Grand designs

Lloyd Evans talks to the young, dynamic and much-in-demand Tom Scutt about the challenges of bringing to life Narnia and its inhabitants

Barky? What does he mean, ‘barky’? We’re talking about Aslan and he says he’s aiming for ‘barky’. ‘Barky like a dog or barky like a tree?’ ‘Like a tree,’ says Tom Scutt, designer of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which opens on 8 May in Kensington Gardens.

‘What I often do with Rupert [Goold, the director] is to imagine setting the whole show in one location. In this case, the wardrobe. So you trace the wood of the wardrobe back to a tree and Aslan has a link with a tree, something honest and true and majestic. That felt right. And in Narnia the witch is an extreme form of nature, freezing ice and burning fire, which would impede the metaphorical growth of a tree. So the lion needs a “barky” quality, leaves and roots, and not just fur.’