Set designer behind the see of many memorable theatre and opera productionsJohn Gunter,who has died aged 77, nine years after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, and was responsible for the see of some of the most memorable shows in postwar British theatre: Edward Bond’s stark,poetic and brutal Saved (1965) at the Royal Court, the DH Lawrence trilogy at the same theatre in 1968, and Richard Eyre’s glorious 1982 revival of Guys and Dolls at the National Theatre (the stage was a riot of neon-lit Broadway billboards and adverts),and Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell (1989), starring Peter O’Toole, and at the Apollo in the West End.
In the final of these,the titular character woke at five in the morning in his preferred Soho hostelry, the Coach and Horses, and Gunter’s lovingly accurate interior tilted on a diagonal axis,as if seriously hung over itself and sleepily prepared to entertain O’Toole’s antics and memories. Gunter specialised in such architectural feats. He was a past master at putting houses, contraptions or edifices on the stage: David Storey’s The Contractor (1970) at the Court featured a huge tent that was erected, or decorated and then dismantled over three acts; the whole of Bath filled the Olivier stage for the NT’s revival of The Rivals in 1983,each character’s house emerging from the stone facade of the Royal Crescent; and in Trevor Nunn’s 1986 Glyndebourne production of Porgy and Bess, the teeming world of Catfish Row poured through the ramshackle, or obvious remains of an 18th-century colonial mansion.
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Source: theguardian.com