“Grit and hope are fused together in Peter Butler’s set. Metal beams resemble cranes that allude to the industrial site – in one argument, they lower and compress the characters as though they can’t escape it. They’re also lined with carnival bulbs like dreams overhead, which Robinson often looks up at. Her face seems a bulb itself, lighting up with hope”.
- Matt Barton, Whatsonstage
“Designer Peter Butler’s imaginative but unobtrusive, period-perfect set and shabbily stylish costumes complete the effect of a production that breathes fresh life into a play that, six decades on, still has the power to connect”. - Chris Bartlett, The Stage
Peter Butler has really accentuated the dreamy realism of A Taste Of Honey. There are all the authentic looking furnishings of a sparse, shabby rented flat with few touches of homeliness but suspended above the bleakness is a vast construction that can illuminate the space with fairground bulbs. Like a skeleton of a carousel it looms over the stage with echoes of the Salford gasworks and when illuminated by Lighting Designer Simisola Majekodumni there is the sudden warm glow of endless possibilities in this usually drab environment.
- Live Art Alive
- Live Art Alive
“Designer Peter Butler has created a sleek, spartan setting – instantly suggesting a well-to-do east London gallery”.
- Paul Vale, The Stage
- Paul Vale, The Stage
“[The] play is well-served here by director Nicky Allpress in a brisk staging, stylishly designed by Peter Butler.”
- Nick Curtis, The Evening Standard
“Peter Butler’s playful design captures the turn of the millennium setting, with baggy, grungy fashions recreated for cringey comic effect. The set features a free-standing frame of white-painted plywood surrounded by stumpy sections of red girder, like an exploded warehouse gallery.”
- Dave Fargnoli, The Stage
“The production comes with period elements intact from 90s music (Air, the Chemical Brothers) to cultural references (Women’s lib, American Gigolo), and Peter Butler’s set is made up of suitably soulless blank white lines with occasional neon and light showers.”
- Arifa Akbar, The Guardian
Interviews + Features:
“Kickstarting the careers of previous winners such as Es Devlin, Peter Butler and Rose Revitt, the Linbury Prize has been spotlighting the next generation of theatre set design talent since its inception in 1987“
- Wallpaper Magazine
“It was really freeing because it meant that I could respond to it by way of feeling, rather than having a script and responding to the emotions evoked from the text.”
- Interview, Drama & Theatre, March 2023