CriticalDance Forum

<B>Serving up a double portion of Hobson</B><BR>Designer Hayden Griffin talks to Terry Grimley in The Birmingham Post about the challenge of designing the same piece for theatre and ballet. <P><BR>Admirers of Harold Brighouse's classic Victorian comedy Hobson's Choice will have a chance to see it in two contrasting versions this spring.<P>There's the play itself, just opened at Birmingham Rep with Tony Britton in the title role of the autocratic Salford bootmaker, and David Bintley's 1989 ballet version, a modern classic in its own right, which returns to the Hippodrome in May.<P>The common factor to both is the designer Hayden Griffin - although, as he explains, the design itself differs according to the different demands of dance and drama.<P>'I've been around for so long it's not unusual for me to have done two productions of the same play but I suppose it is unusual to have designed a play and a ballet based on it,' he says.<P><A HREF="http://globalarchive.ft.com/globalarchive/article.html?id=020312004232&query=ballet" TARGET=_blank><B>click for more</B></A><BR>