When Ti Green’s work disappeared due to Covid, she began her own sustainable clothing label inspired by Bristol Old Vic
At the start of this year, the stage designer Ti Green was working on a production about a 19th-century physician who advocated the life-saving benefits of hand washing. Doctor Semmelweis, starring Mark Rylance, had a story with uncanny resonance but like the other projects Green had planned for 2020, it was put on hold. “I was working on four shows, all of which haven’t opened,” she says. “I had a year’s work go up in smoke overnight.”
Green’s sets and costumes have been seen at theatres including the Globe and the National Theatre, and in the West End and on Broadway (where she picked up two Tony award nominations for her design for Coram Boy). Her relationship with Bristol Old Vic stretches back to the start of her career more than 20 years ago and includes her jaw-dropping set for the mountaineering drama Touching the Void in 2018. Instead of a predictable snowscape or climbing wall, Green used a huge, three-dimensional kinetic structure made of welded metal to represent Siula Grande mountain in the production. “It is an auditorium like no other,” she says of Bristol Old Vic. “The walls are humming with the feeling and festivities of 250 years of theatregoing.”