Sam Wilde creates completely sustainable sets.
The designer on his incredible cardboard creations.
Hello, and welcome to The Crush Bar, a weekly newsletter about theatre written by me, Fergus Morgan.
Each issue features an interview with an exciting, emerging theatremaker - and gives them a chance to be explicit about where they want to go and what help they need to get there. Maybe you, reader, can give it to them, or put them in touch with someone who can.
You can read more about why I’m doing this here, and you can sign-up to get it delivered straight to your inbox using the button below…
Before this week’s interview, I want to give a quick shout-out to The Cultural Coven, a fortnightly podcast series that explores the lives of some of Scotland’s leading arts and cultural figures through conversation with podcast host and actress Nicola Roy.
The podcast delves into the creative and life journeys of guests from backgrounds in music, theatre, TV and literature - from Alan Cumming, to Sam Heughan, to Ian Rankin. You can find all episodes here, or wherever you get your podcasts.
On Christmas morning, Sam Wilde’s children discovered Santa’s sleigh had landed in their living room, laden with presents. It was crafted entirely from cardboard.
“My dad did the same for me when I was a kid,” says the Bristol-based theatre designer. “I found a photo of it recently. It was just something he had cut out with a breadknife and coloured in with a crayon, but to me it was this beautiful and intricate thing. I wanted to do the same for my kids.”
Wilde posted a photo of both sleighs on his Twitter account. His dad’s effort is sweet, but his own is certainly superior: a masterpiece of Christmassy craftsmanship, featuring runners, reins, headlamps, and handrails. There are other examples of his remarkable handiwork on Instagram – a castle, a bus, a boat. They are testament to how expert Wilde has become at creating stuff from cardboard.
“I’ve always made toys and puppets out of cardboard for my family, but I never thought it would become part of my professional practice,” Wilde says. “It was only during the first lockdown, when the director Ian Nicholson and I made an online puppet production of Jon Klassen’s picture book I Want My Hat Back with Little Angel Theatre using cardboard, that I realised it actually had the potential to do an awful lot of good.”
That show was streamed over 180,000 times, hailed by the New York Times, and earned Wilde and Nicholson a spot on The Stage 100 list. It spurred them on to make more shows in the same vein and they collaborated on two more online adaptations for Little Angel Theatre, plus puppetry productions for English Touring Opera, Polka Theatre and Watermans Arts Centre.
Then, last year, Wilde was asked to design the set, costume, and puppets for Shakespeare’s Globe’s Christmas show, Hannah Khalil’s retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Fir Tree. The costumes came from charity shops, and his main material for the set: cardboard. The whole journey, says Wilde, from eight-minute online puppet show to main stage at a major London theatre, was “a complete whirlwind.”
There are difficulties in using cardboard for creating designs – it is not as durable as other materials, and few other theatremakers are as proficient as Wilde is with it – but those drawbacks, says Wilde, are far outweighed by the benefits – the lower cost, the easy availability, and the sustainability.
“Just down the road from my house is an electric bike shop, and they leave these huge cardboard boxes out for me to collect,” explains Wilde. “The design budget for The Fir Tree was only around £500. I Want My Hat Back only cost £16 to make. And all of it could be recycled afterwards. It’s brilliant.”
“Longer lead-ins give designers more time to make sets sustainable. It’s much harder to do at short notice...”
Born in 1986, Wilde grew up in Derbyshire. He was “part of the theatre crew” at high school, then went to Winchester University to study drama. “At first, I wanted to be an actor,” he says. “I was terrible at that, though, so then I thought I wanted to be a director.”
It was not until after graduating, and subsequently training as a teacher at Derby University, that Wilde eventually discovered design. A friend was involved in a production that had suddenly lost its designer, principally for the pay cheque, but found that not only did he enjoy it, he excelled at it, too.
“I’d never met a designer,” he remembers. “I didn’t know what scale was. I’d never seen a model box. I wasn’t even very good at drawing. I didn’t know what to do, so I just sat at the side of the stage and started making stuff for the show, and loved it.”
Wilde completed an MA in theatre design at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, graduated in 2015, and started constructing a career as a designer, building his practice at first around what he was good at: making stuff. “It didn’t matter what those first few shows I did were about,” he laughs. “They were having puppets in them whatever.”
Gradually, Wilde built up his CV, and branched out. He worked with Bristol-based company the Wardrobe Ensemble. He spent a year in residence with Southampton Nuffield Theatres. He worked regularly with Nicholson, and with Sarah Brigham at Derby Theatre. He designed exhibitions, he lectured, and he worked in Singapore for a short time. Then came the pandemic and his conversion to cardboard.
“I don’t want to just be known as the cardboard guy,” Wilde says. “Cardboard will always have a special place in my heart, for want of a better way of putting it, but I’d prefer to be known as the sustainable guy. That is what I am really interested in, designing and making shows that are entirely sustainable. Cardboard is just one really good way of doing that.”
What do you want to do?
I think it has been proven now that you can make shows on the biggest stages in the country in a sustainable way. I’d like to do more work like that. I’d also like to do more design-led projects, that don’t rely on a director for everything to come together.
I’m a big fan of children’s books, and I’d love to adapt some of them. Jon Klassen has a whole trilogy on shapes. Those would be great. David Litchfield’s The Bear and the Piano, too. I’ve always wanted to take a classic adult novel like Moby Dick, and do it as a kids show, too.
What support do you need to get there?
Sustainability is huge, but that is not quite the whole story. The key thing is having longer lead-ins for projects, because longer lead-ins give designers more time to make sets sustainable. It’s much harder to do at short notice.
I would like to see more in-house assistant and associate designer positions available, as well. I had a position like that for a year at Southampton Nuffield Theatres and it completely changed my life. I’d love to see more of that.
How can people find out more about you?
There’s a lot that hasn’t been announced yet. I’m in Taunton at the moment, doing some R&D on a community show about a shipwreck called The Nornen Project. An online show I made with the company One Tenth Human called Curious Investigators is going to be going on a live tour soon, too. Then, in May, there is going to be a load of announcements for projects involving a lot of cardboard, including some of my own stuff, so watch this space.
I’ve just made my kids a cardboard doll’s house, too. Now, they want a smaller doll’s house to fit inside the first doll’s house, so that’s what I’m going to be doing in the meantime.
The Crush Bar is totally free and unfunded at present, so anything you can do to support it is hugely appreciated. There are three helpful things in particular: you can subscribe using the button above, you can share it, either on social media or by forwarding it to anyone who might be interested, and you can donate to my Ko-Fi account using the button below.
If you want to get in touch with me to ask about anything, or to suggest someone who deserves a shout-out in this newsletter, you can reach me on Twitter - I’m @FergusMorgan - or by simply replying to this email. That’s all for now. Back in a week. Thanks for reading.
Fergus Morgan