Design for banners by Leslie Hurry for William Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 1960.

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).

Troilus and Cressida by William Shakespeare, directed by Peter Hall and John Barton, was presented at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, on 26 July 1960. It was revived for eight performances at the 1962 Edinburgh Festival where it opened on 20 August 1962 at the Lyceum Theatre and transferred to the Aldwych Theatre, London where it opened on 15 October 1962, by which time the company had been renamed the Royal Shakespeare Company. The music was composed by Humphrey Searle and the production lit by John Wyckham. The production is remembered for the action being set in a hexagonal sandpit with an abstract backcloth.

Sir Peter Hall, paying tribute to Leslie Hurry after the designer's death in 1978, claimed ‘One of the two most extraordinary things he did for me in the early years of the RSC was Troilus and Cressida. Leslie fell naturally into expressing Troy – wonderful purples and gold, and long, long cloaks, and he used his sense of the barbaric, which was very strong to express the Greeks. We had the sandpit from the word go. He was very wry about it; in a way, although he endorsed it completely, he felt it was almost passing up his responsibility as an artist, because an arena of sand didn’t need him. But he loved it once it was there because it moved, it took different light, it was always different – and because he had a background for the most beautifully coloured costumes.’