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Enigmatic theatre designer Ultz has tried his hand at acting, teaching, drama and directing, on everything from opera to hip hop, classics and cutting edge drama. He takes a break to talk to Nick Smurthwaite
Backstage at the London Coliseum, Ultz is putting the finishing touches to his designs for The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, an operatic version of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's classic 1974 film (and before that, a play) about the romantic entanglements of a group of lesbian fashionistas in 1970s Munich.
Shaven-headed and inescapably English, Ultz is a vision in brown - shirt, trousers, sandals and bag. Style from the 1970s has clearly taken hold. He leads me through a backstage warren to the 20m stage of the Coliseum. There the fixed set reveals a fashionable Munich apartment, furnished in a style befitting the mid-1970s. The colours are predominantly orange, yellow and brown. For anyone who personally experienced the whole 1970s design experience, it is horribly convincing.
Ultz and director Richard Jones considered updating the action to the present day. 'We thought it might be amusing to satirise our contemporaries in the fashion world,' he says....