[Hari]

Maria Bj©Єrnson
Stage designer whose eye for detail was central to Phantom of the Opera and a host of theatre and opera productions



Stage designers often do not get the credit they deserve. It is performers, composers, writers and directors who get mentioned in reviews. But Maria Bj¬кrnson was widely regarded as being central to the concept of Andrew Lloyd WebberЎЇs Phantom of the Opera long before the 1986 musical even existed.
Already in 1984 when the producer Sir Cameron Mackintosh and Lloyd Webber were discussing how to tackle the subject using some of Lloyd WebberЎЇs music written for other purposes, Mackintosh was convinced that the physical imagery and adventure, the boat journey to the PhantomЎЇs lair, the sense of backstage magic, the colourfulness of 19th-century opera, would have to be crucial elements in the recipe. He had been impressed by Bj¬кrnsonЎЇs sets and costumes for the latest in the Welsh National OperaЎЇs Janacek cycle, From the House of the Dead, directed by David Pountney, and also by her Royal Shakespeare Company Tempest, directed by Ron Daniels. He had talked to her about a Carousel revival, which in fact was still years in the future and which ultimately was not to involve her. But he had already decided she was the solution.

Bj¬кrnson created the boat and the chandelier in typically scrupulous detail for the following yearЎЇs try-out at Sydmonton, Lloyd WebberЎЇs country hideaway. The hugely successful production that followed was one of the most complex and demanding designs ever seen in the commercial theatre. Bj¬кrnson returned to check up on each detail over and over again, and took charge of every cast change over a run of nearly 17 years at Her MajestyЎЇs and in travels to New York, Vienna, Tokyo, Melbourne, Hamburg, Chicago, and on tour to the Netherlands, the Far East, Mexico and Copenhagen. She was discussing with Mackintosh the creation of a new Phantom production that could be toured more readily, with less technical complication but without sacrificing the storytelling magic.

Bj¬кrnson was a romantic designer of exceptional range, highly attuned to a baroque colourful aesthetic when required. But she was equally at home working with a more severe conceptual director like Graham Vick. Her approach to David BlakeЎЇs Toussaint at ENO was beautiful, with a painted cloth backdrop, visually appealing in the tradition maintained by Nicholas Georgiadis. Her Queen of Spades (for ENO and Kassel) with Pountney was severe and monochrome. Her period Turn of the Screw for Kent Opera and Nicholas Hytner was economical but intensely focused.

Her fascination with every aspect of live performance and with painting, costume, architecture and furniture went right back to her early childhood. Her mother would queue for tickets to take her to Covent Garden. She would also sit her on the table in their one-room basement flat in Cornwall Gardens and ask: Ў°TodayЎЇs a school holiday; which shall it be, a trip to the seaside or a day at a museum?Ў± Bj¬кrnson invariably chose the latter, developing total fluency as a draughtsman, and an impeccable recall of any detail she had observed for however short a time.

But if she was a famous workaholic and perfectionist, that had its origins in her extremely romantic, unusual, and in some ways insecure background. Maria Elena Bj¬кrnson was a love child, born in Paris in 1949. Her mother, Mia Prodan (now 83), was a cultivated Romanian from Cluj in Transylvania, who had been studying at the Sorbonne and had met and fallen for a Norwegian businessman, Bj¬кrn Bj¬кrnson, more than 20 years her senior. Her great-grandfather was the Nobel prize-winning Norwegian playwright Bj¬кrnstjerne Bj¬кrnson, whose statue stands beside IbsenЎЇs outside the National Theatre in Oslo. Her father was a nephew of the Bj¬кrn Bj¬кrnson who founded the company in 1898.

Maria Bj¬кrnsonЎЇs father trained as a chemical engineer in Germany, then started up a very successful factory (still) making cushions and duvets from duck and goose down. When he died, shortly after Phantom opened in the West End, he bequeathed to his daughter that factory, a fox-fur farm, a silk flower-making factory, and a number of holiday cottages on the Norwegian coast.

Bj¬кrnsonЎЇs mother brought her to London as a baby in 1950. Her first school was a Catholic convent in Notting Hill, and she later attended the French Lyc¬Ыe in Kensington.

Her mother worked for a time as an office cleaner for the BBC before her language gifts eventually led to a job in the BBC Romanian service at Bush House. Bj¬кrnson went to do a foundation course at the Glen Byam Shaw School when she was barely 16, and at 18 joined Ralph KoltaiЎЇs class at the Central School of Art and Design, where she met Sue Blane and David Fielding.

Philip Prowse, newly arrived at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, went to the CentralЎЇs graduate show and was bowled over by all three. He invited both Blane and Bj¬кrnson to go to Glasgow and they worked for the Cits for two very productive years. Bj¬кrnson did Three Sisters with Giles Havergal, and Tiny Alice with Robert David Macdonald. Both assisted on ProwseЎЇs Tamburlane at the Edinburgh Festival.

Other vital encounters at Glasgow were with David Pountney and his young assistant Graham Vick at Scottish Opera. She designed the remarkable Wexford Festival staging of Katya Kabanova that launched PountneyЎЇs career. After nearly 20 years they were planning to work together again at Bregenz in 2005.

Bj¬кrnson, a generous and exhaustively committed collaborator. She took on a vast amount of work with great success, working with Pountney, Keith Hack, Michael Geliot, Elijah Moshinsky, John Schlesinger, Patrick Garland, Steven Pimlott, Christopher Fettes, and Ian McDiarmid. After Phantom she could afford to be very choosy. She worked with Trevor Nunn, and created with Graham Vick one of her most extraordinary and original stagings, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny at the Teatro Verdi in Florence as part of the Maggio Musicale.

But the furore over the BBC documentary The House, about Covent GardenЎЇs supposed inefficiency and extravagance, which laid the foundation for the near meltdown of the rebuilding project, almost induced her to abandon designing altogether. She felt deeply mortified that people blamed her for taking on too much in designing Sleeping Beauty in 1994 at the same time as Katya Kabanova. She talked to friends about becoming a sculptress: one fantasy was to design a statue of Boadicea that would float down the Thames in flames.

It was Graham Vick who lured her back into designing with a project to open the Scala Milan season with Macbeth. And so began a productive and highly distinguished final phase of work. Every corner of her work was explored and debated. Every detail was considered and her costume designs were always ravishingly well finished.

The move to work with Francesca Zambello, with whom she did Don Giovanni last season at the Royal Opera, and with whom her last productions were created, was logical for a designer described by her former assistant Peter J. Davison as Ў°the ultimate ValkyrieЎ±. Zambello persuaded her that she should do more, that she was closing off a part of herself by not designing as much as she used to. Their Trojans at the Met, Bj¬кrnsonЎЇs first (and last) show there, opens next month. ZambelloЎЇs production of Rachel Portman and Nicholas WrightЎЇs brand new opera The Little Prince, with Bj¬кrnsonЎЇs completed designs, will open in Houston later in the year.

One of her most memorable and definitive stagings, for which she had great affection, was The Cunning Little Vixen from her WNO and Scottish Opera Janacek cycle. She did the costumes for William DudleyЎЇs lavish Rosenkavalier and the Tales of Hoffman sets at the Royal Opera. Her Ph¬Ъdre and her Britannicus for Jonathan Kent at the Almeida were excellent examples of her fertile imagination.

During her last six or seven years she was rewarded with a happiness never before accepted, in a relationship with the Royal Opera House scene painter Malcolm Key.



Maria Bj¬кrnson, stage and costume designer, was born in Paris on February 16, 1949. She was found dead at her London home on December 13, 2002, aged 53.