Theatre needs to reinvent creative hierarchy on shows – 59 Productions founder, Stranger Things

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Leo Warner, founder of 59 Productions. Photo: Sophia Spring

The founder and director of 59 Productions – which has worked on productions such as Stranger Things – has called a "reinvention" of "creative hierarchy" on increasingly technical commercial productions.

Leo Warner also said there should be greater recognition for video designers.

Following his production studio’s Olivier win for video design, technical design and production for Stranger Things: The First Shadow, Warner called the conventional timeline of theatrical production, in which set design is "front-loaded" ahead of animation, lighting and video, "archaic".

Speaking to The Stage, Warner highlighted that while a physical set needed time to be engineered and built, there was also a "massive time associated with the development of digital material, almost as long as fabricating something out of steel or wood".

He continued: "Stranger Things shouldn’t have worked by the same dependencies, the same pipeline. In many ways, it held the whole production back until the absolute last minute when it surged forward. I would argue that we got there by reinventing the process as we went but, in an ideal world, those processes wouldn’t be as rigid in the first place, and you wouldn’t have these dependencies and hierarchies that are relatively archaic."

"If we are collectively going to be making massively ambitious work that engages audiences in new ways, and new audiences, we need to completely reinvent the hierarchy of dependency by which all of the departments operate."

Warner explained that 59 Productions was experimenting with having a "design director" who would oversee the "aesthetic interpretation" of a production across lighting, sound, video and set.

He added: "We need to accept that each team will be working together in a different way, not in a way that’s pre-set by the expectations of the medium."

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59 Productions picked up an Olivier award for its video design for Stranger Things: The First Shadow, sharing the best set design win with Miriam Buether, as well as picking up a Tony award in 2015 for the design of An American in Paris.

Despite the nod, Warner also pointed to the absence of a video design category in the awards and the general lack of specific recognition for the discipline.

He said: “In terms of recognition, it remains frustrating that there are sometimes really high-level collaborative processes in which whole subsets of creative and technical and other disciplines just simply get ignored because there’s not a good understanding or vocabulary or interest in talking about them."

While Warner said that he might have once called for a video design-specific Olivier award, he now advocated for productions to choose who should be awarded for design, commending Sonia Friedman for suggesting both 59 Productions and Buether be entered together.

The most successful shows, he said, are those where you can’t "see the seams" between technical elements such as set, lighting and video, all of which should ultimately serve the story.

59 Productions worked on its first theatre show as video designers in 2003, and self-produced its first entirely self-initiated theatre show (as commissioners, directors, set and video designers) in 2017. Since then, Warner said, it has attempted to expand its influence on the industry by giving audiences "new ways of experiencing stories, and opportunities for agency within those stories".

Warner, who was speaking ahead of his appearance on a panel at Soho Green Rooms on July 16, said: "There’s a gradual erosion of patience with subtle variations of essentially the same form. And that is maybe where video and other technology and illusions have offered a bit of a lifeline, engaging audiences who might have become a bit bored by the standard form."