Step backstage at a West End theatre and you cross a threshold: all the gold gilt grandeur at the front just ends. Backstage at the Playhouse, for example, walls are scratched, the floors are scuffed and old, out-of-favour in-jokes hang on the walls. These rooms have been lived in. They have history.
Designer Anna Fleischle has an eye for the details of daily life; the scars we leave on spaces. Sitting in a dressing room that’s waiting for Matthew Perry, soon to star in his own debut play The End of Longing, she clocks immediately that it’s had a lick of paint quite recently. “I notice spaces quite strongly,” she says. “I’ll walk down the street and really experience the differences from one road to another.”
A sense of place drew her to The End of Longing. Set in Los Angeles, it’s a play about four people trying to make sense of city life and middle age. “A lot of the locations are busy – real city spaces – but there’s always this sense of loneliness about them, as if everyone else is on the outside.” She turned to Edward Hopper’s paintings – “that clash of artificial and natural light” – to find the feeling of “great places with real promise, but eerie and unsettling at the same time”, as she puts it. “I think you can be loneliest among a lot of people.”
The Bolton pub she created for Martin McDonagh’s stout-black comedy Hangmen was full of the same wear-and-tear you find backstage: wooden panels rubbed down by drinkers’ knees; frayed rope hanging from a last orders bell; a picture frame knocked askew, waiting to be put straight. Harry Wade’s pub was so lifelike – the go-to phrase is ‘lovingly realised’ – you felt you could have stepped through the door into 1964.
Fleischle and her stage managers had stuffed it with period details – an old wooden Woodbine dispenser on the wall; a clunky ‘ching-ching’ cash register; wood panelling, chipped at the edges; chintzy wall lights; frosted glass. You knew this place. You knew its smell and its stagnancy. This was old England – not the swinging sixties of stock archive footage, all bell-bottoms and Beatlemania, but a corner of the country yet to catch up.
“I was a bit nervous about it at first,” she admits, “because not only am I not northern, I’m not even English. But it interested me that pubs are social places, where you go when you don’t want to be lonely, to talk and to listen. They have a character, but they’re also organic: all these funny corners, things that have changed five times, little alterations over time.”