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Degraded Reality: Designing with the Brothers Quay

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SOURCE: "Degraded Reality: Designing with the Brothers Quay," in TCI: The Business of Entertainment Technology and Design, Vol. 27, No. 1, January, 1993, pp. 44-5.

[In the following essay, which is based on an interview with the Quays, Tilles discusses the brothers' collaboration with theater and opera director Richard Jones.]

"We sort of rub people's faces in some dirt." Thus speak the Brothers Quay, filmmakers and stage designers. "That's our natural preponderance, to wards dirt and especially detail and texture." So sums up the design aesthetic of this artistic team, twin brothers Timothy and Stephen Quay, 45. Although the two have been creating sophisticated and intricately designed puppet animation films for the past 13 years, they have one foot in the theatre and opera worlds as well; since 1988, they have designed scenery for two theatre pieces and two operas exclusively for director Richard Jones.

Their most recent production was Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme at London's Royal National Theatre. Reviews were mixed, with one reviewer proclaiming that "An outfit calling themselves the Brothers Quay (why?) have come up with a crudely painted toy-theatre design … you feel queasy just looking at the stage." At the other end of the gamut, another critic stated, "The settings, by the Brothers Quay, are inspired. The opening scene is full of wonderfully theatrical touches. The set is a striking black and white jeu d'esprit." It is this kind of absolute disagreement often provoked by the Quays.

Finding that sensibility in the theatre was a bit daunting when they embarked on their first project for Jones. The director had seen one of their puppet animation films, Leos Janácek: Intimate Excursions (1983), and was intrigued by their staging of an opera sequence, replete with puppets singing. The Quays think that Jones was not convinced to use them until he saw another film, 1987's Street of Crocodiles. Even then, securing the permission of opera producers to use puppet filmmakers as designers was another challenge, they recall: "[Jones] had to convince the opera people that we could go from puppets to live action. Well, in fact there's no difference, because you're still doing a model box. And our model box, was, in fact, slightly larger than a traditional model box. And really, the puppets are the same as actors."

This first opera with Jones was Prokofiev's The Love for Three Oranges, a co-production of Opera North and English National Opera in 1988: "We felt a bit intimidated at first. But once we got the actual framing device, which was the slabs going back, it was easy to inject what we wanted. More or less, he gave us certain things to aim for. And then it's up to us to choreograph the whole conception. So, yeah, we were terrified."

The result of their nervous efforts was successful: the set had a controlled filthiness to it, with smudgy wood-slat walls, and billowing and twisted fabric lining the ceiling. Along with Sue Blane's over-the-top costumes, Oranges made a definitive visual statement. Clearly it's a look Jones favors, as the Quays have done three productions for the director since then.

Their next two works with Jones, A Flea in Her Ear (1989) at London's Old Vic and Mazeppa (1991) for the Bregenz Festival/Netherlands Opera demonstrated that similar sense of dark, downtrodden reality that the Quays favor so much. However, even after four theatre productions, both designers insist that they're still in awe of the entire theatrical process: "We don't conceive in theatrical terms. Cinema asks for a different language. So it's hard for us to come to terms with a theatre language, when Richard says 'Can we have a quick change here?' and we say 'How?' and he says 'We'll just drop the curtain.' And we say, 'Yeah, right. That's simple. That's great.'"

The two work together in a manner in which they do not elucidate. After working together since their college days, their collaboration is instinctive: "We start out by talking it out between ourselves. We sort of improvise, each in a different aspect, and vaguely work towards the middle. One of us will pick one piece of the furniture, and the other will start on, for instance, the walls. Then one will sort of inspire the other." The twins feel that if one person has a strength, Stephen is more mechanical-minded (he builds the puppet armatures in their films), while Timothy's strength lies in typography—creating the flowing, calligraphic titles in their films.

The designers' collaboration began in 1972, when they graduated from the Royal College of Art and returned to the United States to pursue a career in designing book covers. They recall that period as "treading water," with little success, and they moved back to Europe in 1977, living in London and Amsterdam. Finally, after submitting a film proposal to the British Film Institute in 1978, the project, Nocturna Artificialia, was accepted and the Quays moved back to London permanently. Besides their films, the designers have created several music videos, including Peter Gabriel's award-winning "Sledgehammer," which they designed with Aardman Animators, under the aegis of director Stephen Johnson. The brothers recently completed a video for singer Michael Penn.

There are no plans in the immediate future for more theatre work, however. The designers have only worked with director Jones, and have no real desire to work with anyone else: "We trust implicitly someone like Richard, only because he knows our work. And anybody who came along now and said 'Oh yeah, let's use the twins,' it's because they've only seen this production [Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme] and they don't know the cinema background. We respect Richard, because he's the only one who took a chance on someone coming from animation, which would be unheard of."

The Quays seem to be one of several sets of designers Jones calls on to fulfill different needs, among them Richard Hudson, for that distinctive skewed-perspective look. The Quays see their niche this way: "Although Mazeppa and The Love For Three Oranges had their elegance at times, our natural preponderance is towards dirt, and especially detail and texture. That's not our forte, all this beauty. We tend to like degraded reality."

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