I visited the South Bank recently to see National Theatre Posters from 1963 to 2017: A Graphic Design History. I had missed the private view but this was fortunate, as I had the entire gallery space to myself without the hubbub of chatter, clinking glasses and all that small talk.
An example of George Mayhew's work for the Royal Shakespeare Company 1967.
For me, this little exhibition brought back memories of my time creating the corporate identity for English National Opera (ENO) back in the late 1980s. Laid out before me at the National Theatre (NT), I could see the trials and tribulations of creating production posters. Reading the potted history in the book accompanying the exhibition, I could identify the pitfalls that prevent a designer from producing great posters. This became even more apparent when I watched the short film featuring three individuals who have headed the NT in-house design studio over the years: the late Michael Mayhew (his father, the graphic designer George Mayhew, was a bit of a hero of mine), Charlotte Wilkinson and current creative director of the in-house studio, Ollie Winser.
But before I give you my reaction to their thoughts and on the exhibition itself, I need to go back to the late 1980s and ENO. I was then a partner at Carroll, Dempsey & Thirkell (CDT); I had met with ENO, which had been doing the usual beauty parade of design groups to select from, as they wanted a new identity. Luckily, we were chosen for the job. At the time, ENO, like the NT, had its own small in-house studio, mostly populated by young, overworked, often bullied and underpaid designers. They produced all the print requirements, including posters, season brochures, programmes and press advertisements – in fact, anything that required graphic design. Everything produced was pasted up as physical artwork, as digital studios were still in their infancy at that time.
My first port of call was to review all of the past and existing work produced by ENO’s in-house studio. The normal process under which they worked was to produce rough designs for a new production. The marketing director would then have to do the rounds of Uncle Tom Cobley and all, including ENO’s director, the individual production director, the set designer, the music director and anyone else who happened to be hanging around at the time. All of the comments would be fed back to the in-house studio, and so it would go on.
It was the most ludicrous design approval process I had encountered. It was clear to me that including the set designer, production director and music director was ridiculous. Their focus was on the production, often in a state of flux and tension with 101 issues to deal with. Looking at graphics was very low on their agenda and often involved a lot of waiting around to get any attention from them, with their often over-inflated egos. Few had any allegiance to ENO or cared or knew anything about marketing a show. They were freelancers for hire – this month at ENO and then off to the Royal Opera House or Bregenz the next. For them, all that remains after the show has ended are the reviews and the poster. So, if they could have a ‘personal’ influence on that, it would be more of their own creation and look very good on their wall at home. A crazy state of affairs.
I explained to the then Marketing Director Keith Cooper and the overall ENO Director Peter Jonas that the only way to create a new identity was to take over complete control of every aspect of the material that ENO needed to produce in order to create a unique ‘personality’. There was no way I could work under the existing approval process. Amazingly, Peter Jonas agreed to my terms. And so the in-house studio was disbanded and I with my team at Carroll, Dempsey & Thirkell took over everything. The approval process now comprised just two people: Keith Cooper and Peter Jonas. There were occasional attempts to scupper the process by members of various productions, but Peter Jones, good to his word, always stepped in to stop any shenanigans.
Above the English National Opera identity, created by Carroll, Dempsey & Thirkell in 1989 and some of the posters.
While Jonas was in the driving seat at ENO, things worked like a dream. He was fiercely intelligent and not only understood but was also very enthusiastic about the graphics process and what it could do. Eventually, he was lured by the Bavarian State Opera in Munich with an offer he couldn’t refuse. I suggested to Peter that he meet up with Pierre Mendell to create the identity – he did and the result was Pierre’s wonderful graphic swansong (he died in 2008).
Pierre Mendell's wonderful, highly individual identity and poster work for the Bavarian State Opera in the mid-1990's.
A year or so after Jonas’s departure Keith Copper was poached by the Royal Opera House, they having been impressed by ENO's identity. New people arrived and through a lack of understanding, interest or intellect among the litany of ENO directors following in Jonas’s footsteps, it slowly turned into a warzone with endless battles. Moral of the story: great clients (individuals) equal great work. I always tried to seek them out.
Now back to the National Theatre exhibition.
Above an example of the great Swiss modernist, Josef Müller-Brockmann from 1960. He was a major influence on British graphic designers in the 1960's
Above, a sampling of Ken Briggs Associates' rigorous modernist approach to the National Theatre's original identity. It was featured in the 1963 D&AD Annual.
On viewing the posters on display, one can see how a loss of control seems to present itself throughout the work over the years, as I described above with the pre-CDT ENO era. At the start of the NT’s graphic life in the 1960s, we are presented with a clean, modernist Swiss approach produced by external designer Ken Briggs, echoing Josef Müller-Brockmann’s work of the mid-1950s. Briggs handled it with rigour, and it still holds true when viewing the work today. I found this early work rather beautiful when judged against most everything else on show. It was the utter simplicity that I loved.
Sadly, as Briggs progressed over the years, he diluted his own vision by bringing in ever-more-decorative imagery and varied typography – no doubt influenced by the fact that graphics were being overhauled by a new generation of young, tight-cheesecloth-shirted and crushed-velvet-flare-wearing designers. Briggs was out of his depth – what he was attempting was far better in others’ hands. Following on from Briggs, we are presented with a riot of approaches and styles from various hands with no sense of NT personality, with many looking like committee efforts (and they probably were). Michael Mayhew continued this anything-goes approach right through Richard Eyre's and Trevor Nunn's reign.
Above Alan Kitchin's playful typography for NT Transformations 2002.
In 2002 Michael Mayhew commissioned letterpress printer/designer Alan Kitching, to produce a series of typographical poster for some small-scale productions under the banner ‘Transformation’. Kitchin came up with some witty playful typography. This seems to have stirred something in Mayhew. When Nicholas Hytner arrived in 2003 he was keen to have a more harmonious look and asked Mayhew to think about this. Following Hytner's wishes Mayhew introduced a cleaner look to posters and print, he chose the ubiquitous Helvetica and started to echo Kitching’s playfulness accompanied by simpler (mostly photographic) imagery, giving a more cohesive look. But this was by no means breakthrough work, and even this approach was often peppered with contradictions. Michael Mayhew was in the post for 23 years until 2009.
Helvetica became the typeface of choice for many years, with the occasional twist echoing a combination of Briggs' earlier modernist contribution and Kitchin's typographical playfulness used on the Transformation series.
Some of Michael Mayhew's typographical experiments for Nick Hytner's clearer vision for NT.
Since then, work has continued very much in Mayhew’s legacy. These days, the imagery, still mostly photographic, is more considered and with the aid of Photoshopped additives. The wider material is now tighter, with greater visibility on the web and filmed show trailers with animated type. But I still do not see an exhilarating identity that surely should be the case for our premier National Theatre – more a case of competent corporate work, very close to that of The Old Vic, Royal Opera House and the Almadia Theatre.
Cover over the individual logotypes and there is a remarkable similarity in style and approach to the above four organisations.
Ironically it is the work that Rose Design is producing for my old client ENO that is closer to something special. In my view, the NT have a fantastic opportunity to produce trailblazing individual graphic work to match the quality of what's being put on stage.
Three poster examples of Rose Design's recent work for ENO. It communicates an individual personality for the company.
Listening to what both Charlotte Wilkinson and Ollie Winser (past and current studio heads, respectively) said in the film accompanying the exhibition, the word ‘collaboration’ kept cropping up, along with the terms ‘brand equity’, ‘brand identity’, ‘visual identity’, ‘brand landscape’, ‘media landscape’ and ‘media purchase’. At one point, Charlotte said: “we don't use the term ‘poster’ anymore but ‘brand imagery’.” Oh, dear.
It reminded me of my final years at Carroll, Dempsey & Thirkell in the early noughties, when we were expected to produce ever-increasing quantities of written justification for what we were about to do for a client. In turn, we were receiving client briefs that could have been distilled into single paragraphs instead of six incomprehensible pages. From that moment, an army of words became the norm in the design world. Gone was the universally understood term ‘corporate identity’ to become ‘brand identity’ and a plethora of Jargon along with it, spewed out like verbal diarrhoea on monthly bases, which still persists.
For me, the essence of good design is simplicity. When a director creates a production, his/her creative hand should clearly rise to the surface. I believe it is exactly the same for graphic design. As the American politician Roger Stone said: “Nobody ever built a statue to a committee.”
The exhibition ‘National Theatre Posters from 1963 to 2017: A Graphic Design History’ continues at the NT’s Wolfson Gallery until 31st March 2018.
For more on Pierre Mendell click here