Jocelyn Herbert

Stage Designer

Jocelyn joined George Devine’s English Stage Company (ESC) at The Royal Court in 1956 and designed her first production, Ionesco’s The Chairs, the following year.

The court became the home for a generation of writers and Jocelyn was at the heart of it. The values which she absorbed and contributed to at The Court are ones she carried with her wherever she worked.

In David Storey’s words, “As a designer Jocelyn was really an agent, the means through which passed the intention of the production, which is the combination of the director’s ideas and the ethos in which the company is working - the building, the people involved and so on. Like a ‘cellist or a violinist, there’s the text and there was her interpretation of it; she had a mediumistic power and her lack of egoism was a great virtue. She didn’t assert: she absorbed all the elements involved and then expressed them, which is a completely artistic function. Her great gift, apart from intuition was her identification with the material. She had a remarkable instinct for moving a stage backwards and seeing it in the third dimension all the time, which many designers were instinctively, unable to do. I suppose her gift as a designer, quite apart from her personality was, in literary terms, her lyricism. It was a visual lyricism which was the unifying element in all her designs, even in those which were simple and austere.”

Jocelyn was responsible for landmarks in design - the use of the naked stage with back wall and lighting rig in full view (The Kitchen 1959) and the large scale use of metal at Stratford-on-Avon (Richard III, 1961) - which audiences now take for granted.

Jocelyn and George Devine lived together, uniting work and home life, until George died in 1966.

Excerpts from ‘Jocelyn Herbert, A Theatre Workbook’ by Cathy Courtney. Photo by John Haynes