Es Devlin is the world’s foremost set designer, having conceived stage sets for superstar musicians including Beyoncé, Stormzy, Kanye West, U2 and Adele. She has also created sets for opera houses around the world, and for productions at the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company and many more. Es also works as an artist in her own right, designing sculptural installation pieces that address issues of social justice and sustainability.

For This Cultural Life, Es Devlin remembers a scale model of her home town, Rye in Sussex, that fired her imagination and encouraged her interest in storytelling. She chooses the sleeve of Kate Bush’s 1978 debut album The Kick Inside, which she tried to recreate as a collage in her teenage bedroom. She recalls a career breakthrough when, in 1998, she designed a National Theatre production of Harold Pinter’s play Betrayal, a set which was inspired by Rachel Whiteread’s artwork House, a concrete cast of the interior of a Victorian terraced house in London’s East End, which was demolished in 1994. Her final choice of cultural inspiration is her work with the hip hop artist and producer Kanye West, with whom she collaborated on several spectacular stadium shows.

Producer: Edwina Pitman


Audio of 'The Story of Rye' with kind permission from The Rye Heritage Centre