Yannis 

Thavoris

Stage 

Design

Puccini Madama Butterfly Scottish Opera, December 2000 Director David McVicar Lighting Paule Constable

Reviews

... Yannis Thavoris’s austerely beautiful setting... (Telegraph)


... it looks fabulous. Yannis Thavoris’s simple set shows a room, but only gradually do you notice that it is shifting imperceptibly to the right: the earth does indeed move in the Love Duet. The room, enclosed and looking like a prison cell in the second act is surrounded with gauzes; the costumes are in quiet colours... There is not a whiff of showbiz Japonaiserie (Times)


It looks quite wonderful in Yannis Thavoris’s striking sets, which, unusually, show Butterfly’s fragile dwelling from both the outside (Act I) and inside (Act II and III). (Sunday Times)


Yannis Thavoris, the designer has created a clean handsome set in which eccentric particulars (such as the tilted perspective) offset tradition and familiarity. All is minimal, in echt Japanese style. (Observer)


There is no Japanese make-up, no geisha mimicry - and no Yankee vulgarity. And yet Yannis Thavoris’s décor and costumes capture the spirit of late 19th century Japan just as surely as Puccini’s music does. Thavoris, a young Greek designer of much promise, understands that Japanese art and culture are expressed in understatement, sparseness, symbolism, blending of contrasts. His set has the coded simplicity and self-negation of a Japanese painting: a slanted frame that withdraws imperceptibly into dusk during the love duet, a single branch of cherry blossom, the subtlest of background colourings. The arrival of the geishas behind multiple gauzes is a heart-stopping stroke of genius... (Financial Times)


... beautifully designed by Yannis Thavoris. The emergence of Cio-Cio San and her friends through a rising gauze mist and the house which glides silently through the night, as a sliver of crescent moon creeps along the horizon, are images of sheer enchantment. (Scotland on Sunday)


... designed with beautiful simplicity... YannisThavoris was sensitive... in his exquisite set designs that were the epitome of restraint and elegance (Daily Mail)


Scottish Opera's production is a little surprising in its understated simplicity. Yannis Thavoris's set is a skew-whiff rhombus of a Japanese house with exaggerated angles and sliding screens. Most of the stage is blacked off for the action to take place within the box, save for a single cherry blossom branch reaching onto the stage like a wizened old hand. Muted colours and sensual lighting provide the backdrop, with costumes a mixture of western Edwardian bustles and suits, and traditional Japanese kimonos, the resulting effect being that of a miniature painting brought to life. ... In one of the few theatrical indulgences of designer Thavoris, a final backdrop of the red and white stripes of the American flag is unveiled as Butterfly looms towards her death, and seems ominously relevant as a reminder of the West's current penchant for sneaking into foreign lands and leaving a wake of destruction. Frugal and egalitarian, this was the kind of beautifully sincere production which anyone could aspire to put on, but not necessarily pull off with Scottish Opera's sophistication and subtlety. (British Theatre Guide)