Dressing for success

Elizabeth Whiting (left) says she likes the effusiveness and ebullience of actors. Lisa Chappell (right), as Gwendolyn with a touch of Lady Gaga. Photo / Steven McNicholl

A drawing room comedy about fake identities, romance and snobbery among a group of Victorian aristocrats, The Importance of Being Earnest is packed with plenty of Wildean one-liners. It is very funny but even Oscar Wilde needs updating from time to time.

Enter Elizabeth Whiting, costume designer, pattern-maker and seamstress, whose costumes will transport the 19th century play into the 1960s.

We met as she was fitting actor Lisa Chappell for Auckland Theatre Company's upcoming production of the play, in which Chappell will play the character of Gwendolyn.

If you are anything like me you might have imagined her in something frilly and Edwardian, but the only frilly thing about Chappell, at least at this stage of the fitting, was the pair of large lime green carnations pinned to her platinum Lady Penelope-ish wig.

The rest of her body was pinned into a shiny white minidress made of PVC material. Whiting pulled a pair of PVC leggings over Chappell's lengthy pins. She planned to pair the leggings with a pair of extremely high ankle boots that would be painted a glossy white, creating the look of thigh-high boots.

Chappell popped on a pair of sunglasses that, in the spirit of Victoria Beckham, were the size of two bread plates. She assessed the effect in the mirror. "Cecily won't know what's hit her."

For those requiring a recap: the play revolves around two young men, Jack and Algernon, and two young women, Gwendolyn and Cecily. Jack is in love with Gwendolyn, who is Algernon's cousin.

Algernon falls for Cecily, who is Jack's ward. Putting the spanner in everything is Lady Bracknell, Gwendolyn's mother and Algernon's aunt, who refuses to let Gwendolyn marry Jack because of his uncertain background.

In response, Jack refuses to let Algernon marry the financially blessed Cecily. At some stage Cecily and Gwendolyn believe they are both engaged to the same man (both Jack and Algernon have invented alter egos), hence Chappell's reference to the showdown with Cecily. The battle will partly be played out at a sartorial level. Both will be wearing extremely high heels.

The governing aesthetic of this production is 1960s high street fashion at its most extreme - this is a play that contains the line "style, not sincerity, is the vital thing". There are also several visual references to the play's author, such as the green carnations, which Wilde famously wore in his lapel.

There are several overt references to contemporary celebrities - who are, you could say, the aristocracy of our times. And so Gwendolyn's outfit is part 60s, part Lady Gaga, particularly as she appears in her video Bad Romance (the one in which Gaga and co dance around in shiny white leotards and shiny white boots).

"The thing about theatre is that it's very immediate," says Whiting. "It's for the audience right at this moment, and so you have to play with the energy and the ideas that are around right now. And one of them is Lady Gaga, who is the most amazing stylist - or her stylist is the most amazing stylist."

Gwendolyn apparently has much in common with Lady Gaga. "She's absolutely of her time," says Whiting. "She's London society. Up-to-the-minute, all style and little substance - at least you think that when you first meet her."

Whiting, an easy-going and engaging woman in her late 50s, is one of the country's most highly regarded costume designers. As a teenager she had vague ideas of becoming an actor. She studied speech and drama and even directed, acted and made the costumes for a production of ancient Greek playwright Euripides' The Trojan Women. "It must," she says, "have been appalling".

At some stage she decided she didn't have what it took and went to university to study law, although she left before completing her degree when she and husband Roger moved to Zambia for three years. When the couple returned to New Zealand she was roped in, through family connections, to work on a production at Auckland's Mercury Theatre.

"And I absolutely loved it." Asked exactly what she loved so much about it, she says that being a shy person, she revels being around those who aren't. "I like the effusiveness and ebullience of actors. I like the world. I love the theatricality of it all."

Over the following few years Whiting did an unofficial apprenticeship in the late 1970s under the tutelage of the late Eve Schlup at Theatre Corporate. (Schlup was legendary in theatrical circles, not only for her devotion to the job but her seeming ability to need only a glimpse of an actor before creating a perfectly fitting and exquisitely detailed costume.)

Schlup taught Whiting most of what she knows, from pattern-making to not letting ego - or attachment to one's own design - come before what actually works on stage. "You find mentors in life and she was certainly mine." She cut her cloth as a costume designer (as distinct from making other people's designs) in the mid-1980s with Limbs Dance Company, which allowed her to stretch her imaginative wings.

For almost 30 years now she has designed and made costumes for dance, theatre and opera. She began designing for New Zealand Opera in 1995, with Don Giovanni.

Recent costumes include those for NZ Opera's Faust, Cosi fan tutte and Carmen, and she is currently designing costumes for The Marriage of Figaro. Recent dance productions include Black Grace's Amata and Michael Parmenter's Tent.

Recent ATC productions include She Stoops to Conquer, The Thirty-Nine Steps, Design for Living, My Name is Gary Cooper and Twelfth Night. Jennifer Ward-Lealand, who was costumed by Whiting in both of the latter productions (and dozens of others over the years) can't say too many good things about her: "She has a real understanding of how costume works on stage, right down the jewellery, the buckles and the shoes. You feel somehow completed by her costume."

According to Ward-Lealand, Whiting's skill isn't just about capturing an aesthetic - she is also aware of the way clothes inform the way an actor moves, the way clothes can inform a character.

This is perhaps most evident in the costumes she designed in 2005 for Equus (a play about a boy pathologically obsessed by horses), in which she had the six actors who played the horses wearing nothing but tight leather pants and enormous platformed hooves. The hooves had a horseshoe fitted to the base, so that when the actors scraped them across the stage, they created the sinister sound effect of unhappy horses.

The fit of the leather pants showcased the actors butts and thighs or, if you're into the spirit of things, haunches and hinds. "That was experimental from the beginning," Whiting says. "I kept going into the rehearsal and thinking that it was the movement of their bodies that you wanted to see. You didn't actually want to see costumes on them. That's where the leather chaps came in ... and as they went up onto those heels, you were very aware of the muscle and the tension in their bodies."

Hera Dunleavy played one of the horses and recalls putting on the costume and coming over all equine. "Those pants were just incredible. I don't know how Elizabeth did it but they were really soft and they felt like a second skin, while the hooves pushed us forward, as if we were standing on our toes."

Dunleavy was the only female horse and, like the other horses, was naked from the waist up. At some stage Whiting experimented with various ways of covering her breasts, but Dunleavy said it really spoiled the overall effect.

"So Elizabeth asked me if I minded not wearing anything and I said, 'okay'. When you get into the character like that you don't feel at all self-conscious." (Besides, the strenuous rehearsal period had ensured that she was buff and had nothing to hide.)

Then there was The Duchess of Malfi, the bloodthirsty Jacobean revenge tragedy and one of the theatrical hits of 2005, in which the characters were dressed top-to-toe in a shade of red so vivid they almost seemed to glow. It was the colour of fresh blood, the constant suggestion of imminent violence.

Whiting sampled dozens of swatches of red fabric under the ultra violet lights before settling on the right shade. "We wanted it to vibrate." Yet there was so much vermillion that it almost risked overwhelming the play.

"Yeah, that could have been completely over-the-top," says Whiting. "It did have the risk of leaving the audience behind. With that play you had you interpret the language and follow the story. And with quite an extreme staging, it was challenging the audience on a number of levels.

Which is great, as it means they're certainly not bored. And I bet anyone who saw The Duchess of Malfi has got the most amazing visual images. That's my role, creating visual images."

Meanwhile, back in the 60s-cum-Gaga interpretation of the 19th century Earnest, Lady Bracknell will be squeezed into a white leather skirt and jacket suit - topped off with a Philip Treacy-inspired hat made out of a large green carnation.

Lady Bracknell is a Victorian of the snobbiest order and it is through her that Wilde most savagely satirises the hypocrisy and foolishness of the British upper classes.

If, like me, you have imagined Gwendolyn in frilly Edwardian fashion, you might also imagine Bracknell played by someone like Maggie Smith in the manner and garb of the typical domineering Victorian dowager. In the ATC's version she will be played by Elizabeth Hawthorne and imagined, says Whiting, as "a bit of an old tart ... who has married extremely well".

Lady Bracknell's gauchely off-key aspirations will be evident in the details. "So she's wearing a leather suit that is just a little bit too tight," says Whiting. "And she has a padded bra, so you're very aware of her breasts, which is quite inappropriate to the sort of things that she is saying. The idea is that she is trying very hard to fit in with the society world, but there's something tacky, slightly cheap about her."

Costumes are the means by which a director can transport a play into another time, while still remaining faithful to the text. However, it's not unusual for critics to accuse directors of using costumes (and time travel) as a gimmick.

Actor and director Michael Hurst (who has employed Whiting numerous times over the years, including his Twelfth Night production, which he set circa-1940) has been accused of such and, unsurprisingly, he rejects the accusation.

Why would you perform Shakespeare in the 21st century in breeches and doublets? "It's important that the audience sees enough dress-up to see this is a dress-up production, but not so much that it's a distancing experience. Or to dress the characters so far in the past that the audience can't identify with any of them. You reposition plays to make them speak to a contemporary audience."

This is how Whiting describes her role - creating a link between the here-and-now and the there-and-then. "My view is that it only becomes a gimmick if the costumes aren't an intrinsic part of the play. If you update it in a way that makes the story clearer and the themes clearer, then it's working. If it obscures or confuses the audience, then it isn't."

However, too much authenticity can be a real turn-off. "If you do pretty period costumes people view it as a pretty period piece, rather than something that is relevant to them now."

Besides, good costume design isn't just about style, but the semiotics. "If the messages are kept to the language of the town or the language of how you hold your handkerchief or how you hold a fan, a lot of the audience won't know that. Period pieces can be very exclusive. I think theatre should be inclusive," Whiting says.

"You should come in off the street and know nothing about it and be able to understand the play."

* The Importance of Being Earnest is on until April 3 at the Maidment Theatre.