Costume design by Leslie Hurry for Imogen in Cymbeline, Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 1949.

Artist Leslie Hurry (1909-1978) trained at the Royal Academy and during the 1930s became known as a surrealist painter. A one-man show in London in 1942 was seen by the theatre director, Michael Benthall, who recommended Hurry to the dancer and choreographer, Robert Helpmann, then planning a ballet based on Shakespeare's Hamlet. The success of his Hamlet designs set Hurry on a second career as one of the most distinguished theatre designers of his generation. He designed operas, ballets and plays, notably Swan Lake for the Sadler's Wells Ballet in 1943, a production which stayed in the repertoire for thirty years; Venice Preserved for Peter Brook (1953); the Ring Cycle at Covent Garden (1954), and Troilus and Cressida at Stratford for Peter Hall (1960), famous for being staged in a sand pit. Although he did design contemporary drama, it was the classics of the British stage that were most suited to Hurry’s imagination. Using a distinctive colour palette dominated by dull reds, yellows, greys and muddy greens, he created elaborate costumes and oversized architectural settings. Michael Benthall worked with Hurry on Hamlet, the play, at the Old Vic (1944) and Turandot at Covent Garden (1947), and in 1949 brought Hurry to Stratford to design Cymbeline. Together they devised a production on an operatic scale, set in a fantastical distant past.

Hurry has annotated this design for Imogen with the words 'Travelling dress', though the small coronet suggests something finer than the 'riding suit ; no costlier than would fit / A franklin's housewife', which Imogen requests for her journey to Milton Haven. Production photographs show that she wore a wimple without any adornment for her travels, before adopting male disguise. The coronet, again with a wimple, was actually worn at the British court in the first part of the play. Writing in the Daily Telegraph (21 May 1949), W.A. Darlington felt that the ‘nun-like garment’ hampered Kathleen Michael’s performance in the early scenes, commenting that ‘it was not until she assumed her disguise that she really came into her own. Then she showed both power and pathos.’