Video transcript
Drama Company 2023 - The Wasps - 05. Costume design

[intro music]

SUZANNE WILDING-HART: Hi. I'm Suzanne, Suzanne Wilding-Hart. I've been working with the Arts Unit for some years now, and here we are again on another show, which is very different to shows I've done before.

I read the Greek play, first up, thinking, OK, traditional Greek, and then speaking to Genevieve, it's like, oh, you're not doing traditional. OK. But knowing chorus and all that, I knew that there would be repeated costumes. I just didn't realise the entire cast would be in orange hazmat suits.

We came to the point of orange hazmat suits because of the internet techie side of things. We thought orange might be a bit prisonery but, in hindsight, totally intended. When I was watching it on stage in the dress rehearsal process, I'm like, oh, yes, they are prisoner, to the internet.

So some things that came out of the development worked really well for us. And the process also-- Gen suggested binary code. We want binary code everywhere. And my addition to the thoughts were like, if they're always on computers, it's being absorbed up their arms. I can't explain how it went up their legs, but it did. [laughs]

Yeah. And then Gen suggested eyeballs just naturally placed on the hand. Nothing-- you can't see that they're there. And I'm like, OK, that's a challenge-- and which is done with-- here they are. It's done with dense fabric. And they're just little invisible gloves. But the kids can blink, whatever.

And I tried ping-pong balls, different balls. We tried different paints. Ultimately, to give them resilience, we used nail polish. And that doesn't sound terribly technical, but it's the same as the suits.

It's not so much a high-design show. But working out what inks will go on hazmat suits, what colour hazmat suits we can get, how we can make a 'one size fits all' hazmat suit fit a very broad variety of shapes and heights and so forth of actors. And how do we just paint up the eyeballs? It was all just little technical issues.

So I worked very independently, playing with all that stuff in my studio. So Gen didn't see very much of me. But we got it together in the end.

The suits aren't all exactly the same. They're very random. And it became the printing process. You can't just send 24 hazmat suits to the printers. So I had to create little block prints and stencils, which just-- they had to be right. It became very random. But it had to look a good random, not a horrible random. Getting the right ink, as I mentioned before.

Knowing that hazmat suits are not the most durable garment on the planet, knowing that we need a lot of spares because the kids are very active in the show, they could split the suit at any moment. I've got to have spares out the back like crazy. And the eyeballs are quite fragile in many ways too.

And this doesn't really gel well with my personal philosophy of sustainable theatre and being able to reuse costumes and do things like that. But we had to get this show as it's designed on the stage. So it was a lot of thinking and just working out the right printing techniques and the right mediums to give it durability where we could.

GENEVIEVE DE SOUZA: Would you have any suggestions for either young designers who are working on that show or even teachers who are creating this, maybe even some sustainable suggestions about how they could create the feel of what you've created but on a low budget?

SUZANNE WILDING-HART: Well, really, bearing in mind the Greek chorus-- and the Greek chorus, there's uniformity in that. It doesn't have to be exactly the same. But you see it's a whole team. So even if it's coloured T-shirts and jeans.

And maybe appeal to the art department to do a bit of screen printing or something if you wanted to go down the avenue of binary code or polka dots. If you want them all in polka dots, do it. But there's ways of doing it without going to great expense.

But often, I'll use a tool, particularly with schools, and I work a lot with schools and lower budget productions. Colour coding is all I can say. When I do junior schools and you're always losing your kindergarten kids and your 3 Grade 1 kids have gone off to the canteen or whatever, if all your kindergartens are in yellow and your Grade 1's are in blue and your Grade 2's are in green, the teachers who are taking charge of those classes can spot them a mile off and pull them back in.

But it works with adult theatre as well because your colour coding your team, your chorus. So even just colour coding will give you that uniformity.

When I was told there's a dog in it, loved the idea. And it's quite funny how the dog came about for me. I have just finished another show. And it was an animal. It was Mr Tumnus. And I made these trousers. And I'm like, oh, they're great because they've got lots of organic movement.

That show finished last week, but I'd made them several weeks ago. And those trousers are going to this dog on this show because again, it's sustainable. But they just looked good. And I was talking to Gen about the dog's not just a cute puppy dog. It's a dudish dog. And he had to have a bit of swagger about him without being too juvenile or animated. So he's not complete dog, dog, but he's got that feel to him. And of course, the actor plays it and carries that forward really, really well.

Now, with Afsana, there's wasps. She's almost like the bee. And I had been given the brief of she's more conservative and all that. And I leant into conservatism. When we got to dress rehearsal, it was like, oh, she's too conservative. She's too dull.

And Jane had said, no, no, no, no, no. Bees, buzzy bees, they're a bit more joyful. There's a bit more energy to it. And they know how to work as a team, as opposed to some of the wasps didn't. So we went much more to a casual, bright, more relaxed outfit. But she had to contrast with the orange.

And a lot of the yellows that are trending at the moment in fashion are much more of an orange yellow. So we had to find a really, really rich yellow, yellow that it just suits Afsana so beautifully as well. Considering they're so close on the colour spectrum, they contrast really well. And that's how we came up with her.