Death of a Salesman

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'On Anna Fleischle's grey stage, all Escher angles that climb to the ceiling, you can't help but see the Lomans as prisoners. Fleischle has the windows and doorways float down on wires and we see the Lomans looking out, stuck within.'

Whats On Stage​

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“But here they’re staged with a kinetic Lynchian surrealism, the memory figures surrounding Willy sped up, heightened and jerky. He crashes from one reminisce to another - sometimes with a near indistinguishable intrusion from the present - falling through his own crumbling mind with a terrifyingly vertiginous pace as Anna Fleischle’s dreamy, hypermobile set rises and falls around him. It’s stunning.”

Time Out

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"Anna Fleischle’s design heightens the sense of being immersed in his thoughts, switching between the past and the present, and creates the impression that the entire fabric of his existence is warped."

Evening Standard​

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"This production constantly reminds us that Miller’s play is about a man with a fragile grasp of reality who easily confuses past and present. Anna Fleischle’s design is dominated by skeletal door and window frames that float in the air like one of Alexander Calder’s mobile sculptures."

The Guardian

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"Yet despite its focus on the outside events weighing down on Willy, the production is in fact strongest in taking its audience deep inside the ageing man’s head. Anna Fleischle’s set design, in a neat approximation of Arthur Miller’s extensive description of how the stage should look, has the wall-less components (window frames, floors, furniture etc.) of the house slide in, out and alongside each other. The entire setting feels, almost immediately, more like a metaphor for Willy’s mind, in a similar vein to the dream houses of psychoanalysis, than an actual dwelling. At one point, Willy retrieves a near-empty bottle of milk from the duck egg blue fridge which, almost immediately, starts to slowly drift away from him towards the back of the stage. Everything here is as it should be, both in terms of Miller’s vision and the bog standard ordinariness of a real-life house, but also subtly wrong, like: Dalí-dripping-clock wrong"

Exeunt Magazine

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"Miller's original title, The Inside of His Head, has rarely felt so faithfully mirrored in the staging choices, a welcome reminder that he was as much midcentury modernist as earnest social realist. Adding to this sense of mental fragmentation is Anne Fleischle's artfully minimal set, an exploded house interior with free-floating window frames and furniture suspended high above the stage." 

The Hollywood Reporter

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"And in Marianne Elliott and Miranda Cromwell’s ambitiously staged production, Anna Fleischle’s brilliant design of the Loman household doubles as the shadowy recesses of Willy’s mind. Windows and furniture are suspended in mid-air, then drop into place as his misfiring synapses conjure another scene from his past." 

Metro

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“Anna Fleischle's abstract, flexible set can provide different areas, then and now, real and imagined, inside and outside, somewhere and nowhere.”

The Arts Desk

“Amid a wonderfully ethereal set (designer Anna Fleischle), in which walls and objects fly and float,”

The Telegraph

A German Life

'“The actor doesn’t so much draw us in as literally draw close without us noticing. The wooden floor in Anna Fleischle’s cunning design inches imperceptibly forward until by the end Smith is at the front of the Bridge Theatre’s thrust stage.”'

The Arts Journal

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"A German Life” largely states its case rather than showing it, bar Anna Fleischle’s design: a parquet floor that shifts underfoot like tectonic plates, as Jon Clark’s lighting dims to a chilly darkness, wrenching an elderly woman out of her homely context and into an abstract void — an example to us all, perhaps, or else the epitome of the banality of evil..'

Variety

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'Sitting in Anna Fleischle's kitchen setting (pictured above), Smith looks comfortable enough, suggesting the complacency of a person who knows that her self-serving evasiveness will protect her from reprisal. As directed by Jonathan Kent, who uses the venue's thrust stage to gradually bring Smith closer to us, this stage picture gets the "twilight of the gods" treatment from Jon Clark's lighting, and Paul Groothuis's radio soundtrack reminds us of real historical events.'

The Arts Desk​

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'Returning to the stage after a 12-year absence at the age of 84, Smith barely moves, but Anna Fleischle's brown, dully-domesticated set slides slowly forwards and day turns to night as she reveals the ways in which an ordinary girl from an ordinary family can slowly become trammelled in the deepest reaches of evil, without ever realising where she is residing.'

Whats On Stage

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"In Jonathan Kent’s deft production, Anna Fleischle’s kitchen set slowly recedes to leave her isolated and surrounded by darkness'

The Financial Times

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A Very, Very, Very Dark Matter

'Anna Fleischle’s excellent design reveals a warped, magical throng of dangling marionettes.'

The Independent

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'The unsettling contrast between the comic dialogue and the violent action is echoed in the wonderfully gothic set design by Anna Fleischle.'

The London Magazine

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'Anna Fleischle creates a stunning and intricate world.'

Culture Whisper

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'The highlights of Matthew Dunster’s energetic production is Anna Fleischle’s impressively detailed design.'

Evening Standard

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 'This gothic fable is told against the haunting backdrop of Andersen’s attic, filled with near life-size puppets, all strikingly designed by Anna Fleischle.'

BritishTheatre.com

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by Martin McDonagh, directed by Matthew Dunster, The Bridge Theatre

Home, I'm Darling

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'Designer Anna Fleischle has created a vast set – with all the attention to detail Judy would have employed – which has a neat ability to reflect the shifting timeline.'

The Guardian

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'Anna Fleischle’s lovingly detailed mock-up suburban house.'

The Telegraph 

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'It certainly looks like a 1950s domestic idyll, in Anna Fleischle’s note-perfect design, all post-austerity bright colours and new plastic gadgets.'

The Evening Standard

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'A play about visual aesthetics demands impeccable design, and Tamara Harvey’s production has this down in the form of Anna Fleischle’s colour-coordinated two storey house.'

The Stage

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'Tamara Harvey’s production, is a delight. It feels sparky, knowing and totally natural, bringing light to Anna Fleischle’s immaculately detailed retro set.'

TimeOut

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'Anna Fleischle’s set is beautiful, lurid, loud, and as lovingly detailed as if designed by Judy and Johnny themselves.'

RadioTimes

'Wade’s script, like Judy’s lifestyle, is precariously balanced — it takes real skill to maintain the tart surface humour and sharp detail, while gradually allowing the drama’s serious concerns to roll out. She achieves it beautifully, aided by Tamara Harvey’s funny, tightly observed staging on Anna Fleischle’s delightfully precise set.'

Financial Times

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'Absolutely beautiful set design by Anna Fleischle.'

Exeunt Magazine

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'The first thing we see is Anna Fleischle's Fifties-tastic giant doll's-house set: each period-perfect room bathed in a different twinkling hue.' 

Broadway World

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The Writer

'But this is a play about big issues, and Blanche McIntyre’s superbly inventive production and Anna Fleischle’s ingenious design reinforce the point that Hickson’s play practises what it preaches: it adopts precisely the provocative, non-naturalistic form it is asking for. '

Michael Billington - The Guardian

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'Anna Fleischle’s flexible set assists the play’s continual shifts in tone. The audience gets to watch it being erected by the Almeida’s backstage team; we are privy to its tricks.'

Natasha Tripney - The Stage

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'It’s a play of continually collapsing walls: each scene is as provisional as Anna Fleischle’s brilliant design, which hauls flat screens up from the floor to turn them into backdrops. A view of the London Gherkin, a cardboard-looking wallpapered set; bright flowers...'

Susannah Clapp - The Observer

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'Director Blanche McIntyre and Designer Anna Fleischle reflect Hickson's writing by showing the inner workings of the Almeida Theatre. With the bare brick wall showing, the set is deceptively minimal yet incredibly transformative, giving each scene a completely different atmosphere.... If nothing else, this all-women creative team show the immense and transformative power of theatre...'

Brendan Macdonald - Culture Whisper

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'Her real set-to with her director echoes the fictional one she penned, while her home life plays out like a rickety old kitchen sink comedy — the mismatched walls of her flat are, in Anna Fleischle’s deceptively simple design, flimsy stage flats propped into place'

Matt Truman - Variety

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 'Playing a creator all but ready to tear herself apart from the inside, Garai constitutes the crucial if late-arriving fulcrum of a play that wants to dismantle the patriarchy as fully as Anna Fleischle's clever designs keep returning us to the Almeida space itself, stagehands at the ready…. Before long, Fleischle's set is being re-erected (flimsily so, on purpose) and Garai is off on her alternately explosive and exhausted way. …'

Matt Wolf - The Arts Desk

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The Way of the World

'It could easily become disengaging, but the outrageous costumes and overtly stylised performances make you enjoy it so much….

Designer Anna Fleischle has given you so much to be wowed by, so enjoy the colour, glamour and luxury of it all.

Broadway World

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'JAMES MACDONALD directs William Congreve’s post-Restoration comedy The Way Of The World, with an equal sensitivity to time and place. In this, he is much aided by Anna Fleischle’s elegant sets and sumptuous costumes…

Some of the brocades on the men’s frock coats would make Jean Paul Gaultier blush.'

The Express

'Anna Fleischle’s costumes are a joy'

Financial Times

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'A crack cast and magnificent costumes power this boldly naturalistic take on a classic Restoration comedy…

And it’s all further elevated by some truly spectacular period costumes, courtesy of designer Anna Fleischle (for the first time in my life I wonder if I should invest in a frock coat).'

Time Out

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It also ushers us into a dignified William and Mary-era London nicely realised in Anna Fleischle’s design, with its dark-panelled rooms glimpsed through a lime-green surround

Guardian

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'This is an immensely stylish account of the play – presented in period (the excellent design is by Anna Fleischle) and its elaborate dialogue spoken with a wonderful throwaway poise and penetration.'

Independent

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'...its best to simply sit back and just drink in the language, the performances, and the gorgeous parade of costumes they are dressed in by designer Anna Fleischle.'

London Theatre

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'Anna Fleischle’s wood-panelled set, with its hidden doorways, makes a cunning backdrop to the subterfuge. This is a society of surfaces, where wigs and paint imperfectly disguise bad behaviour, and perfume covers the stench of betrayal…'

The Stage

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'they are placed in a world that is both recognisable and historical. This is obvious from the very first when, in Anna Fleischle's stunning designs, a gauze curtain bearing the translucent shape of a house rises to reveal a panelled room, where two men play cards, wearing wigs and high heels, with their richly embroidered coats slung over their chairs. Each period detail is observed, including a bright bronze chocolate pot, but their inflection is naturalistic'

What's On Stage

Donmar Warehouse

EVERYBODY'S TALKING ABOUT JAMIE

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'The kids — think Matilda but grown up — are sometimes outrageous, cruel and kind, the way that 16-year-olds can be. They bounce around Anna Fleischle’s versatile set (the band is behind glass, a floor above the stage) like jumping beans.'

The Times

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'Anna Fleischle’s grid-based, fluid set wittily contrasts constraint and exuberance.'

The Guardian

'The stage design is slick and effective, transitioning us quickly between locations. It was also lovely to have the band visible above the stage, rather than hidden in the orchestra pit. The whole piece fizzes with excitement.'

Broadway World

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'Designer Anna Fleische has created an intriguing set which opens and closes to establish a range of acting areas and makes particularly exciting use of the rows of school desks which are arranged in a variety of different configurations to provide areas for dancing as well as the school scenes. The scene changes are managed with maximum efficiency by the cohort of school pupils.

Fleische excels herself in the costumes for the drag artists either when they’re partially clothed or in full performance rig. Jamie’s gradual transformation in the night club scene is teasingly presented until the final apotheosis achieved with a crowning blonde wig.'

British Theatre Guide

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Crucible Theatre

RENT

'Anna Fleischle’s smoke-shrouded, scaffolded set summons up the downtown squat in which the would-be film-maker Mark (Billy Cullum) lives with his songwriter flatmate Roger (Ross Hunter, in full grunge-era hair and shorts and leggings),

The Times

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'played out on a scaffold design by Anna Fleischle that invokes the grimy glamour of New York'

The Guardian

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The set, designed by Anna Fleischle, is made up of rusty scaffolding, wire fences, ladders and neon lights, easily transporting the audience from New York streets to threadbare living rooms, grimy bedrooms and a local café. The cast make brilliant use of the moveable scaffolding during several songs, particularly Stefani as Mimi Marques during her solo "Out Tonight".​

Broadway World

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Anna Fleischle's designs create an edgy feel that is aesthetically challenging, leaving one to focus on the drama.

Jonathan Baz

Musical Theatre International / Theatre Clwyd / Robert Mackintosh

Don Giovanni

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'Anna Fleischle's catacomb set is one of the company's most ambitious to date, tall and imposing with a sturdy metal staircase that soars to the flies. Four tunnels converge on the stage like pipes into a cistern, and at any one time Guy Hoare's artful lighting conceals as much as it reveals. During the overture, which ETO's music director Michael Rosewell shapes with a gripping élan that never once slackens thereafter, the eye is drawn first here, then there, but never everywhere at once. So it continues for the entire evening, fittingly in an opera where secrets mean power.'

Whats On Stage

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'Lloyd Wood’s English Touring Opera production of Don Giovanni relocates Mozart’s tragicomedy to 1900s Vienna and sets it in the system of underground tunnels that served as makeshift housing for the city’s disenfranchised proletariat. It’s a striking concept that reminds us that the opera is as much about class as it is about sex.

The Guardian

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'Designer Anna Fleischle has created the largest and most intricate set that English Touring Opera is fielding on its current spring tour. The visual inspiration for director Lloyd Wood’s production of Mozart’s dark-toned comedy is the underworld of Vienna around 1900, as recorded in the writings of the investigative journalist Max Winter. He chronicled the seamier side of the capital in its imperial era – the lives of the lower classes, and those even better hidden from the day-to-day gaze of the well-to-do.

The result is striking, placing the opera’s high-born characters in finely made suits and fashionable dresses, while the lower orders – Giovanni’s manservant Leporello, and the peasant couple Masetto and Zerlina – are a good deal less smart in appearance. Since much of Giovanni’s behaviour depends on his innate class advantages and sense of entitlement, this offers useful insights into the piece.'

The Stage

English Touring Opera

HANGMEN

'Anna Fleischle’s gorgeous set, with a prison cell that rises to reveal the best onstage pub in the history of onstage pubs, and opens to reveal a rain-soaked greasy spoon...' Exeunt

'Anna Fleischle’s extraordinary design moves from starkness to the cluttered fug of a pub...' The Observer

'Anna Fleischle’s ingenious design evokes the timeworn textures of a pub that looks like a diseased lung...'

Evening Standard

'Anna Fleischle’s remarkable set..' Express

'Anna Fleischle’s multi-level set is also a rich thing: the eerie cream brick death cell of the opening scene rises up, slowly and dramatically, to reveal an immaculate recreation of a 1960s boozer, all brass and etched glass, the wood brown as ale, the air like an ashtray, Dunhill-thick...'

The Stage

'...the period detail of the pub set (revealed in a virtuosic coup de théâtre)... City A.M.

Royal Court / Playful / Robert Fox

JOHN

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A deceptively simple set of dividing walls with empty shelves revolves constantly, depicting sordid flats, police stations, rehab centres and a gay sauna. Everything - and everyone - on the stage is in almost constant motion; men walk through doors into rooms beyond or slip and bend as they talk. Even in solo sequences, they twist and turn and jerk with restless anxiety as if prompted by some invisible force.

The Stage

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In Anna Fleische's ingenious revolving design, the family home is a house of horrors, a place of dark rooms and narrow spaces where the family are constantly glimpsed in poses like broken plastic dolls...

The Guardian

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And the company’s astonishing physicality controls the tone: the stage is in constant, spinning motion and though Langolf’s balletic traversal of it is remarkable, his John is still a slave to the motion, a man not in control of his own life and destiny.

Time Out

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Anna Fleischle’s marvellously fluid revolving set, which seems to echo the dancers’ rhythms.

The Arts Desk

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Anna Fleischle’s wonderful simple set, all wooden walls and cupboards and doors, resembles a doll’s house, a home, a prison and a sauna at different times. Every ounce of space is used effectively and the use of the revolve genuinely adds to the sense of the set’s purpose and the complexity of the narrative.

British Theatre

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As a piece of dance theatre John is outstanding. Every aspect of stagecraft, from the remarkable stage design by Anna Fleischle, who also designed the costumes, Richard Godin’s lighting design, Gareth Fry’s sound design and the music – supervised by Gabriel Castillo, also one of the performers – is perfectly judged and executed.

The Reviews Hub

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Anna Felischle’s continuously revolving set, which becomes a maze of different rooms and settings adds to this whirlpool of darkness.

The Wonderful World of Dance

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Anna Fleischle’s set, an almost constantly rotating network of interconnected rooms, is versatile and expressive – when John’s father sexually assaults his sister, for instance, it turns away, evoking the suppression of painful memories.

City AM

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'...As a piece of dance theatre John is outstanding. Every aspect of stagecraft, from the remarkable stage design by Anna Fleischle, who also designed the costumes... is perfectly judged and executed. It doesn’t feel too much of an exaggeration to say that John is a masterpiece. A blisteringly powerful, superbly executed and performed piece of dance theatre – or indeed any kind of theatre....'. 

The Public Reviews, Liverpool

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On a revolving stage, John (Hannes Langolf) keeps moving – or moving on – from place to place, door to door. He has to keep moving, because he can’t find a foothold on life. Everyone he meets is like him, beset by problems: addicts, prostitutes, “a community of shoplifters.” They drag each other down. Drugs to depression to crime to jail to depression to drugs. John lives in a tailspin.

Matt Trueman

"The scenography (by Anna Fleischle) is as straightforward as it is astonishing. An ever rotating, round platform with different rooms unnoticeably changing appearance. "

PREVIEW PRESS Dagens Nyheter, Stockholm

'...Hearts will end up in mouths, hairs stand on end and socks get blown off. John really is that good, that arresting...'

British Theatre Guide, Liverpool

‘Explosive. Magnificently performed.Brilliantly choreographed.

’Der Standard, Vienna Premiere

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DV8 Physical Theatre / National Theatre

LOVE'S SACRIFICE

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'The first striking thing about this production is Anna Fleischle’s design. In place of the usual Swan severity, she gives us a set dominated by receding skeletal arches, sulphurously lit from within, that lead the eye towards shifting, painterly images of religious martyrdom and ecstasy...'

The Guardian

'a densely plotted carnal tragedy of lust, misapprehension and revenge... Dunster and his designer Anna Fleischle  bathe these antics in some striking visual imagery'

 Whats On Stage

Dunster has made a very beautiful production of this play of ugliness. Designer Anna Fleischle has churched the Swan stage. The floor is carpeted in black velvet and a series of metal arches frame the play space, glowing ominously during scenes of high tension. Videos are projected on the windows at the back of the set and the beautiful, ornate costumes pop against the black backdrop.

The Stage

RSC

LBERIAN GIRL

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‘…It has all the sweep and horror of a Brecht epic, only Liberian Girl never feels like a fable. Dunster doesn't let it: his quickfire, brutal staging is totally transporting. Anna Fieschle's design combines real materials -

metal, sticks and concrete - with smart signs of its own theatricality…’

Whats On Stage

…The second twist is Matthew Dunster’s unexpected staging: though there is limitedseating, most of the audience are on our feet the whole time, constantly shunted about Anna Fleischle’s fine, naturalistic set...’

Time Out

‘…You can perch on oil drums in Anna Fleischle’s shanty town set, but I recommend standing for the full impact of Matthew Dunster’s production…’

Daily Mail

‘…The exploitation of children in conflicts continues. An impressive and superbly choreographed young cast provide tension and pace, taking serious knocks on Anna Flelschie's evocative set…’

MM

Royla Court

KING PRIAM

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…’Troy, astonishingly designed by Anna Fleischle, is a place of fetishes and totems where instinct lurks beneath an almost baroque veneer of civilisation. Weaponry is made from animal bones...'

The Guardian

…’a strong and beautiful production, which should be seen for its design and costumes alone...'

Bachtrack

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ETO