In Tec for Iho or the Intelligent Homosexuals Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures at Hampstead, an epic family drama set in Brooklyn and New York in 2007. Dealing with themes as varied as the title suggests it is almost easiest to sum up as View from a Bridge meets King Lear. I have found it one of the most challenging shows to design . Tony’s writing is passionate and visceral, huge family overlapping arguments, then distilling down to powerful and intimate two handers. The stage directions read a bit like Shaw’s(The title is a riff on Shaw’s intelligent woman’s guide to socialism and capitalism) with the action moving from outside a brownstone in Brooklyn into the parlour room, up the stairs and into the rest of the house both bedrooms and basement, then swapping to other NY locations. So although it was tempting to base the design around the family house which is at the heart of the piece, all my attempts to serve a more naturalist reading of the play floundered around the logic of the architecture of the house and made all the other locations feel like token gestures.
The political background to the piece is the decline of the waterfronts, crisis in socialism and what kind of revolution is really possible, so Michael Boyd the director has pushed towards a more abstract space, that still allows for the architectural levels demanded in the script but has the feel of a socialist ivory tower, a monument to the industrial decline of the west. It has become a tower of white girders, set into a floor of rusted tramlines, echoes of construction, dockland cranes, containers.
Iho By Tony Kushner, Hampstead Theatre 2016, Directed by Michael Boyd, Designed by Tom Piper
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