follow from the idea, as an inevitable consequence of it."
Stefan (as he was known) was born to a Greek family in Ethiopia and he was educated in Addis Ababa and Geneva. He came to London in 1962 to attend business school, but instead studied design at the Central School of Speech and Drama. He worked as an apprentice for Nicholas Georgiadis, a fellow Greek designer, known for his work with Kenneth MacMillan.
Lazaridis’s first professional design was for Tennessee Williams's Eccentricities of a Nightingale in Guildford, Surrey (1967), and his first opera was Carmen for director John Copley at Sadler's Wells Opera in 1970. His early work was noted for its ‘opulent naturalism’, including The Marriage of Figaro (1971) at Covent Garden, starring a young Kiri te Kanawa.
In 1979 Lazaridis designed Aida at English National Opera and it became a turning point in his design style, the set was drenched in gold paint and it was described as ‘grand opera gone wild’. He stripped back the production for touring, but the decisive shift from decorator to conceptualist came when he worked with visionary Russian director Yuri Lyubimov. Tristan and Isolde in Bologna (1983) was a revelation and he noted it was ‘ Like moving house, because I suddenly discovered all the things I did not really need about me on stage.’
In the early 1980s, Lazaridis returned to ENO and was appointed associate director in 1986. The company was led by general director Peter Jonas, conductor Mark Elder and director of productions David Pountney, their artistic period would become known as the "power house" and put ENO on the international opera map for producing some of the most influential productions of the era.
The ENO began staging rare works including Janacek's Osud (1984) and Busoni's expressionist Doktor Faustus (1986): the latter was one of Lazaridis's proudest achievements, a skyline of filing cabinets spiking the background.
Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1987) was a triumphant discovery. Lazaridis and Pountney set this opera banned by Stalin at the height of the dictator's purges. It opened in a meat-packing warehouse, iron and a raw arterial scarlet dominating the colour scheme. Wozzeck (with Pountney in 1990) was dominated by a corrugated iron wall, drenched for the finale in a blood-red moon.
Opera houses depend on a revivable bank of repertory staples, but this was not Lazaridis's style. The question, he felt, should be "let's see what this particular opera means for us now". Even popular productions should be discarded: "Throw it away and get somebody to do another one." He and Pountney courted controversy with Verdi: La Traviata (1988) had a strong feminist charge, and in Macbeth (1990) an unstable society warred against nature: the Macbeths enforced Ceausescu-style charades of loyalty, while bloodshed ran green, the natural world insisting on its presence.
Lazaridis and his directors realised that Puccini's operas are emotive precisely because the heroines are tormented by the abuse of power. Madame Butterfly (ENO, 1984) was presented with a split-level design, red cutting through black and ivory, was built on contrasts – between Butterfly's fantasy of America and her industrialising society, Nagasaki was industrial and muddy.
Tosca (1986) with Jonathan Miller, seen first in Florence and later at ENO, placed classical Roman architecture at a perilous slant, suiting Mussolini's regime.
His collaboration with Miller producing work which continues to be in ENO repertory including The Mikado (1986). A fantasia of English eccentricity, it is set in a white-on-white hotel, all palms and pianos.
Lazaridis did not work like a painter, by starting from sketches: he preferred to develop his ideas with a model box.
Duran Duran's Nick Rhodes saw a Coliseum production of Janacek's The Adventures of Mr. Broucek in 1992 and "for weeks after I was thinking how magical it was". He invited Lazaridis to design the band's American tour the following year, and relished the "cross between Flash Gordon and Kafka". But he recalled, "we soon realised we'd bitten off more than we could chew" – even the Hollywood Bowl could not contain the gargantuan set.
Lazaridis made scale work triumphantly on Carmen, staged in arena style at Earl's Court with Steven Pimlott in 1989. Five hundred performers occupied the sandy bullpit and the moving wooden walkway that encircled the stage. He and Pountney produced spectacular outdoor productions on the lake at Bregenz in Austria, including The Flying Dutchman (1989) and Fidelio (1995). Lazaridis occasionally worked as a director himself – on Oedipus Rex at Opera North (1987).
With Pountney and costume designer Marie-Jeanne Lecca, he created the ‘shadowy dreamspace’ of Martinu's Julietta (Leeds and Holland, 1997) and shut Kát'a Kabanová (Munich, 1999) into a claustrophobic series of boxes ("oppressively cramped theatres of family life," as he described them). In Martinu's Greek Passion (Bregenz and the Royal Opera, 1999), he contrasted the might of the Orthodox church with the hardscrabble poverty of Greek village life.
At Bayreuth, an acclaimed Lohengrin with Keith Warner envisioned Wagner's "blackest tragedy" through what the designer described as "a windswept, barren landscape awaiting redemption".
Lazaridis also made a triumphant return to ENO in 2000 for the Italian Opera season – eight new productions in 13 weeks, on a semi-permanent set which deconstructed the lavishly tatty auditorium and celebrated "flamboyant poverty". Especially notable was The Coronation of Poppea with Steven Pimlott, the erotic shenanigans topped by an artificial red heart.
In 2006, Lazaridis was appointed artistic director of the Greek National Opera and he relocated to from London to Athens.
Stefanos Lazaridis died in 2010.
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Citation
V&A Collections, Theatre and Performance, https://collections.vam.ac.uk/archive/ARC99657