Hackney People - Lorna Ritchie
Theatre designer Lorna Ritchie moved to Hackney in 2004 and has felt at home here ever since.
“It was a comforting place to be,” she explains. “I didn’t get that scary London feeling.”
She lives next door to Dalston’s Arcola Theatre and late last year designed the set and costumes for its production of The Ballad of Crazy Paola, a short but intense dissection of a disastrous youthful relationship.
It wasn’t the first time Lorna has worked for the Arcola, having got to know the venue as a costume designer for its Ibsen season in 2008.
Hackney’s a long way from Scotland, where she grew up and studied, gaining a Masters degree in fine art from Edinburgh University.
“It felt quite small,” she says.
Lorna spent her first two years in London studying set and costume design at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). She also found that living in Hackney had many benefits. “Living here, I met lots of people doing creative stuff, similar to what I was doing,” she explains. “There was a lack of pressure and enough space to do my work.”
Lorna’s been working as a freelance designer for four years, and has picked up some prestigious confirmation that her work will take her places. She was one of two new graduates selected by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) to spend a year working between London and Stratford-Upon-Avon.
She was also a finalist in the 2007 Linbury Biennial Prize for Set Design, reaching the last 12 out of 90 entries.
But Hackney has been a constant part of her adult life, and she enjoys the way that it feels like a city in its own right. “I barely leave this postcode district,” she muses.
The borough’s open spaces were a lifesaver for Lorna. “I used to live in Homerton, which felt quite barren and empty, you could get some proper fresh air.”
She was also seduced by the food on offer, citing a Turkish restaurant in Kingsland Road as her favourite. “It is decked out like a Flintstones set, with tables like a petrified forest and stumps to sit on,” she elaborates, with a designer’s enthusiasm, and the confidence of someone who knows an area well enough to call it home.
Curriculum Vitae
- 1979 Born in Lanark, Scotland
- 1997-2002 MA Fine Art at Edinburgh University & Edinburgh College of Art
- 2004-06 Graduate Diploma Theatre Design at RADA
- 2006-07 Graduate Scholarship, Royal Shakespeare Company
- 2007 Finalist in the Linbury Biennale Prize for Stage Design
- 2006-08 Set designs for the Gate, Old Vic, Young Vic & Theatre Royal York
- 2008 Designs for the Arcola Theatre, Dalston, including An Enemy of the People & The Lady From the Sea
Page updated: 7 Apr 2009