I designed a theatrical set for Henry Waddon’s play Circadian Rhythm, I was given the dimensions of the stage and the script and was given complete creative freedom to play off of the themes in the play. I presented this at The Royal Market Hayward Theatre as part of their script scratch, explaining my design process, please find my script/ design analysis below.  

• CIRCADIAN RHYTHM is an examination of  how we cope when our biology lets us down." - Humanity has a tendancy to complicate things, our logical thinking faculties can create tension with natural and humane instincts/desire. I want to take this theme of the script and use it to explore innate drives through the set. What do we turn to when our ego succumbs to id like instincts? ​
• "It’s about having choice over our own lives, and why we blame ourselves when things go wrong" - This theme speaks to the complexities of our independence, playwright and philosopher Jean Paul Sartre described this feeling as "abandonment", we have executive decision-making responsibility over our lives, and this can feel very overwhelming, Warren laments what "stress did to [his] body".​
• To link this back to our innate natural instincts, Freud devised his theory of the 'death drive', to highlight how he believed it was in humanity's nature crave the infantilizing state of a foetus, a time where we were inextricably and intimately intwined to another being, fully codependant, never having to make a decision​
• "The clock stops." The clock's ticking is a sound that persists throughout the narrative, to tie this to the discussions of fertility and the presupposed angst Warren and Claire feel surrounding baby-making I chose to understand this as a biological clock, creating urgency around their need to breed - "I’m so old, man. I’m so old."​
• The eponymous circadian rhythm speech in the play "when we start the day, these blue light sensors can absorb light – light from the rising sun - and send a signal to the brain", encouraged me to interpret time through one of the most natural images of time we have, the sun. Our bodies' sleep cycles are dictated by the rising and falling of its movements. ​