Object of the Day, Museum Edition: Set Model for "The Lady's Not For Burning," 1949

Set Design
London, 1949
The Victoria & Albert Museum

The Victoria & Albert Museum—in addition to the hundreds of thousands of other wonderful items there—has a remarkable collection of theatrical artifacts from costume-pieces to set designs and much more.


Here, we see a set model by Oliver Messel for a 1949 H.M. Tennent production of The Lady's Not For Burning,” The model shows Messel’s proposal for the set of a room in the house of Hebble Tyson, Mayor of the small market town of Cool Clary.

Essentially, a wooden box which recreates the proscenium, it is hung with velvet strips on the inside to indicate where the scrims would hang. The set itself depicts a medieval building constructed from painted pieces of paper and card.

Messel shows a stone floor, Gothic windows and furniture as well as the indication of a spiral staircase and turret on stage left. To the house left, a desk and shelf are stacked with miniature books. On stage right, a birdcage hangs before an open door leading to a passageway. There is also a small wood fire in the foreground.

Great Britain’s leading theatre designer from the early 1930s to the mid 1950s, Oliver Messel (1904-1978) won international acclaim for his lavish, painterly and poetic which he painstakingly based on period examples. Messel worked steadily in ballet, drama, film, musical, opera and revue. Later, when his traditional style of theatre design became unfashionable from the mid 1950s onwards, he concentrated primarily on painting, interior and textile design.

This set reads like a medieval painting and his design complemented Christopher Fry’s verse play, “The Lady’s Not For Burning”--Fry's first play to be presented at a West End theatre.

Fry recalled of Messel’s design, “The set was enchanting; the inventiveness of it stays in the mind - the hanging birdcage, the shelf behind Tyson's desk, the way to the garden, the feeling of Spring. It was all a bit grand and ecclesiastical for an impecunious mayor of a small country town, perhaps. But the charm of it, and particularly the space of sky, by sunlight, rainlight and mooonlight, outweighed any such reservations.”