Great Britain’s leading theatre designer from the early 1930s to the mid 1950s, Oliver Messel (1904-1978) won international acclaim for his lavish, painterly and poetic designs informed by period styles. His work spans ballet, drama, film, musical, opera and revue. Messel’s traditional style of theatre design became unfashionable from the mid 1950s onwards, and he increasingly concentrated on painting, interior and textile design, including designing luxury homes in the Caribbean.

Messel created a light-hearted pastiche of early Victorian style for Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, presented at the Old Vic Theatre on 27 December, 1937. Tyrone Guthrie, the director, sought to reconcile Elizabethan comedy with the Old Vic’s early Victorian architecture (1833) and Mendelssohn’s (1809-1847) early Victorian incidental music. He said that the music was ‘redolent of crimson and gold opera houses, of operatic fairies in white muslin flying through groves of emerald canvas.’ (Old Vic Theatre Programme, 27 December 1937).

Vivien Leigh (1913-1967) played Titania, one of her first Shakespearean roles. A. E. Wilson reported that she was ‘like an exquisite picture from some Victorian lady’s keepsake’. This costume sketch indicates the flowing lines of her early Victorian style white muslin dress, which Messel decorated with flowers and accessorized with insect wings.