The HMS Wilson - Smith
Everything is totally fine! Now, who’s for tea?
Set & Sound Designer, Playwright
TILT 2022, Blue Room Theatre
In this Becket style work, a family of 4 goes about their every day lives. Mum serves breakfast, the eldest pines over her new boyfriend, while the youngest plays eye spy, and Dad is… a mop. So they sit down for breakfast, at the dinner table, on a life boat in the middle of the ocean. Now, who’s for tea? HMS Wilson-Smith asks us what will become of social convention post climate crisis, and what ‘loss’ really means.
“The writer and designer Abi Russell makes The HMS Wilson-Smith grim, stylised and stylish, and Samuel Beckett would have approved.”
– See Saw Magazine (TILT 2022
HMS was my first independent set design project, happening to be on a script I had written. Both roles entailed an exploration of the absurdist form, and enabled me to enhance my understanding of the relationship between text and design. I enjoyed my use of design to support the absurdist world created through the text, and enable the audience to sit comfortably in a fully realised to design, to enable them to consider the content critically.
One of my goals for this project was to only use second hand, handmade, and/or recycled items to create the set. Given that the show was a comment on the climate crisis, it was important to me to push my creativity to accommodate the values of the work, and achieve a stunning result without comprising the integrity of the text.
Can you hear it coming?
Having written this text also as the designer, I played with matching the textual dramaturgy to the tension arc in the sound design.
Existentialism (especially within Becketts work), was a huge influence on this piece, with the dominating sense of waiting for something dreadful and inevitable – in this case, perishing via climate collapse. Throughout the piece, the youngest character asks consistently ‘When is the bus coming?’ – in the sound design, this was always accompanied with increasing rolling thunder, to build tension, and to create the sense of anticipation of something dreadful.