Alison Chitty is represented by Rayfield Allied worldwide.

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Alison Chitty

Designer

  • realised in wonderful detail on Alison Chitty’s set
    Sarah Hemming, Financial Times
  • Alison Chitty’s elegantly sparse designs
    Richard Morrison, The Times
  • designer Alison Chitty has created a bullring-like lair for the Minotaur himself. The production is an outstanding achievement
    Andrew Clements, Guardian

  • Alison Chitty trained at St Martin’s School of Art and Central School of Art and Design.

    Opera credits include The Minotaur, Billy Budd, Gawain, The Bartered Bride, Arianna (Royal Opera House), Khovanshchina, Cosi fan tutte, La Vestale (English National Opera), Midsummer Marriage (Chicago), Rigoletto (La Fenice Venice), Tristan und Isolde (Chicago, Seattle), The Last Supper (Staatsoper Berlin, Glyndebourne), Billy Budd, Turandot (Paris), Jenufa (Dallas), Otello (Munich), Blond Eckbert, Dialogue Des Carmelites (Santa Fe), The Corridor (Aldeburgh, Bregenz), La Forza del Destino (Opera Holland Park), Betrothal in a Monastery (Toulouse, Paris).

    Theatre Credits include Two Thousands Years, Voysey Inheritance, She Stoops to Conquer, Remembrance Of Things Past, Venice Preserv’d, Antony and Cleopatra, Much Ado About Nothing, the late Shakespeares and The Bacchae amongst numerous others (National Theatre), Merchant of Venice, King Lear, The Seagull, The Master and Margarita (Chichester Festival), Days of Wine and Roses (Donmar Warehouse), Uncle Vanya (Rose Theatre Kingston), Ecstasy (Hampstead Theatre and West End).

    Film credits include Life Is Sweet, Naked, Secrets and Lies (Mike Leigh) and Turn of the Screw (BBC).

    Current plans include Nabucco (La Scala Milan), Parisfal (ROH) and a new play by Mike Leigh (National Theatre).

    Alison Chitty was Director of the Motley Theatre Design School, was awarded an OBE in 2004 and made a Royal Designer for Industry in 2009 by the Royal Society of Arts.

    Alison Chitty is represented by Rayfield Allied worldwide.
    This biography is for information only and should not be reproduced.

    • A Provincial Life
      Sherman Cymru, Cardiff

      Yet in Alison Chitty's beautiful bare and open design the play moves with a marvellous freedom: scythers walk in rhythm across a field; families cluster miserably around a stove; the sense of small episodes in a massive space has rarely been so powerfully summoned.
      Susannah Clapp, The Observer
      a series of sparely but handsomely evoked locations on Alison Chitty's almost abstract blonde-wood set.
      Paul Taylor, The Independent
      Against Alison Chitty's blank-canvas design – vast floor-to-ceiling panels of bleached wood – scenes are full of exquisite detail, marking the class and status of the households. Furnishings are swept in during dynamic, extended scene changes featuring Terry Davies's stirring music. These, and haunting moments such as a line of men scything crops or the tableau-vivant that ends the first act, are the pulse of the production, contrasting with static scenes at dinner tables with endless cups of tea from samovars.
      Elizabeth Mahoney, The Guardian
      Shaw adeptly portrays Misail’s trajectory from sweetly naive idealism through to a solemn awareness of futility and injustice once his love leaves him. His struggle is emphasised by Alison Chitty’s starkly authentic sets where the characters are dwarfed against the pale wooden backdrops
      Susie Wild, The Stage
      designer Alison Chitty's meticulous visual naturalism (replete with samovars and stoves)…framing Chitty’s authentic foreground scenes are a series of shifting wall panels that alternately open up and embrace the action, staging it with calculated self-consciousness.
      Alexandra Coghlan, The Art’s Desk

    • “Grief” by Mike Leigh - National Theatre
      (September 2011)

      The action is set in a suburb near London and follows its characters through several months in 1957-58. The period setting is meticulously caught in both Alison Chitty’s oppressively neat but cheerless suburban living room design, the Fifties clothes, and the flavour of the dialogue
      Daily Telegraph
      On Alison Chitty’s living-room set, which has been created with an encyclopedic eye for detail, the play moves quietly but inexorably to its awful conclusion
      The Arts Desk

  • Alison Chitty: Design Process 1970 - 2010

    Design Process 1970 - 2010
    • View a PDF of the brochure released to celebrate the National Theatre's 2010 exhibition dedicated to the work of Alison Chitty. The brochure includes drawings and photos from throughout her varied career, as well as articles written by Alison Chitty which give an insight into her design process.

  • Photos

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