Sarah McCarroll, MFA, PhD

On the Razzle by Tom Stoppard

Costume Design; Georgia Southern University Spring 2013

Tom Stoppard’s treatment of an earlier play is ostensibly set in the 1830s; this is not a period many people have many garments from in their costume stock. From the outset, the director and I agreed that it was practically necessary to reset the production in order to deal with the scale of costume requirements. We decided on the late bustle period (1884-1887) because the women’s clothing of the period contains much the same sense of extravagant fun as the earlier era. Bustles bounce and move with the wearer, and the swagging, fringe, drapery, and extravagant piled curls of the popular hairstyles seemed to us to preserve the farcical nature of the script. The text includes the joke that all of Vienna has gone mad for plaid, so the costumes needed to include plaid in many instances, and the color palette was wide and bright.