The second in Rosemary Waugh's ongoing series of career retrospectives
Anna Fleischle designs everything. This is true in two senses, both the breadth and the content of her work. By this point in her career the German-born set and costume designer has worked on designs for theatre, opera and dance that span the historical to the contemporary, the maximalist to the minimalist, the metaphorical and suggestive to the most painstakingly tuned-in acts of realism. Some of them are instantly recognisable as Fleischle-esque (although you’d be hard pressed to nail down precisely what that means), while others seem like such a departure they send an excellent jolt through you.
Inside each of these individual worlds is a million acts of extreme precision – and this, really, is the ‘everything’ that occupies me when looking at her creations. Fleischle is the queen of macro to micro, an artist who selects, designs, positions and understands the importance of every item on stage within the overarching visual language of the piece, whether that’s a wonkily angled photo of a bald baby, the ridges in a glass water bottle, or the natural wood patterning of a table leg.
Within this vast and varied back catalogue, there is one recurrent theme that’s hard to overlook: houses. Or maybe that should be ‘homes’. There are lots of them within Fleischle’s portfolio, either showing one or multiple rooms of a dwelling. The most recent of these is the set for Nathan Englander’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, which involves a kind of ghost home, a kitchen-dining area where all the colour has been drained out of the cabinets, the crockery and the assorted bits of semi-useful household stuff. Here, the home depicted is both a literal representation of a domestic space and – as with Death of a Salesman, discussed in greater detail below – a reflection of the mental landscape of the characters present in it, who disagree over what ‘home’ is meant to mean.