Biography

Hugo is a Performance Designer, working across disciplines of set, lighting, and video design.

He trained at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School after reading Italian and History of Art at UCL, for which he spent a year working as an electrician and lighting design assistant at Teatro alla Scala in Milan.

Hugo likes to work in a collaborative and interdisciplinary way, with a focus on integrated visual dramaturgy. His approach to design is holistic, often working across design disciplines, and working closely with collaborators to find alternative ways of making theatre.

Credits include: Dear Annie, I Hate You (Riverside Studios/Pleasance Courtyard); Loam, Catastrophe Bay, Henry V (Bristol Old Vic); Dear Young Monster (Bristol Old Vic/Soho, touring); Smalltown Boy (Bristol Old Vic, touring); Sensory Cinders (Soho Place); The Cherry Orchard, Angels in America, Balm in Gilead, Brand New Ancients, A Fairy Story [Animal Farm] (Tobacco Factory); Night Waking (An Tobar & Mull Theatre, touring); Sugar Daddy (Underbelly Boulevard); The Last One, This Little Earth (Arcola); The Welkin (Mountview); Mother Courage and Her Children, Machinal, The White Devil, The Visit (RCSSD); The Crucible (The Egg); Not the End of the World (Cockpit); Mariupol (Cockpit/Pleasance Courtyard); Illusion (Bloomsbury Theatre); Fame Whore (King’s Head, touring); The Telephone / La Voix Humaine (Playground); The Last Days of Judas Iscariot (The Station); Girl in the Machine (Wardrobe Theatre); Little Light (Tower Theatre); Romeo and Juliet (Redgrave Theatre); Answering Machines (East Riding Theatre); How You Died (Old Red Lion).

“Hugo Dodsworth’s design is ingenious” – Hugh Simpson, All Edinburgh Theatre

A remote Scottish island. A sleep-deprived mother. A grave you were never meant to find.

Anna Bennett should be writing a book. Instead, she’s counting the minutes of lost sleep, peeling a toddler off her leg, and Googling ‘Victorian infanticide’ at 3 a.m. Her ornithologist husband is out studying puffins, oblivious. Her sons are running feral. And when she and her eldest uncover something in the garden—something small, something wrapped in wool—it becomes clear that history isn’t just a thing she studies. It’s here. Underfoot. And it won’t rest quietly.

Night Waking was created on the Isle of Mull and designed to tour to theatres, town halls and community centres in the most remote parts of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. My design featured a domestic setting, perched on top of a pit of soil which was spread across the set throughout the play, and enveloped by projected landscapes which I filmed on the Isle of Mull.

“Visually, the production is striking. Hugo Dodsworth’s set unfolds gradually, revealing new layers as Anna’s psyche fractures further. What begins as a sparse domestic space becomes something more fluid and uncannier, a stage that seems to shift under our feet. Projections are used with intelligence, sometimes evoking the island’s rugged beauty, sometimes intruding with disorienting force […] the landscape itself becomes a character, its silence and remoteness pressing down on Anna as much as her sleepless nights.” – Dominic Corr, Corr Blimey