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Sally Jacobs
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Sally Jacobs
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Sally Jacobs (née Rich, 5 November 1932 – 16 August 2020) was a British stage designer and director.

Key Information

Early life

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Jacobs was born in Whitechapel, London on 5 November 1932. Her parents were Bernard and Esther Rich (née Bart), a furrier and milliner respectively. She studied at Dalston County secondary school in Hackney[1] and then St Martin's School of Art, leaving school at 14. She worked initially as a secretary at a film company. However, experience of film continuity work, and particularly seeing theatre in the mid-1950s, made her return to study of stage design[2] at the Central School of Art and Design in London.[3]

Career

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Jacobs commenced her career as an assistant scene painter and then began designing.[2] She began working at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1962 and brought a very different appearance to many of their productions with her stage and costume designs.[4] Between 1967 and 1982 she lived in the U.S. and continued to work as a designer and director for theatre and opera companies. In 1982 she returned to the UK.[3]

During her career Jacobs has designed costumes and sets for a very wide range of theatre and opera productions. She has worked with organisations including the Royal Shakespeare Company, Royal Opera House, The English National Opera, The Royal Court Theatre, Paines Plough, The Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and Joseph Papp’s Public Theatre in New York.[5]

One of her best known set and costume designs was for the innovative production of A Midsummer Night's Dream by Peter Brook, in 1970. She was inspired by a production of the Beijing Opera to provide a blank white box as the stage and clothe the actors in brightly coloured costumes. This contributed to the lasting impact, and controversy, of this specific production.[4]

In 1984 her design for Turandot at the Royal Opera House used mirror images and colour contrasts to suggest an audience all around the performers.[3]

Jacob also taught stage design in the U.S. (including California Institute of the Arts, University of California Los Angeles, New York University, The Actors Studio and Rutgers University) and UK, including the Slade School of Fine Art.[3][5][6] She was a senior lecturer in stage design at the Central School of Art and Design and was a Fellow at Goldsmiths University.[5]

Recognition and awards

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In 1971 she was nominated for Best Scenic Design in the 25th Tony Awards and awarded the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Set Design when the Brook A Midsummer Night's Dream was on tour in the USA.[2]

Harvard University has added her archive to the Harvard Theatre Collection at the Houghton Library.[5]

Personal life

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She married Alexander Jacobs (a screenwriter) in 1953. They had a son. They separated but did not divorce and he died in 1979.[1] She was a very independent and adventurous person.[4] She died 16 August 2020.[1]

References

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Sally Jacobs

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'''Sally Jacobs''' (5 November 1932 – 1 August 2020) was a British stage designer renowned for her bold, innovative, and transformative work in theatre and opera over more than half a century. She first rose to prominence in the early 1960s through her groundbreaking collaborations with director Peter Brook at the Royal Shakespeare Company, creating iconic designs for productions including the landmark ''Marat/Sade'' (1964), the protest piece ''US'' (1966), and especially the revolutionary 1970 ''A Midsummer Night's Dream'', which featured a stark white box set, trapezes, and circus-inspired elements that redefined the play's visual language. Her non-naturalistic approach—often employing fully lit stages, minimal props, and conceptual structures—made her designs a powerful force in their own right, profoundly influencing the aesthetic possibilities of modern performance. Jacobs' career extended internationally and across disciplines. In the 1970s she spent a decade in Los Angeles, working at the Mark Taper Forum and with experimental figures such as Joe Chaikin, Richard Foreman, and Sam Shepard, while continuing her long partnership with Brook on projects like ''The Conference of the Birds''. She later designed for opera, including Andrei Serban's ''Turandot'' (1984) and ''Fidelio'' (1986) at the Royal Opera House, both notable for their stark, spectacular, and conceptually rigorous staging. In the 1990s she created designs for new plays at companies such as Paines Plough and the Royal Court, as well as operas at English National Opera, while teaching at institutions including Central School of Art and Design and the Slade School of Fine Art. Born Sally Rich in Whitechapel, east London, in 1932 to a Jewish family, Jacobs trained at St Martin’s School of Art and Central School of Arts and Crafts before entering the theatre world in the early 1960s. She remained active in her Muswell Hill studio into later years, producing performance art, installations, and paintings, until her death from cancer on 1 August 2020. Her archive is held by the Harvard Theatre Collection.

Early life and education

Family background and childhood

Sally Jacobs was born Sally Rich on 5 November 1932 at Mother Levy’s Jewish Maternity Hospital in Whitechapel, London. She was the daughter of Bernard Rich, a furrier, and Esther Rich (née Bart), a milliner. Raised in a poor Jewish family in London's East End, she grew up in financially strained circumstances in the Whitechapel family home. She attended Dalston County secondary school in Hackney and left school at the age of 14. To contribute to the household income, she learned shorthand and typing before taking a job as a secretary at a film copyright agency in Soho, where she earned £3 per week.

Art training and entry into design

Sally Jacobs trained at St Martin's School of Art and the Central School of Arts and Crafts, institutions that provided her foundational education in the visual arts and prepared her for a career in stage design. Financial pressures during this period led her to learn shorthand and typing to secure office employment while continuing her studies. She worked as a secretary at a film copyright agency in Soho, earning £3 a week, a role that supported her ongoing artistic development. Following her training, Jacobs entered the field of stage design professionally, beginning work as a designer in 1960. This marked her transition from formal art education to active participation in theatre, where she would later specialize in set and costume design.

Professional career

Early theatre designs and RSC beginnings

Sally Jacobs began her professional career in theatre design in the early 1960s, quickly establishing herself within the emerging Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) circle. Her first RSC-associated work was the set and costume design for Thomas Middleton's Women Beware Women, directed by Anthony Page at the Arts Theatre in 1962, with John Thaw and Nicol Williamson in the cast. During this period she also designed costumes for two feature films: Clive Donner's Nothing But the Best (1964), starring Alan Bates and written by Frederic Raphael, and John Boorman's Catch Us If You Can (1965, also known as Having a Wild Weekend), featuring the Dave Clark Five and on which her husband Alexander Jacobs served as assistant producer. Jacobs contributed designs to several non-experimental RSC Shakespeare productions in the mid-1960s. She designed Love’s Labour’s Lost, directed by John Barton in 1964, and Twelfth Night, directed by Clifford Williams in 1966, the latter featuring Diana Rigg as Viola and Ian Holm as Malvolio. In 1962, after seeing Peter Brook's RSC production of King Lear starring Paul Scofield, Jacobs was interviewed by Brook and invited to join the first workshop of his Theatre of Cruelty season in 1963, marking her entry into the radical experimental strand of RSC work and paving the way for her major collaborations with Brook.

Major collaborations with Peter Brook

Sally Jacobs formed a significant and influential artistic partnership with director Peter Brook beginning in the early 1960s at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Their collaborations produced some of the era's most innovative theater designs, marked by radical approaches to space, audience engagement, and visual metaphor. Their first major project together was Brook's 1964 RSC production of Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade (full title The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade), which transferred to the Aldwych Theatre. Jacobs designed an iconic bath-house/asylum set featuring pools, duckboards, pipes, and water jets that reinforced the play's themes of madness and institutional confinement, while the production maintained a fully lit stage throughout with no blackouts to heighten immediacy and discomfort. In 1966, Jacobs created the set for Brook's devised protest piece US at the Aldwych Theatre, a volatile playground-like environment that reflected the production's chaotic critique of the Vietnam War and audience complicity. The collaboration reached a landmark with Brook's 1970 RSC production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for which Jacobs designed a stark white box set incorporating trapezes, swings, and metal coil springs functioning as trees, drawing on circus and acrobatic imagery to reimagine the play as a joyous, physical spectacle. This design transformed the traditional stage into a fantastical gymnasium/circus space and became one of the most celebrated innovations in modern Shakespearean staging. When the production transferred to Broadway in 1971, Jacobs received a Tony Award nomination for Best Scenic Design and won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Set Design. Jacobs later designed Brook's 1979 Stratford revival of Antony and Cleopatra, continuing their shared interest in stripped-back, actor-focused environments. From 1973 onward, she collaborated with Brook on The Conference of the Birds, a devised adaptation developed through his International Centre for Theatre Research, featuring puppets, masks, and silk plumage costumes that evoked bird forms and enabled fluid, non-naturalistic transformation; the piece was performed in New York, at the Bouffes du Nord in Paris, on tour in Africa, and at the Avignon Festival in 1979.

Opera and international stage work

Sally Jacobs returned to Britain in the early 1980s and produced notable designs for major opera companies. For the Royal Opera House, she collaborated with director Andrei Șerban on Puccini's Turandot (1984), creating colourful sets and costumes inspired by ancient Chinese culture while evoking a stark, violent pageantry that characterized the production's theatricality. This staging proved enduring and remained the company's longest-running production for decades. She reunited with Șerban for Beethoven's Fidelio at the same house in 1986, designing a vast dungeon set that dramatically broke open to allow sunlight to flood the stage during Leonora's rescue of Florestan. Jacobs also contributed significant designs to the English National Opera. She created sets and costumes for Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin in 1988, directed by Graham Vick, which earned critical approval. In 1996 she designed Bernd Alois Zimmermann's Die Soldaten, directed by David Freeman, for ENO at the London Coliseum. Beyond opera, Jacobs designed for contemporary British theatre. At the Royal Court Theatre she created the set for Timberlake Wertenbaker's Three Birds Alighting on a Field (1991), featuring a maze of transparent Perspex and empty frames that reinforced the play's themes. During the 1990s she worked with the theatre company Paines Plough on several new plays, including Stephen Jeffreys' The Clink.

Period in the United States

In the late 1960s, Sally Jacobs relocated to the United States, primarily in Los Angeles, where she continued her work as a designer and director in theatre while maintaining collaborations in Europe. She spent a decade there, working with influential figures in American experimental and regional theatre, including directors Joe Chaikin and Richard Foreman, playwright Sam Shepard, producer Joseph Papp at the Public Theater, and the Mark Taper Forum under artistic director Gordon Davidson. She also worked in other cities such as San Francisco, Houston, and New York. Among her notable contributions in the US, Jacobs directed and designed Oedipus at Colonus at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. She also directed and designed The War in Heaven, a work she co-devised with Joe Chaikin and Sam Shepard. Jacobs taught at several prominent institutions during her time in the United States, including the California Institute of the Arts, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), New York University, the Actors Studio, and Rutgers University. She returned to the United Kingdom full-time in 1982.

Later British projects and directing

Upon returning to the United Kingdom full-time in 1982, Sally Jacobs became a sought-after educator in stage design. She served as Senior Lecturer at the Central School of Art and Design and the Slade School of Fine Art, and was appointed a Fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London. In the 1990s, Jacobs designed sets and costumes for multiple new plays produced by the Paines Plough theatre company, including Stephen Jeffreys' Elizabethan burlesque The Clink, where she placed a jagged wooden stage against a backdrop featuring the outline of England. Jacobs also pursued directing and devising in her later career. She directed and designed Last Tango on the North Circular, an opera by Peter Wiegold. She co-devised The Dancing Room with Kate Flatt, a work that was filmed for the BBC. Other devised projects included Me You Us Them, a performance piece created in response to the Iraq War, and a staged adaptation of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. Jacobs maintained a studio in Muswell Hill, north London, where she continued to create performance art, installations, and paintings alongside her theatre work. Her professional archive is held by the Harvard Theatre Collection at the Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Personal life

Marriage and family

Sally Jacobs married screenwriter Alexander Jacobs in 1953. They met while she was working as a secretary at a film copyright agency in Soho. The couple had one son, Toby Jacobs. Although they later separated, they never divorced. Alexander Jacobs died in 1979. Sally Jacobs was survived by her son Toby and two grandchildren.

Death and legacy

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