Tanya Moiseiwitsch

Who was Tanya Moiseiwitsch?

Tanya Moiseiwitsch, OC was an English theatre designer.

Born in London, the daughter of Daisy Kennedy, an Australian concert violinist and Benno Moiseiwitsch, a famous Ukrainian classical pianist, she attended the Central School of Arts and Crafts. A pioneering figure in 20th-century theatre design, Moiseiwitsch was the founding designer of the Canadian Stratford Festival and its theatre, and designed the interior of St. Catherine's Chapel, Massey College. She also designed the Crucible Theatre, in Sheffield, England, which opened in 1971. Between 1935 and 1939 she was designer at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, and designed more than 50 productions for it.

In her career, she had as many as five productions running at the same time in London, England. Some of her more notable productions included: the Old Vic Company's Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac, Britten's opera Peter Grimes at Covent Garden, Chekov's Uncle Vanya, and Sheridan's 'The Critic'. She also designed sets and costumes for the English Stratford's 1953 tour of Australia. She designed a number of memorable sets for productions of the National Theatre. For Peter Hall, she designed the modernized production of Ben Jonson's The Alchemist in 1962, and Tyrone Guthrie's beast-fable production of Jonson's Volpone in 1964. She worked with Tyrone Guthrie At the Old Vic, and at the Stratford Memorial Theatre, in England. She designed the highly stylised sets for the 1947 hit musical Bless the Bride.