Set model piece by Leslie Hurry showing a design for Shakespeare's The Tempest, produced by Robert Helpmann for the Old Vic Theatre, London, 1954.

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 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 Preserv'd 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.

This production of The Tempest opened on 13 April 1954. For Philip Hope-Wallace in the Manchester Guardian 15 April 1954 the settings and costumes were fanciful and often beautiful: "what was achieved was ingenious in the extreme. A series of backdrops are skilfully whipped up and down, darkness falls with shimmering fireflies, the corps de ballet are in a perpetual state of metamorphosis, now representing waves like the totem chorus in Rose Marie, now guests out of some banquet which would have satisfied Comus."