New Israeli Opera

Director:
David Pountney
Set Designer:
Stefano Lazaridis

Donizetti’s Lucia di Lamarmoor is an opera about a tragic love story that brought its heroine to madness and death. In this production I took upon myself, apart from my duties as head of scenery and props at the NIO, to manage, coordinate, and supervise the building of the Scottish landscape that spread over a suspended platform in mid air. The size of this huge garden was approximately 8x6 square meters.

In the break between the scenes it all had to disappear and to leave the platform a bear slab of stone resembling a tombstone. In order to create the landscape to look as realistic as possible a large space was dedicated for a crew of 10-15 craftspeople to create a surface that would be resilient to the wear and tear of theatre use, to make over 30,000 various plants, shrubs, stones and trees. All the elements had to be light and unbreakable when lifted for the scene-change and to be extremely convincing. All this was done within a limited time schedule and a limited budget. It was a great success and is being revived in 2006..