When Soutra Gilmour and theatre director Jamie Lloyd met 20 years ago it was a ‘done deal’. Two decades on their symbiotic relationship prevails with an Evita which will go down in history. Tatler speaks to the set and costume designer with the Midas touch
‘There’s so much history and energy held in there [the Palladium],’ says Soutra Gilmour, Evita’s set and costume designer and theatre director Jamie Lloyd’s 20-year-long creative partner. ‘When it’s electric, it really goes,’ she emphasises, sat in a sparsely-decorated, wood-panelled room right at the very heart of the 114-year-old theatre, at the end of a maze of corridors and doors. ‘It’s a 2000-seater but it’s got an intimacy… how do you create that? It’s something that holds the energy,’ says Gilmour, speaking a mile a minute, dressed in a blue Adidas striped top which goes with her same-colour, same-brand shoes and blue-rimmed spectacles. Gilmour, who celebrated opening night at the Century Club on Shaftesbury Avenue, is already on to the next project: Samuel Becket’s Waiting for Godot which will open on Broadway in September….
In their two-decade-long working relationship, Evita – ‘a very special thing in our lives’ – is a project which has ‘come all the way back round’. There was a version of it in 2019 at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre but development was cut short by the pandemic. ‘Andrew (Lloyd-Webber) felt really passionately that it hadn’t had its “moment” and so asked us to re-look at it,’ she explains.
There’s a degree of symbiosis which comes from having worked with someone for 20 years. ‘So much of the conversation is the conversations you’ve been having over all this time,’ she says thoughtfully. ‘So, of course it’s a new production – but it’s also a continuity from all the work you’ve done before,’ she clarifies. ‘You have this shared language of ideas and images you’ve experimented with.’ Take the stepped space, the screens, the live camera, the relationship of chairs to the body and ways of pushing through the proscenium arch – all pillars of Jamie Lloyd and Soutra’s working relationship….