There is a second in Michael Morpurgo’s Pinocchio on the Watermill Theatre, Newbury, the place the performers elevate clear umbrellas dripping with cherry blossoms, bathed in scorching pink neon mild. It is the type of picture that stops an viewers chilly. And it could not exist with out the work of Yoav Segal, a multidisciplinary artistic whose latest run of theatre initiatives demonstrates what occurs when visible storytelling is awarded true artistic ambition.
Yoav’s set and costume design for Pinocchio, directed by Elle Whereas and Indiana Lown-Collins, was nominated for Greatest Design on the UK Theatre Awards 2025, and the manufacturing was chosen within the Guardian’s high 10 reveals of 2024. Their evaluate referred to as each facet of the stagecraft excellent. And I am not stunned.
It is a daring, maximalist piece of design (timber, lanterns, cascading flowers, neon strips) that by some means coheres into one thing atmospheric quite than cluttered. The stage turns into a dwelling surroundings the story inhabits quite than merely a stage the story sits on.
Totally different palette, identical intuition
Yoav’s design for The Wizard of Oz at TBTL in Keswick, directed by Sarah Punshon, shifts issues into a totally completely different gear. A wall of mismatched screens glows emerald inexperienced, faces flickering throughout the screens like digital ghosts. The place Pinocchio is natural and plush, that is industrial and eerie. However the underlying intuition is similar: create an surroundings that does dramatic work, not simply ornamental work. The screens aren’t there as a result of they give the impression of being good. They flip the Wizard’s world into one thing surveilled and unsettling; an Oz that feels modern and barely sinister.
Wizard of Oz – Pamela Raith
The extra of those units you see, the clearer it turns into: Yoav’s willingness to commit totally to a design idea and belief the viewers to come back alongside. There is not any hedging, no midway. Every manufacturing has a definite visible id that you possibly can recognise from a single {photograph}.
A household story on stage
Take Cable Road, a musical which dramatises the occasions of October 1936, when 100 thousand East Londoners (Jewish communities, Irish staff, communists) blockaded their streets towards Oswald Mosley’s fascist marchers. For Yoav, this isn’t summary historical past. His grandfather was one of many organisers of that demonstration. It is a household story.
The manufacturing offered out two runs at Southwark Playhouse in 2024 and was chosen as considered one of The Stage’s high reveals of that 12 months. It is at the moment enjoying on the Marylebone Theatre till 28 February earlier than making its worldwide debut Off-Broadway at 59E59 Theaters in New York this spring. However every venue has demanded a rethink.
Transferring from thrust staging to a proscenium end-on configuration on the Marylebone meant Yoav needed to reimagine the spatial dynamics solely. His resolution was to open out the world with a smashed picket arch and metallic portals, inserting the East London block of flats from which the characters are being evicted instantly on stage.
Cable Road – Johan Persson
Consequently, the entrance of the stage turns into a home inside, ripped open to the surface world as politics and beliefs crash in. To benefit from the stage depth and width, Yoav used old-school compelled perspective strategies; the type of optical trickery that predates digital projection by centuries however nonetheless works as a result of it engages the viewers’s creativeness quite than doing the imagining for them. He is described it as feeling like “a dangerous roll of the cube” whereas it was nonetheless within the drawing and development levels.
That honesty concerning the hole between design intent and realised manufacturing is value noting. As a result of in spite of everything, that theatre design is speculative work. You decide to concepts months earlier than you see them, beneath stage lighting with performers transferring by way of them. The boldness to push an idea, figuring out it may not land, is all a part of the craft.
The broader image
Yoav’s background helps clarify this vary. He is an Arts Basis award-winning theatre designer, however he is additionally a BAFTA-longlisted filmmaker and D&AD-nominated artistic director. His animated title sequence for the Sky Originals documentary As soon as Upon a Time in Londongrad made the BAFTA longlist. He is carried out stop-motion work for the BBC, projection design for reveals at Sadler’s Wells and the Nationwide Theatre. He was the founding artistic director of RightsInfo, a human rights communications venture, and has made movies with the charity Hope Not Hate.
This is not a designer, then, who arrived at theatre by way of a single pipeline. The cross-pollination between disciplines (movie, animation, digital, and campaigning) feeds into stage work that thinks by way of photos and environments, not simply flats and furnishings. Whenever you have a look at that wall of screens in Oz or the neon-lit forest in Pinocchio, you are seeing somebody who is aware of how photos work throughout a number of media and has introduced that considering to the stage.
For any artistic working throughout disciplines, Yoav’s trajectory is a helpful reminder that essentially the most fascinating theatre design typically comes from individuals who do not solely do theatre design.
The talents switch. The visible considering transfers too. And the willingness to take dangers—to decide to compelled perspective when it looks like a bet, to fill a stage with cherry blossoms and neon, to place your grandfather’s story on stage—that transfers most of all.
