William Constable 1906-1989

For Eugene Goossens, Constable designed several NSW State Conservatorium of Music opera productions, including Goossens’ own Judith, which introduced Joan Sutherland to staged opera. Constable espoused Goossens’ call for an opera house for Sydney, especially at Bennelong Point, and produced some preliminary concept designs. In 1951 he designed the sets for the National Opera of New South Wales’ inaugural season: Carmen, A Masked Ball and the Australian premiere of Il Seraglio. In 1955 he designed for the Peter Scriven puppets and created the settings for the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust’s first production, Medea.

And then there was film. Constable was production designer for Long John Silver, which was shot in Sydney in 1954. He also worked on the subsequent television series The Adventures of Long John Silver. At Borovansky’s suggestion he returned to London. He was there from 1957 until 1973. Although he made a splash with his sets and costumes for London Festival Ballet’s London Morning, Noel Coward’s only ballet (1959), it was in film that Constable really made his mark. There were major productions such as The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960), for which both he and Peter Finch won silver medallions at the Moscow International Film Festival, The Long Ships, filmed in Yugoslavia in 1963 and Lord Jim, shot in Cambodia in 1965. And there were his science fiction and horror films, many of which have achieved cult status: Taste of Fear, Dr Who and the Daleks, Dr Terror’s House of Horrors, The Deadly Bees, The Psychopath, The Skull, Torture Garden, They Came From Beyond Space, Scream and Scream Again… and so on.

In 1966 Constable came home briefly to design the Australian Opera’s Boris Godunov, its Australian premiere. His sets were generally criticised for their ‘seething colour’ and were replaced when the opera was revived in 1969.

Constable returned permanently in 1973. In Melbourne he designed one of the last St Martin’s productions, Rashomon, and J.C. Williamson’s commissioned him to design the house curtain for the rebuilt Her Majesty’s in Sydney. The result was superb: a vibrant ‘phoenix’ centrepiece created from carefully dyed cloth fragments. Williamson’s then asked him to design their 1974 production of the musical Irene. Eventually, though, the show was designed by Kenneth Rowell.

From then on Constable concentrated on fine art, producing vibrant, evocative paintings of Central Australia and the Great Barrier Reef. He was still painting when he died in Melbourne on 22 August 1989.

Many of Constable’s designs are preserved in the Performing Arts Collection at the Victorian Arts Centre. The ‘phoenix’ curtain survived the demolition of Her Majesty’s, and now hangs in the in Queensland University of Technology’s Gardens Theatre. Constable’s most important legacy, however, is the generation of Australian theatre makers who admired and loved him, and to whom he passed on his vast knowledge and his deep love of theatre.

Frank Van Straten, 2007