Design in focus: an appreciation of Anna Fleischle
The second in Rosemary Waugh's ongoing series of career retrospectives
By Rosemary Waugh
Anna Fleischle designs everything. This is true in two senses, both the breadth and the content of her work. By this point in her career the German-born set and costume designer has worked on designs for theatre, opera and dance that span the historical to the contemporary, the maximalist to the minimalist, the metaphorical and suggestive to the most painstakingly tuned-in acts of realism. Some of them are instantly recognisable as Fleischle-esque (although you’d be hard pressed to nail down precisely what that means), while others seem like such a departure they send an excellent jolt through you.
Inside each of these individual worlds is a million acts of extreme precision – and this, really, is the ‘everything’ that occupies me when looking at her creations. Fleischle is the queen of macro to micro, an artist who selects, designs, positions and understands the importance of every item on stage within the overarching visual language of the piece, whether that’s a wonkily angled photo of a bald baby, the ridges in a glass water bottle, or the natural wood patterning of a table leg.
Within this vast and varied back catalogue, there is one recurrent theme that’s hard to overlook: houses. Or maybe that should be ‘homes’. There are lots of them within Fleischle’s portfolio, either showing one or multiple rooms of a dwelling. The most recent of these is the set for Nathan Englander’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, which involves a kind of ghost home, a kitchen-dining area where all the colour has been drained out of the cabinets, the crockery and the assorted bits of semi-useful household stuff. Here, the home depicted is both a literal representation of a domestic space and – as with Death of a Salesman, discussed in greater detail below – a reflection of the mental landscape of the characters present in it, who disagree over what ‘home’ is meant to mean.
In 2018, Fleischle designed the set and costumes for Laura Wade’s Home, I’m Darling, which premiered at Theatr Clwyd (and was directed by the then-AD of the same venue, Tamara Harvey), before moving to the National Theatre and then onto a West End run at the Duke of York’s the following year. It follows the familiar-but-unfamiliar marital life of Judy (Katherine Parkinson) and Johnny (Richard Harrington) who have a modelled their contemporary existence on their own hallucinatory dream of 1950s domestic bliss. Judy stays home, wafting around the kitchen in huge skirts while decanting modern produce into 1950s packaging, and Johnny goes out to make money selling – of all things – normal homes to normal people.
Re-reading it recently, I was struck by what a total gift of a play this is to a set designer. Not for the seemingly obvious reason that Judy and Johnny have meticulously converted their home into a place that only contains items from 1950 or before and so it offers a chance to create the same in turn (because, of course, a set designer could easily find themselves working on a play set in 1950 that requires an historically accurate set) – but because what the couple have created is, in a sense, a stage set. It is, as Judy’s former commune-living feminist mother says, “a cartoon” of what they think the fifties was all about. It is flawed and silly and sweet and conceals as much as it reveals: exactly the same as the characters’ marriage.
Fleischle captured this hybrid of authentic and fake by making the entire home like a life-size doll’s house. The audience could see the external shape and structure of fairly non-descript light grey building, along with curved openings, like the screen shape of a retro television set, into the kitchen, living room, upstairs landing, main bedroom and – more covertly – the pink-themed bathroom. The performers, especially Parkinson in those gigantic circle skirts, always looked a tad too big in the space which, brilliantly, made the home itself and all its artfully selected bits seem fragile and slightly unsuitable for use by real-life humans. All of it only worked if you were going to (as my own mother would say) “faff around” and play house rather than really live in it.
Fleischle, who was nominated for the 2019 Olivier Awards for Best Set Design and Best Costume Design for the show, was praised for mimicking the same level of detail that the vintage-obsessed Judy would have done. This slightly missed the point. Fleischle didn’t just respond with total accuracy to Wade’s stage directions and the surface level aesthetic of the piece, she responded to the essence of Wade’s play, which is really about the role play – whether tragic or necessary – that informs a marriage and an individual life, and how this imprints itself onto the domestic space. In the case of Judy, this space has morphed from innocent refuge to the adult version of a Wendy house, a fantastical ‘safe space’ within which she hides from the difficult, scary parts of real-life adulthood.
In Home, I’m Darling, the contrivances of a ‘dream home’ are obvious. But this, of course, doesn’t have to be the case. For Danny Robins’ 2:22 A Ghost Story, which premiered in the West End in 2021 and then went on to a mammoth number of additional runs, tours and international productions, Fleischle created a contemporary home based around a different – and, to many of us, more familiar – set of middle-class domestic aspirations. Jenny, originally played by Lily Allen, is the mother of a young child living in a typical Victorian house in London (I strongly imagine it as red brick, despite this being ambiguous). The set design shows the main part of the ground floor, a long strip of living room into kitchen into dining space and out to the glass panelled back doors opening onto a neat little paved garden area.
I interviewed Fleischle about her design for an article in the 2:22 programme before the show opened. She spoke about how it was based on oh-so-many examples of older terraced houses bought by young couples who then immediately commence ‘doing them up’ by ripping everything out, knocking through the existing walls and putting in dramatically modern features which are vastly out of keeping with the original architecture. If you want a real-life example of this phenomenon, I suggest the Warner Estate houses of Walthamstow, where I lived pre-pandemic. This exact practice was taking place up and down those wide-avenued streets and behind many of the lovely, curved doorways by millennials who thought they – like Judy’s beloved fifties women – knew best when it came to domestic tastes and modernising.
The 2:22 set captures the home mid-transformation. To the right is a new navy-blue kitchen, with a large breakfast bar and light-wood surfaces. At the back are those brand-new glass doors, an ugly configuration of rectangles that look like the brainchild of someone with a death wish against Victoriana. To the left, are the remnants of the old home. Peeling patterned wallpaper, resembling a faded nightie, is marked by the places pictures once hung. Features surely destined for the skip are still present, including a carved wooden fireplace which later became a post-war electric bar heater – itself a reminder of previous fashions and fads.
Tending to a home can be a demonstration of care, love and preservation, similar to growing a garden than incorporates plants both inherited from the previous keepers of the space and those newly added. But these intentions feel absent from what is happening in the doing up of this home. In the interview, Fleischle spoke of how the set “slightly highlights how it’s quite an aggressive act to go in and start ripping things out; in a way it’s vandalising someone’s way of life and, in this case, ignoring the kind of life and marriage the couple who lived there before had”. There is, she said, an “arrogance” to assuming to know what a living space should look like and overlooking the dedication invested in it by those who came before.
She read Jenny as a character intuitively sensitive to the old and the new, and to the layers of history inscribed in the house. Jenny introduces aspects of warmth and care. One of my favourite details of the design is a baby’s bib which Fleischle embroidered with the name of Jenny’s daughter, because she imagined Jenny to be the sort of mother who would do that kind of devotional, often-overlooked act of love. She also included some additional bits of clutter, like aprons, that came from her own home and were once used by her now-older children.
That little hand-stitched name is a lovely example of how props and bits of design can tell you so much about a character’s inner life. Jenny, quite deliberately, isn’t living out a trad wife daydream where she hand-stitches all her child’s clothing while baking bread and tending chickens. She’s an actively contemporary mother, a Lululemon-leggings-on-mat-leave type, but the tiny stitches on the bib tell you that she wants to give her daughter just a smidgen of that other way of being. It’s a little hint of the incongruous dreams we often have, the ones about being a different, more perfect person whose love and care and time spent is registered in every small item used by those around us.
The dissonance within the home – the half old and half new – also echoes Jenny’s conflicted inner world and sleep-deprived grasp on reality. But it was in another production that Fleischle used the interior of a home as a metaphor for mental unravelling to expert levels. Marianne Elliott and Miranda Cromwell’s Death of a Salesman opened at the Young Vic in 2019 and transferred later that year to the Piccadilly Theatre. To talk about the world the characters were ‘in’ seems misleading. Fleischle’s set wasn’t about containing or enveloping – in the way a functioning homestead ideally does. Instead, it was about expanse and breakdown, a place where walls dissolved, furniture hung in mid-air, and the movements of the characters were dictated by their impulses rather than spatial logic.
When I reviewed it at the Young Vic, I was nowhere near as taken with it as other critics were – although I liked Yarit Dor’s slow-mo movement sequences where the cast stretched and slunk and slipped as though stuck in memory lapse toffee. But something about the staging, at the time, blocked the kind of full, emotional reaction I look for in theatre. But the all-at-sea set of floating furniture in blue light and black shadow wedged the production more in my subconscious than I would have expected at the time. I watched it then as a renter who appreciated the freedom of quick relocation, whereas I now recall it from the vantage point of a mother in a mortgaged home. The home where I stood, a few days after we bought it, by the garden door and felt the presence of a little boy next to me. The would-be creature I knew then would be my son.
So maybe this is why, in retrospect, the fragmented home in Death of a Salesman fills me a sense of fear and dread. Rather than just suspend aloft the elements that could make a home, it’s like Fleischle has taken an existing home and de-solidified it. The structure, the comfort, the rules that were once in place are no longer there and this doesn’t just provide an insight into Willy Loman’s disintegrating mind (as played by Wendell Pierce), it also shows how the departure of a major character from a home can leave a whole family unmoored, exposed and living in an exploded reality.
Domestic spaces are, in many ways, the perfect subject for stage design. Because each and every home is a stage set, even when not as hyper stylised as the one created by Judy in Wade’s play. Behind front doors, up staircases, behind heavy curtains are whole words created by the people who live in them. They are the settings where we stamp out our personalities, in the way we’d like others to see them, and the places that, in their dirt, their failings, their brokenness often end up showing much more about the less palatable bits of ourselves than we’d like. And perhaps it’s their inherent precarity, like the Lomans’ violently deconstructed home, that leads us to over-invest in the idea that, with the help of a new glass-panelled kitchen extension, we can control our environment and the course of our lives.
As parents especially, we use these spaces to create the stage set for what we wish could be true for the characters who will play out their stories here. Sometimes, like with the pre-newborn ‘nesting’ period – which, for me, was/is very real – this desire to create the right set is so pronounced it hurts. We believe that if the walls and the floors and the cot are just so and the clothes are all folded and the pictures are beautiful, then upon this expertly designed stage we will step and deliver the Olivier Award-winning performance to match. And then, inevitably, we fall short and end up shouting lines or fucking up the choreography in ways that result in days of one-star inner critic reviews circling in the mind.
The true domestic setting is also, like set and costume design in British theatre, constricted by finances and limited by available resources. And it’s undervalued and often taken for granted by those who look upon it. Like most children, I never appreciated the labour, the expense, the care and the craft my mother, in particular, put into our home. I didn’t see how every single thing within that house only existed thanks to active decisions and the work of parenting. Nothing is there by chance, it’s only because someone bothered to put it there.
Fleischle’s homes on stage, then, have a strong effect on me, in the same way that the female-centric paintings of Caroline Walker showing mundane homes, beauty salons, and caesarean sections do. In their deep understanding of how humans make, mould and then move within their version of a burrow, these sets pay homage to our compulsion to use objects as the means by which we make and shape the world. The artistry of the everyday as we try to create the perfect setting for a new character.
Rosemary Waugh’s book Running the Room: Conversations with Women Theatre Directors is available now. She is currently working on Building the World: Conversations with Women Set Designers, due for publication by Nick Hern in 2026.