Tanya Moiseiwitsch, Stratford Festival of Canada Designer, Dead at 88
Cecil Clarke and an original set model
(Photo: Peter Smith, courtesy of the
Stratford Festival Archives)
Tanya Moiseiwitsch, designer of the Stratford Festival of Canada’s stage and more than 40 productions there, has died in London at age 88.
Moiseiwitsch was born in London in 1914. She attended London’s Central School of Arts and Crafts and apprenticed at the Old Vic. She worked at the Westminster Theatre, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, and the West End’s Duchess Theatre before first collaborating with the Stratford Festival of Canada’s future founding artistic director, Tyrone Guthrie, at Liverpool’s Old Vic in 1945.
In designing the stage for the Festival, Moiseiwitsch followed Guthrie’s encouragement to break away from the use of a proscenium, instead adopting the thrust style of stage Shakespeare himself had used. Her design for the Festival stage proved highly influential, inspiring such stages as the Olivier Theatre at London’s National Theatre and the Vivian Beaumont Theatre at Lincoln Center in New York. Moiseiwitsch adapted her own design for use at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and the Crucible Theatre in England.
As a designer of sets and costumes, Moiseiwitsch designed two plays of the Stratford Festival’s inaugural season, as well as working for the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre, the Old Vic, the Edinburgh Festival, the Guthrie Theatre, the Metropolitan Opera, and many other venues. For her work, Moiseiwitsch was awarded honorary doctorates by the University of Toronto in 1988 and the University of Minnesota in 1994, and she was named as an Honorary Officer of the Order of Canada earlier this year.
In a statement, Tom Patterson, the founder of the Stratford Festival said of Moiseiwitsch, “Tanya loved Canada and she gave something to her adopted country that will go down as part of world theatre history. The Stratford stage has been copied around the globe and we Canadians will be ever grateful to her. She was not only a talented artist of the first rank, but a wonderful person who gave generously of her talents to the younger generation. We shall all miss her greatly.”
