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.

Oliver Messel won an Antoinette Perry 'Tony' Award for his set for Rashomon, a play directed by Peter Glenville and performed at the Music Box Theatre, New York, in 1959. Although a box office failure, the play was critically acclaimed. Brooks Atkinson praised Messel’s atmospheric set: ‘…Oliver Messel’s settings, representing the decaying Rashomon gate and a barbaric bamboo jungle are like the illustrations for a macabre legend. Rashomon is an incantation of things far away and long since forgotten.’ (New York Times, 28 January 1959).

Messel created a revolving Japanese forest which appeared to move as the leading female character made her way through the forest on horseback, led by her husband, toward a dramatic encounter with a bandit near a ruined temple.