Sally Jacobs
Set and costume designer who worked with Peter Brook’s iconic 1970 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the Royal Shakespeare Company and taught at Central School of Art and Design, Slade School of Fine Art and Goldsmiths University
One of the most innovative scenic designers of the 20th century, Sally Jacobs will forever be associated with Peter Brook’s iconic 1970 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Together, Brook and Jacobs reinvented Shakespeare’s bucolic comedy, replacing the usual twinkling prettiness with a stark yet dazzling white box-set, white-costumed characters swinging on trapezes, Puck walking on stilts, actors tumbling like acrobats, with metal coils representing the trees of the forest. It was a revolutionary concept and one that would influence design students for years to come.
Prior to rehearsals, director and designer had visited a Chinese circus in New York, the energy and invention of which engulfed their imaginations. Brook said later it afforded “a new imagery (that) could begin to flow from Sally’s rich creativity”.
Born Sally Rich in Whitechapel, east London, Jacobs attended St Martin’s School of Art and the Central School of Arts and Crafts, while also learning shorthand and typing to fund her studies. On one of her temp jobs in Soho she met a screenwriter named Alexander Jacobs, whom she married in 1953.
Having assisted the great Jocelyn Herbert at London’s Royal Court, then doing her own show for the Edinburgh Festival in 1961, Jacobs made her RSC design debut the following year with two plays – Women Beware Women and The Empire Builders. Brook, then an associate director with the company and impressed by what he’d seen, invited her to join him in his Theatre of Cruelty season. This included the Peter Weiss play Marat/Sade, set in a Parisian mental asylum after the French Revolution (Jacobs also worked on the 1967 film version), and the documentary-style, anti-American US in which one American soldier sported a rocket for a penis.
She also worked on more conventional RSC productions, notably John Barton’s Love’s Labour’s Lost (1964) and Clifford Williams’ Twelfth Night with Diana Rigg and Ian Holm in 1966.
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But it was A Midsummer Night’s Dream that defined her time at the RSC, not only because of its conceptual uniqueness but also because of the international demand that followed its triumphant Stratford-upon-Avon opening. Everybody wanted a piece of the revolutionary action. It toured the world for two years and broke box-office records wherever it went.
During its gestation at Stratford, the RSC executive was clueless as to what Brook and Jacobs were up to. Bill Wilkinson, finance director at the time, recalls he was shocked when he first saw Jacobs’ box set for the show. “It seemed the weirdest thing imaginable. I thought: ‘Where are the fairies? Where is the shady glade?’” Wilkinson remembers Jacobs as “a very energetic person, fun to have around, brimming with ideas, bold in presenting them and I suspect not to be dissuaded easily from her intentions”.
In the early 1970s she and Alexander moved to Los Angeles where she found employment at the Mark Taper Forum, among other US venues, working with distinguished directors such as Joseph Chaikin, Joseph Papp and Richard Foreman, as well as the playwright Sam Shepard.
In 1973 she worked again with Brook on The Conference of the Birds in New York, based on a 12th-century Islamic, allegorical poem, transferring the project – which involved puppets, masks and beautiful silk costumes – to the Bouffes du Nord theatre in Paris.
Returning to London in the 1980s, she designed a number of operas for the Royal Opera House, Three Birds Alighting on a Field (1991) for the Royal Court, and four plays for Paines Plough.
A passionate and committed teacher of scenic design, Jacobs had spells at the Central School of Art and Design, Slade School of Fine Art, Goldsmiths University and the California Institute of the Arts. Her archive is housed at the Harvard Theatre Collection, Harvard University.
Sally Jacobs (nee Rich) was born on November 5, 1932, and died on August 1. She is survived by her son Toby.
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