sammy dowson

Designed in 2017 for Oldham Coliseum

Directed by Chris Lawson

Adapted from Charles Dickens by Stephen Jeffreys

"The set is a real credit to this production and remains fixed throughout; the steel and mill windows serve well for the whole of Coketown - the set is the star of the show." The Reviews Hub

"Chris Lawson's production opens on an imposing set by Sammy Dowson of Victorian iron steelwork and glass built over coal covered ground.....a joyous and impressive production" British Theatre Guild

"Sammy Dowson's set is ingenious and multi purpose and still vividly representative of the 19th century northern mill" Manchester Theatre Awards

Hard Times is the story off a place called Coketown. Set in the industrial North it tracks the life of rich and poor alike. Starved of kindness and entertainment, oppressed by the "facts" men, the people live unnatural lives and their relationships are doomed to fail.  

Photos by Sarah Lam

Designed in 2017 for the MA course graduates at the Royal Central School for Speech and Drama. Played in Traverse at the Webber Douglas Studio.

Directed by Martin Wylde

Musical Score and beatbox Grace Savage
Written by Sabrina Mahfouz

Beweep, Outcast is a dramatic exploration of having a baby whilst imprisoned in the UK.

Lyrically following the story of Clara, a pregnant ex-civil servant jailed for fraud, and those she knows both in and out of prison, we are drawn into a justice system riven with injustice and a world where even well-meaning actions can have devastating consequences.

Designed in 2017. Set, Costume and Lighting rig/concept. The Island was a touring co - pro for Chipping Norton Theatre and Dukes Lancaster. The design played in-the-round at The Dukes Lancaster, Chipping Norton Theatre, Tabacco Factory and Southwark Playhouse.

"It is a play that makes big demands on its actors who deliver an intense ninety minutes of theatre. John Terry’s direction allows no let up, only a brief hiatus when the horn sounds to mark work ending or beginning and Sammy Dowson’s design strips things to the minimum with just a bucket and a couple of blankets and props made from frayed rope and string for the Antigone performance.

The Island now stands as a potent memorial to those who were the victims and prisoners of apartheid and everything Robben Island stood for but, like Sophocles’ Antigone, it also stands as a statement against any form of dictatorship, against the eroding of human rights. [John] Kani and [Winston} Ntshona gave their last performances a decade ago but... this is a play that won’t date and a production worth seeing." British Theatre Guide

Director John Terry

Written by Athol Fugard

Designed in 2016. Set, Costume and lighting concept. Stones in his pockets was a touring co - pro for  Chipping Norton Theatre and Dukes Lancaster. The design had to play in over 30 venues, thrust and end on, from tiny venues to full scale regional theatres. 

It was revived in 2017 for Smock Alley in Dublin.

Director John Terry

Written by Marie Jones

"Staged on a set which nods to the Irish landscape and their own predicament - a grass circle within which the actors remain largely trapped - It brilliantly picks out the distance between these extras and the loud - mouthed arrivals in town" THE STAGE

Photos by Sarah Lam

Designed in 2016 for the MA course graduates at the Royal Central School for Speech and Drama.

Directed by Martin Wylde 

Written by Helen Edmundson

Played behind the Iron in a studio setting on the Embassy stage.

Sister Juana, a gifted writer, thinker and friend of the Mexican court is silenced by the arrival of the new and zealous Archbishop of Mexico.

Photos by Sarah Lam

Designed in 2015 for the under graduate course final year production at the Embassy Theatre, Royal Central School for Speech and Drama.

Director Auriol Smith

Writer Terence Rattigan

Deep Blue Sea was written in 1952 and is based on Rattigan's secret relationship with Kenny Morgan. The action takes place over the course of one day. Hester is discovered in her flat after a failed suicide attempt, an act which precipitates a deep and psychological journey towards her own independence.

In 2015, 2016 and 2017 Sammy was the design co-ordinator for Kings College School Partnerships Project, working with 5 different schools from the Borough of Merton.

Developed over 9 months and then performed at the Cottman Gallery Theatre, KCS.

2015-16 The Man Who Planted Trees

2016-17 The Pilgrim Of Love

Both directed by David Antrobus

Both productions involved over 100 children of all ages and abilities producing art works for the stage, costumes, music and drama.

Photos by Robert Day

Invincible was first produced in-the-round at The Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond in 2013. It then transferred to St James Theatre (now The Other Palace) in 2014.

Directed by Ellie Jones

Written by Torben Betts

"A delightful class-based comedy with a dark heart" ****

"When middle-class civil servant Oliver loses his job in staff cuts brought about by the financial crisis, he and Emily, his radically left-wing partner, decide to move north where the cost of living is less astronomical. The play opens when they invite their north country neighbours round in an effort to make friends and get to know them."           British Theatre Guide

"Betts's sharp, funny play" wrings plenty of droll comedy out of class mismatch....This state-of-the-nation play, packed with thorny issues under the cover of comedy, receives a witty production that shifts to become surprisingly moving.        Sarah Hemming  Financial Times

"This spiky new comedy of culture clash and embarrassment from Torben Betts made me laugh out loud continually....The four performances in this ebullient and surprisingly poignant production are of the very highest order."              Fiona Mountford   Evening Standard

"Betts's latest work begins as robust social comedy and then shades into something darker and more disturbing, ......This fresh, punchy production expertly treads the line between hilarity and heartache."

Paul Taylor  The Independant

Photos by Robert Day

From 1996 - 2014 Sammy was Designer-In-Residence at The Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, designing over 70 productions.

Here is a small selection of photos. Please see Full Biog for complete work. 

Photos by Robert Day

Performed in-the-round at the Orange Tree Theatre in 2014

Written by Stephen Sewell

Directed by David Antrobus

"I instinctively warm to plays on big issues and they don't come much bigger than those in this work by the Australian Stephen Sewell. His theme is nothing less than the survival, or not, of the human race and whatever oddities there may be in the plotting are more than outweighed by the urgency of the ideas….

Sewell starts deceptively by showing us an American couple in a high-rise apartment that we assume to be in New York. Franklin is a cultural commentator …. seeking to prove that art is above politics: Beth, his partner, produces a radio show for a local shock-jock. Their day is thrown into disarray when everything on which they depend, from the computer to the elevator, ceases to function. And their panic only increases when a mysterious couple – a brash Australian capitalist named Bill and his trophy-wife Pearl – turn up at the door. We realise that we are in Melbourne,…and that the stage is set for a debate about what we are prepared to sacrifice in order to survive….

His play takes on board art, politics, consumerism, climate change and just about everything you can think of. But what I love about it is that the arguments are not conducted through abstractions but through the interaction of the four characters….

the play jolts us into an awareness that our lives are cocooned from reality and that we are living on borrowed time. David Antrobus's production has caught the passion in the writing and is played with real fervour by Joseph Kloska and Emma Pallant as the head-in-the-sand Americans and John Bowler and Cate Debenham-Taylor as their alarming Aussie visitors.

After so many plays on piddling themes, it's refreshing to find one that asks how we would cope if our world just stopped."

Michael Billington, The Guardian, 2014

Photos by Robert Day

Performed in-the-round at the Orange Tree Theatre 2013.

Written by G B Stern

Directed by Helen Leblique

1913: eighteen year old Daryll Fairley, an ebullient young suffragette, dances the Argentine Tango around the family hallway and announces her determination to be financially independent. Just over a decade later she has it all: the power to vote, a flourishing creative business, a faithful boyfriend, deferential siblings, and the fame to be able to demand a last-minute table at all the best restaurants. But does it make her happy?

FOUR STARS

Daily Telegraph, The Times, Independent, Evening Standard, Time Out

"the current clever programming at the Orange Tree... has unearthed a bit of a gem in The Man Who Pays the Piper... The relationship between the couple, and between Daryll and her chaotic, Mitford-esque family, is rendered with both verve and subtlety by director Helen Leblique." 

Laura Thompson, Daily Telegraph 

2013 "Helen Leblique's sparkling revival of The Man Who Plays The Piper, a shrewd and delightful... 1931 comedy by G B Stern"

Paul Taylor, Independent 

"Mullins is excellent as the conflicted Darryl, brilliant, generous, and exuding elegant, waspish wit to the very tips of her fingernails. A sharp, stylish provocation." 

Sam Marlowe, The Times

"The too-often overlooked Orange Tree always has a sure touch with theatrical rediscoveries. They’ve hit on another winner with this 1930 drama from GB (Gladys Bronwen) Stern, one of the most prolific female writers of the 20th century. Stern’s sophisticated examination of gender roles, economic power and the pressures of the working world rings just as true some 83 years later." 

Fiona Mountford, Evening Standard 

"Deirdre Mullins's outstanding performance as Daryll. Tall, blonde and striking... there is first-rate support from Emily Tucker as Daryll's flighty sister, Christopher Ravenscroft as her bullying father and Stuart Fox as an out-of-work popular musician"

Michael Billington, The Guardian 

"It’s great fun and in Helen Leblique’s vibrant production the jokes come as fast as the jibes. Infused with the glamour and rapier wit that defined Evelyn Waugh’s Bright Young Things, Stern presents a delightfully landscaped battlefield for her heroine."

Honour Bayes, Time Out 

Photos by Robert Day

Performed in-the-round as part of a triple bill at The Orange Tree Theatre in 2012
Written by Amiri Baraka

 Directed by Polina Kalinina.

'I even got into this train... walked down the aisle... searching you out.'

First staged in 1964 as the civil rights movement continued to escalate, this catastrophic and sexually-charged chance meeting on a subway train between a white woman and a black man exposes the ambiguities in America's race relations still pertinent today, by controversial playwright and activist Amiri Baraka.

'...a trio of persuasive productions...charming, witty…lacerating' The Times

Photos by Robert Day

Performed in-the-round at The Orange Tree Theatre in 2011

Written and directed by David Lewis

"Two households, both with the same settee. A settee that gets lolled on, cried on, argued on, walked on and shagged on over the course of David Lewis’s lively and thoughtful new play at Richmond’s Orange Tree. Directed by its author, How To Be Happy unfolds in a series of overlapping, parallel scenes that take place in the separate - yet deeply interconnected - homes of Emma and Paul, a divorced couple now living with their new partners Graham and Katy." 

Alex Ramon, British Theatre Guide, 2011

"The stark black and white set, designed by Sam Dowson, provides an ironic backdrop as the characters struggle with the ‘grey’ areas of life and try make some sense out of several messy relationships….How To Be Happy is realism at its best, whilst making great use of the Orange Tree space by creating split scenes over the mutual sofa in a way that never detracted from the speech. Lewis evidently has a real talent for picking on life and recreating it with ease, making this play both enjoyable and enlightening."

Tiffany Stoneman, A Younger Theatre 2011

Photos by Robert Day

Performed in-the-round at the Orange Tree Theatre in 2009

Written by Georges Schehadé

Directed by Adam Barnard

“Some of the most imaginative work to be seen in London” British Theatre Guide

A war rages. All the men in the little town of Sosso have gone to fight - except for Vasco, the timid barber. Then Lieutenant September arrives on a mission to recruit the barber. Vasco is needed for 'top secret' duty. But is it really to cut the Mirador General's hair?

Meanwhile, in a cart in the forest, Marguerite dreams of a scissor-wielding hero. Accompanied by her father Caesar, and his collection of stuffed dogs, she sets off in pursuit.

Georges Schehadé (1905-1989), a Lebanese poet and dramatist, who often worked in Paris where Histoire de Vasco played in 1957, wrote this controversial play at the height of France's Algerian war.

Funny and moving, half fairy tale, half Goon Show, our production is the premiere of a hitherto unknown version by the poet Ted Hughes.

Photos by Robert Day

Performed in-the-round at The Orange Tree Theatre in 2008

Written by Matthew Strachan and Bernie Gaughan

Directed by Paul Prescott 

"In husband-and-wife team Matthew Strachan and Bernie Gaughan’s musical, the first music we hear is the voice of tenor Josef Locke coming tinnily from a radio, placing us in a particular Irish culture and period. It is the 1950s in Crumlin, southside Dublin, and we are spectators to a classic bout of neighbourly contention between the snooty Hennessys and the O’Briens, shabbier but ruled with a rod of iron by their fiercely assertive mother. When the local paper announces a bonny-baby contest, any halfway practised eye can see that the drama will not be about which family’s sprog will win, but which will turn out to be illegitimate: Max Hennessy, whose young mother attained widowhood with indecent haste, or Conor O’Brien, whose “Ma” seems on the old side to have borne him and inexplicably keeps berating elder daughter Orla........ it is packed with toothsome ingredients. There’s the feud, and the inevitable awkward friendship struck up between Orla and Miriam Hennessy. Riona O’Connor is excellent in the former role, making a compelling emotional journey and holding her own opposite the formidable Louise Gold as her battleaxe mother; Emily Sills as Miriam has little more than everyday saintliness to her character, but gets the show’s most powerful musical number in “Passion”, a duet with her abusive estranged husband. There are secrets, dreams, determination to win through in the face of various oppressions… No doubt about it, Gaughan’s script is a grabber."

 Ian Shuttleworth for The Financial Times

Photos by Robert Day

Performed in-the-round at the Orange Tree Theatre in 2006

Written by Ben Brown

Directed by Alan Strachan

"Oliver Ford Davies gives an achingly real portrayal of Larkin in this little gem of a production. He thoroughly embodies the paradox of the self-absorbed grump who got up every day thinking about death, yet had a lively wit and an unaccountably successful way with women...It's huge credit to both Brown and director Alan Strachan that an analysis of an ultimately selfish arrangement never feels one-dimensional. Carolyn Backhouse as Monica and Jacqueline King as Betty are women who give as good as they get. And Amanda Royle wins the heart with her quiet, fluttery Maeve." Time Out

"An absorbing look at a contradictory personality, a loner who sought love eagerly enough but recoiled from any of its messier implications and responsibilities, a man whose selfishness was leavened by a dry, deadpan wit that gives some idea as to why his lovers were so fond of him. Brown draws on Larkin’s published prose and the best jokes are his. He also acknowledges that Larkin’s beautifully melancholy poetry was bound up with a sexual strangeness and social prejudice. Alan Strachan, who directed the 1999 premiere of Brown’s play at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, directs this welcome revival. Back, too, is Oliver Ford Davies in a terrific performance as Larkin. Probably less prickly than the original, Ford Davies is still a rumpled, unsentimental presence: sardonic, guardedly tender and amusingly baffled to find that he has become a bespectacled “Don Juan in Hull”. Equally strong are Carolyn Backhouse as the sharp-tongued Monica, Larkin’s equal when it came to a love of literature and drink, and Jacqueline King as the no- nonsense Betty. And Amanda Royle is wonderfully touching as Maeve, a devout Roman Catholic often hurt by their relationship, who inspired some of Larkin’s most touching love poems. Brown offers an expert distillation of Larkin’s life and work. Strachan turns it into poignant drama." The Times

Photos by Robert Day

Performed in-the-round at the Orange Tree Theatre in 2003

Written by Oliver Ford Davies

Directed by Sam Walters

If good history plays offer a metaphor for the present, then Oliver Ford Davies's King Cromwell eloquently passes the test…. 

Confined by illness and death-threats to Whitehall, Cromwell wrestles with Parliament's offer of kingship. Acceptance means that hereditary power will soon pass to his ineffectual, unsoldierly son, Richard. Endorsement of an elective system, however, implies that Colonel John Lambert will succeed and turn England into a permanent military dictatorship. Torn between these choices, Cromwell faces the failure of his dream of creating a true, god-fearing republic….

Ford Davies himself plays the title-role, under Sam Walters's guileful direction, with a moving sense of the melancholy underneath the rage.

Michael Billington, The Guardian, 2003

Photos by Robert Day