Ralph Koltai
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 23 August 1998
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sue Lawley's castaway this morning is the stage designer Ralph Koltai. He says his work is not about art, but about ideas. His stage sets are a metaphor for the whole play. Thus he thrilled Ken Russell by building him four stages each resembling different parts of a woman's body. His aim? To represent the degradation of women in the 18th century.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello I'm Kirsty Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. |
| 0:06.0 | For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. |
| 0:09.1 | The program was originally broadcast in 1998 and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a theatre designer. His influence on the British stage |
| 0:35.8 | over the past 50 years has been enormous ever since he created his first |
| 0:39.9 | professional theatre set at a total cost of 36 pounds. |
| 0:44.0 | Born in Berlin of Jewish origin he was sent to this country as a boy in 1939 |
| 0:49.3 | and after the war as a German speaker was put on the staff of the war crimes tribunal in Nuremberg. |
| 0:55.6 | He's worked in opera, the theatre, ballet and musicals. |
| 0:58.8 | If you've been a reasonably regular theatre goer in this country, you've almost certainly sat in front of his work |
| 1:04.2 | or at the very least something influenced by it. Now 73 he's still hard at it. I like to |
| 1:10.6 | give directors what they want he says whether they know what they want or not. |
| 1:15.4 | He is Ralph Kulte. |
| 1:17.3 | The implication being Ralph that they don't always know what they want. |
| 1:20.6 | Well, quite often they don't. |
| 1:21.8 | No. The directors who do know exactly what they want |
| 1:25.6 | tend not to work with me. Why because you like to collaborate. You want to have your say? I like to |
| 1:30.7 | enjoy having the concept for the production and I've tended to work with directors who actually wait for me to have an idea so that I can that that can be motivated to work within that. |
| 1:45.0 | But you tend to have ideas, it seems, on occasions that will suit the director. |
| 1:48.8 | I mean, I've seen a picture of a set you did for Ken Russell's production of Desoldaten, which was all kind of bikini |
| 1:54.7 | knickers and breasts. |
| 1:55.7 | Yeah, well, that is, I know my Ken Russell. |
| 1:58.2 | And when he said to me, I want four acting areas for an opera. |
... |
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