Staging and Design: Ships, Palaces and the Ayahs' Home
Designing a World That Refuses to Sit Still
The Empress moves between a ship’s deck, Windsor Castle, a rowdy boarding house and the Home for Ayahs, often within a single scene. Several moments are written as split or simultaneous action: Lord Oakham’s dinner table is intercut with Hari writing by candlelight at sea, a storm on the ship plays alongside a heavily pregnant Rani and a meeting at Dadabhai’s desk, and the Queen’s Hindi lesson runs beside Rani abandoning her newborn at the docks. A designer’s first job on this play is finding a stage picture that can hold two or three worlds at once without ever slowing the story down.
The Royal Shakespeare Company’s original 2013 production, directed by Emma Rice, solved this with black and white film projected onto canvas and gauze, including archival footage of the Diamond Jubilee procession and the sea. This moving backdrop sat behind smaller, more detailed scenes staged on platforms of different levels. As the commentary on the production puts it, “Britain was symbolically presented as a tiny island in a heaving and billowing imperial sea.” Colour was then used more sparingly, to heighten the contrast between Rani’s world and the Queen’s.
The 2013 Royal Shakespeare Company design used black and white archival film projected onto canvas and gauze as a moving backdrop, with smaller, detailed scenes staged on platforms at different levels in front of it. This let the production cut between the ship, Windsor Castle and London without a scene change, while colour was reserved to sharpen the contrast between Rani and the Queen.
Sound and Song as a Staging Device
A sequence of songs is printed in the play text — a Clan Line parody, the ‘Lascar rap’, the ‘Shanty rap’, ‘Cast adrift the starlight’, the work song ‘Eki Dumah’, Kipling’s verse set to music and ‘A promise made’ — several of them with lyrics credited to Dom Coyote. According to the commentary, using music and song this way was Emma Rice’s own initiative: she saw them as a way of reinforcing the play’s clash and blend of cultures, mixing classical Indian and contemporary Western musical styles — including a sitar player performing in a punk rock style, and an opening number that reimagines a lascar shanty as a rap. A soundscape built from these songs can establish the world of the ship before a single word of dialogue lands.
Scale is not fixed, though. A smaller 2019 production at a London drama school worked with far less music and far simpler sets and costumes than the original RSC staging. The commentary notes that this sparer approach actually sharpened the play’s political argument, because the audience had less spectacle to hide behind and had to sit with the injustice at the centre of every scene. A designer working with limited resources should not assume the play needs a huge budget to work — a stripped-back production can hit harder, not softer.
Victoria is unwell, reclined on a chaise longue near the end of her life. Abdul tells her a story from his faith about the Angel of Death, then tells her that if she cannot travel to India, he will bring India to her instead. A troupe of colourfully dressed dancers and musicians enters the room. For design, consider a sharp contrast: the sickroom around Victoria has been lit throughout the scene in a cold, desaturated wash, so the entrance of the performers could be marked by a sudden warm gold wash flooding the stage floor, paired with a rich soundscape of Indian instrumentation replacing the scene’s previous silence. A set idea used in the original production floats small lit paper boats on a represented sea across the stage floor, giving Victoria — and the audience — a miniature version of the empire she ruled but never saw.
As a performer, Victoria’s stillness could dissolve slowly: her breathing settles, her eyes track each performer, and her hand reaches, unbidden, towards Abdul. Abdul’s own physicality shifts here too — from the contained, formal posture he has held around the court for years into something looser and prouder, a showman offering a final gift rather than a servant delivering breakfast.
Named Objects as Design Symbols
Some objects function as props as symbols across the whole play. Abdul gives Rani his father’s silver compass as a good-luck charm at Tilbury docks near the start of the play; in the final scene, fourteen years later, she presses that same compass back into his hand. A golden egg cup at Windsor is noted by Victoria as matching Abdul’s turban, quietly linking the Queen’s domestic ritual to the man she has just met. The jewelled spice box Abdul brings as his Golden Jubilee gift — rubies and pearls inlaid in gold — is a visual argument in itself: it announces value and skill from a culture the court is ready to dismiss. A designer who tracks one object like the compass consistently across the whole running time, letting its shine dull slightly as the years pass, gives the audience a physical thread through a story that otherwise leaps years at a time.
Abdul’s silver compass travels the whole play: given to Rani in Act One, returned to Abdul in the final scene. The golden egg cup and the jewelled spice box both link Abdul’s arrival at court to questions of value, taste and status. Treating an object as a symbol — not just a prop — gives a production a visual thread across a story that jumps years at a time.
Avoiding the “Costume Drama” Trap
Emma Rice has described wanting to avoid turning her production into a conventional “costume drama.” The risk with a play set across the British Empire in the 1880s and 1890s is that literal, decorative Victorian and Indian costuming can slide into stereotyped exoticism — pretty pictures that undercut the play’s political argument instead of sharpening it. A strong design answer names specific fabric, cut, colour and fit, and explains what each choice communicates, rather than reaching for generic period dress.
Writing “I would dress Rani in a colourful Indian costume to show she is Indian” is too vague to be useful, because it names no specific design detail and is not tied to a moment in the play. A stronger answer tracks change: dress Rani in a plain, undyed cotton sari for the ship and docks scenes at the start of the play, then bring her back in the final Tilbury docks scene in the red bridal sari the text specifies. The colour shift alone communicates her transformation, across thirteen or fourteen years, from an abandoned teenage ayah into a married woman with a trade and a plan for a school.
Choosing a Staging Configuration
The play’s constant cross-cutting makes the choice of staging configuration matter more than usual. A proscenium arch configuration could keep the RSC’s idea of separate framed spaces or “boxes” for each location, letting the projected backdrop sit cleanly behind the action. A thrust stage configuration would pull the audience much closer to intimate scenes, such as the cramped room above Sally’s boarding house, but makes a single large projected backdrop harder to sustain, since there is no one “front” for the whole audience. A traverse staging configuration could place the ship’s world at one end of the space and Windsor at the other, physically forcing the eye to travel between empire’s two poles every time the focus shifts.
Whichever configuration or object choice you argue for, the compulsory design-and-context question rewards you for tying the decision back to the play’s social and historical context — empire, class, migration — and for stating, in plain terms, the effect the choice has on an audience watching that specific named moment.