The award-winning designer, whose work spans theatre, opera and dance, was in constant demand before Covid forced her to press pause. As her two latest projects open almost simultaneously, she tells Tim Bano about joining forces with her peers to push for changes in the way stage designers are treated, the need for pay reform and why she can’t take a backseat.
The middle of tech week, as anyone who works in theatre knows only too well, is a stressful time. Being in the middle of two tech weeks pretty much simultaneously demands hours in the day that simply don’t exist. That’s why I’m speaking to Anna Fleischle at 7pm on a Friday evening as she helps put Florian Zeller’s new play The Forest on its feet at Hampstead Theatre, before she has to zip off the following week to the Young Vic for Anthony McCarten’s The Collaboration, about the meeting of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol.
This level of perma-stress is not uncommon for Fleischle; in fact, as she explains, taking on a close-to-unmanageable workload is pretty much the only way to make the profession financially viable.
“It is a tricky thing, I’m not going to lie,” she says with a frustrated laugh. “It means you have lots of worlds inside you the whole time, and it becomes quite hard to switch those off at night.” A lot of work has come back all at once since Covid pressures have eased, for which she is extremely grateful, but “it isn’t necessarily how I would have planned things”. Then add two children to the mix.