My good friend and collaborator Kate Owen, who has died of most cancers aged 72, was a designer devoted to radical fringe and different theatre.
Prolific and hardworking, she created 150 reveals over 35 years. These included repertory theatre commissions, however the different sector was the place her coronary heart remained. There, she might give voice to her feminism and homosexual rights commitments.
Amongst many corporations with whom she collaborated had been Blood Group (for which I used to be inventive director), Extemporary Dance, Paines Plough, Shared Expertise, Theatre Centre, and, centrally, Homosexual Sweatshop. Serving on their administration committee (1984-90), she was instrumental in organising two new writing festivals, Homosexual Sweatshop X 10, for the corporate’s tenth anniversary in 1985, and Homosexual Sweatshop X 12, two years later, with the playwrights and administrators Noël Greig and Philip Osment.
Born in Croydon, south London, Kate was the one youngster of Valerie and Peter Owen, each artists who taught at Croydon College of Artwork. She went to a grammar college in Crystal Palace, the place she additionally excelled in artwork, leaving aged 17 to take up a spot on the Central College of Artwork and Design (now a part of Central Saint Martins) in London, on the theatre design course. Coaching there with the distinguished stage designer Ralph Koltai, she graduated in 1972.
Kate’s dedication to different theatre had begun in 1979, when she was invited by the Albany Empire Deptford’s director Jenny Harris to design comedy acts, cabarets, events, music occasions (for the younger Jools Holland) and new performs. The Albany was a pioneering socialist theatre for native individuals, with a everlasting appearing firm that included Alfred Molina. Working to tight budgets, Kate would habitually work by means of the evening to rework the venue along with her immersive imaginative and prescient.
We had been launched by Greig in 1981, our seven-production collaboration starting two years later with a Blood Group piece concerning the intercourse business, Filth, proven on the Cockpit and ICA in London. Our adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, entitled Nature (1985), for Theatre Workshop Edinburgh, 1985, opened with a refrain of corduroyed Sackville-Wests planting books within the venue’s backyard.
Deft at inventing imaginative options on a shoestring, Kate was a genius market, charity and junk-shop searcher, fashioning scenographic supplies hands-on in her studio from discovered objects, furnishings and used clothes – a sustainability ethos means forward of her time. The director Teddy Kiendl described her as having a “good eye backed up with pleasure and a level of mischief”.
Her inside design ingenuity was equally outstanding, creating her personal properties for the reason that age of 27 in Britain and France. In 2000, she returned to the Albany as inside designer for his or her Nationwide Theatre artwork of regeneration refurbishment programme, and subsequently labored as design advisor for a number of new theatre areas.
When arts funding cuts drastically hampered design alternatives, she stop the theatre, however continued to create along with her arms, making musical devices and bookbinding. In 2009, she obtained a basis diploma in furnishings making from The Cass, London Metropolitan College.
In 2005 Kate entered right into a civil partnership along with her longterm companion, Lesley Weiner, a medical psychologist. Lesley died in 2013.
