Margaret Harris
| Margaret Harris | |
|---|---|
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| Born |
Margaret Frances Harris 28 May 1904 Hayes, Kent, England |
| Died | 10 May 2000 (aged 95) Denville Hall, London, England |
| Years active | 1932–2000 |
Margaret Frances Harris (28 May 1904 – 10 May 2000) was an English theatre and opera costume and scenic designer.
Harris was born in Hayes, Kent, the fourth child and second daughter of William Birkbeck Harris, a Lloyds Insurance clerk, and his wife Kathleen Marion, née Carey. With her older sister Sophie Harris she studied at The Chelsea Illustrators Studio in London in the late 1920s. A fellow student was Elizabeth Montgomery Wilmot, and the three formed a theatre design partnership known as Motley Theatre Design Group.
The first full-scale production on which they worked was Romeo and Juliet for the Oxford University Dramatic Society (OUDS), John Gielgud's debut as a director. The great success of this led to an invitation from Gielgud to design Gordon Daviot's Richard of Bordeaux, which opened at the New Theatre in St Martins Lane, London, in February 1933. The production was a huge success, achieving cult status, with playgoers queuing round the block every night. It is widely recognised that the success was partly owing to the Motley sets and costumes, which captured the essence of the period in an artistic rather than a slavishly historical sense, and were much admired for their beauty and lightness. This early recognition led to a busy and highly successful decade during which they became Gielgud's regular collaborators, working with him on such productions as his celebrated Romeo and Juliet (1935), in which he alternated the parts of Romeo and Mercutio with Laurence Olivier,and his Hamlet of 1936. They also formed a partnership with the celebrated French director Michel Saint-Denis, whose production of André Obey's Noah, starring Gielgud in the title role, they designed in 1935. Saint Denis went on to found The London Theatre Studio (1936–1939), a radical new theatre school which incorporated courses in theatre design taught by the Motleys. This was the first time theatre design had been taught within a drama school in the UK, and their students included Jocelyn Herbert. In addition to their teaching and theatre work, the Motleys also opened a couture house in 1936.
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