The choice of plays was important: I imagine they were his, not handed down by an advisory panel. After the initial group play reading (which I enjoyed) there would be a group discussion (which made me nervous) and then we would be more or less left to design the play: part of the play, I can't recollect designing a complete play and solving all the practical problems in all the time I was at college. What we were doing was creating a personal world for the play gently prodded along by Negri. He didn't teach model making: we did model making. You quickly got the impression that white card models were infra dig. His eyes would glaze over if you said you working out how to change the scenes in advance, but his eyes would light up at some lightly drawn doodle that had been discarded as impractical. Technical problems definitely followed the idea and not vice versa. The all purposes set was anathema to him and that idea has stayed with me, in principle anyway. He taught that a good design will only work for a particular production of a particular play and where the distinction between directorial idea and design idea is indivisible. It seems a truism but there are plenty of forces against it and his purpose was help us believe in our own ideas; if that was possible then technical knowledge could be quickly learnt by experience. He taught us to design from the inside out and also to think of the detail simultaneously with the whole. We definitely didn't have to start at the beginning and go through to the end "start with what you see and let it grow from there". The sets when they worked were organic.
He could spot a false influence at a hundred paces. The work of Nicholas Gieorgiadis was particularly fashionable at the time and as the project was "Blue Beard's Castle", I thought something bold and operatic was called for, so I laboured over some tissue paper and gouache collages: quite pleased with myself I was until he pointed out that there was more of the real me in a costume design I had done of a man in a suit than in all the ill digested abstracted expressionism of my "Blue Beard" designs.
He always wanted to draw out the personal truth from us and it could be painful and it was certainly slow: whether we were all individuals I do not know as many times people have told me that they can tell a Wimbledon product from a Central one at a glance.
I never really knew him: never had a casual conversation with him. I was shy and indecisive, sensitive was the word often used about my work, but he was patient and little by little prized designs out of me. But what he said and the why he said it has always stuck, remained in the mind to ponder. I remember his impish humour and his delight in quirky ideas. Serious not solemn.
It was an exciting time to be at college, with much expansion in the arts and though the facilities were rudimentary by today's standards, there was everything we needed. The theatre had just been built and little did we know that Negri was using it to try out his staging ideas that he developed further at the 69 Theatre Company and finally at the marvelous Royal Exchange, which even after all this time does not appear dated unlike so much that was built contemporaneously.
