We celebrate the work of international theatre and film designer Hayden Griffin, Senior Production Design Lecturer at LFS since September 2008, who died on 24 March. In his career Hayden designed an incredible range of award-winning work, including 30 theatrical world premieres, for The National Theatre, Royal Shakespeare Company, Metropolitan Opera and many others. Film credits included Patrice Chereau's Intimacy and David Hare's Wetherby.
Guardian Obituary below.
Hayden Griffin obituary
Keith Dewhurst
Hayden Griffin, who has died of cancer aged 70, was regarded by many as the finest stage designer of his generation and a worthy successor to Brecht's Caspar Neher and the Royal Court's Jocelyn Herbert. The reason for this lies in what Hayden himself said in an interview in 1983: "Theatre is about a man or a woman saying the line. The designer's job is to decide what the audience should see when that line is said."
Never decorative for their own sake, Hayden's sets tried to be the pictures that authors saw in their heads when they were writing – sometimes open tableaux, as in David Hare's Plenty (at the National Theatre in 1978), sometimes a detailed environment, as in David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross (at the National in 1983). Sometimes the sets actually were what the writer saw, because Hayden had sent them sketches of what would solve the problems of scene changes and an actor's business. Read the full obituary here
Read David Hare's obituary here