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.

Helpmann's one-act ballet was inspired by Shakespeare's lines 'For in that sleep what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil'. The ballet presents the distorted memories of the dying Hamlet. Hurry was initially reluctant to take the commission but eventually agreed to make one design to express his own reaction to the play. This was exactly what Helpmann wanted and became the basis for the set.

Helpmann asked for a decadent palace and Hurry created a nightmare vision, loaded with symbols of death and decay. The figure of Revenge, literally two-faced, looms over the dancers; the architecture is itself symbolic: a column transforms into a hand clutching a dagger, the receding perspectives suggest the unknown, with the stage as a point of transition on a journey. The blood red sun is both an emblem of doom and of light breaking through Hamlet's mind at the point of death. The curling vegetation is decay.