James Helps (Designer)

 

James trained at the Wimbledon School of Art and has since designed over 200 productions.

 

He was winner of The Peacock Award as Designer of the Year in Northern Ireland for work at the Lyric Theatre Belfast.

 

Local work includes numerous plays for Show of Strength, Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory and for Headley Players, now at Backwell Playhouse. James was Art Director on the films Leon the Pig Farmer and Beyond Bedlam.

 

He designed the set for Eric Wetherell’s opera A Foreign Field which had its first performance in Bristol in September 2010 and was the production designer for The Happy Lands, a community feature film released in 2012. He has also designed the sets for Bristol Gilbert and Sullivan Operatic Society for the past six years, and his design work for Stalin’s Daughter performed recently at the Brewery Theatre achieved critical acclaim “To watch the production is to view the world from a perspective as skewed as the angles of James Helps’s expressionistic set: it imparts the nausea and dizzying thrill of vertigo. Vivid, disturbing and utterly fascinating”.