Biography

Chris is an experienced set and costume designer equally at home with large and small scale productions. His larger theatre and opera commissions include Candide and Sweeney Todd (Värmlandsoperan, Karlstad, Sweden), Nine (Malmö Musikteater, Sweden), Il Trovatore (Tbilisi Opera & Ballet Theatre, Georgia and Dalhalla Festival, Sweden), Paradiso (Hoa Binh Theatre, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam), Cyberjam (Queen’s Theatre) and Nixon’s Nixon (Comedy Theatre) in the West End, Edmund the Learned Pig (Manchester Royal Exchange Studio and Queen Elizabeth Hall) and four shows on Colorline Cruise Ship Fantasy.

While he is very happy to create work on a larger scale, he also enjoys the challenge of distilling the essence of a piece when resources are limited, designing regularly for small scale and touring companies. Shows include Crossings (Julie McNamara Productions at the Cochrane Theatre, DaDa Festival Liverpool and tour), Tomorrow Morning (Landor), Call Me Madam (Union Theatre), Straker Sings Brel (King’s Head) and The Golden F**king Years (Jack Studio).

Chris is Associate Artist with Krazy Kat Theatre Company, collaborating on nineteen shows to date, including Petrushka, Clownderella, A Victorian Mikado, The Waving Cat Of Japan, The Very Magic Flute, The Singing Ringing Tree and Oliver in the Overworld.

Bernstein’s Candide first opened in 1956, almost exactly 200 years after Voltaire wrote the book.  We chose to set our production in 1956, with apparently random moments from the 1750s intruding along the way.  Candide’s picaresque journey is an invitation for the bizarre and the surreal, which we responded to by giving each episode a different, colour-coded look and make each set piece deliver something unexpected.  With a hard working cast of just 12, we embraced puppets, cross-gendered casting, contemporary cultural references and physical theatre techniques to create a fast-moving kaleidoscope of images.