Imaginary Spaces

Es Devlin is a wickedly talented set and stage designer who has been notoriously talked about for her affinity towards pushing boundaries and creating designs that takes people away. The set was a series of slender transparent boxes, made of Lucite, that could move around the stage, continually reshaping the dramatic area. The boxes had arches, columns, shuttered windows, Palladian doorways, and they fit together to evoke the castle in Cyprus where the drama takes place—grand rooms frozen in glass. They were lit from within, and inside were staircases that characters would use for entrances and exits. This created a feeling of claustrophobia and enhanced the opera’s fixation on eavesdropping and spying. Devlin clicked the mouse and showed me how the structures would move, both revealing and containing the tension.