Creating the Far Away hat parade
We speak to Designer Lizzie Clachan and Agnes Treplin, Course Leader for London College of Fashion’s MA in Design for Performance, about how they collaborated to create the iconic Far Away hat parade on the Donmar stage.
The hat parade at the centre of Far Away is perhaps the best known scene in the play. Intriguing and iconic, this scene offers a unique challenge for directors and designers. In the script, Caryl Churchill presents the provocation with a short note and no more than a one-sentence scene direction:
The Parade (Scene 2.5): five is too few and twenty better than ten. A hundred?
Scene 2.5. Next day. A procession of ragged, beaten, chained prisoners, each wearing a hat, on their way to execution. The finished hats are even more enormous and preposterous than in the previous scene.
For our production, the creative team partnered with London College of Fashion, with students from the MA in Design for Performance creating the hats under the supervision of Course Leader Agnes Treplin.
Director Lyndsey Turner and Designer Lizzie Clachan wanted the scene to shock audiences with its surrealness. Lizzie says:
When Lyndsey and I discussed the scene, we decided to approach it as X Factor meets horror film. We wanted the hats to be eclectic and preposterous and not about fashion.
They passed this brief onto the students, inviting them to create a set of deliberately extravagant hats, which would, as Agnes puts it, ‘enhance the deliberate irony of parading prisoners as if they are in a show’.
At their first meeting with the students, Lyndsey and Lizzie showed them images of works by milliners including Philip Tracey and Stephen Jones, whose creations are closer to sculptures than hats. The students each designed 10 hats based on the brief, of which Lyndsey and Lizzie selected three to be realised in 3D. In the end they chose 40 hats to be featured in the production, with 26 on stage at each performance.
Speaking about the partnership, Agnes says:
The project was perfect for us because of the freedom Lyndsey and Lizzie gave to the students, inviting them to design whatever they wanted as long as it was large and extraordinary.
The final 40 hats include an upturned ice cream cone, a windmill and a giant egg-timer. They are truly eclectic and eye-catching. Partnering with London College of Fashion enabled Lyndsey and Lizzie to achieve their vision as each student brought their own experience and ideas to the hat parade, offering a new perspective on this famous moment in British theatre.
For more information about Far Away, please visit donmarwarehouse.com.
