Glyn Hughes 1931 - 2014

273 actors. Costumes were of leather and appliqué. The play was a great success and Glyn went with the company when it travelled to Weimar, Germany. The artist drew wherever he happened to be and did so at every rehearsal; later drawings, costumes and props were shown in an exhibition at the British Council, Nicosia. This started a career as a designer for the classics, not only for the Cypriot theatre, but also for companies in Greece, Germany, USA and the United Kingdom, where he worked with the National Youth Theatre of the Deaf on a project, which was exhibited at the Edinburgh Festival. Many of the plays were directed by Heinz-Uwe Haus for venues as varied as an ex-missile base in Hasselbach (Brecht’s Mother Courage), Trier (Ernst Toller’s Man and the Masses ), Kaiserslautern ( Hamlet ), Athens (Brecht’s Baal), Thessaloniki ( Measure for Measure ), Kalamata (Brecht’s Arturo Ui ), Bremen, (where for the staging of Brecht’s early love poems he created a 5x27 metre canvas to cover a post-modern television studio in a municipal park), Northern Greece (Sophocles’ Antigone , staged at a mountain-top theatre near Ioannina, for which he painted an entire archaic orchestra on canvas) and the University of Delaware, USA (Brecht’s Threepenny Opera ) . During the 1980s, Glyn Hughes also went on tour with other directors – three times to the great Epidavros Festival of Ancient Theatre in Greece, as executor/assistant to the designers of Sophocles’ Electra , directed by Michalis Cacoyannis, with Irene Papas in the lead and designs by Marina Karella (1983), Euripides’ Medea with designs by Dionyssis Fotopoulos (1984) , and Euripides’ Orestes (1987). Between 1971 and 1996, Glyn collaborated with the Cyprus National Theatre in fourteen productions including: Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure I (1976), Brecht’s Mother Courage I (1977), Shakespeare’s Othello (1979), performed at Deryneia, facing the town of Famagusta where the play was set, Brecht’s The Good Person of Setzuan (1979), Moliere’s The Miser (1984), Buchner’s Woyzeck (1987), and Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1989). He also worked with other theatre groups in Cyprus, notably with Theatro Ena, then called the Little Theatre, for Oscar Wilde’s Salome , acted under the dome of the magnificent Famagusta Gate building. This was followed by designs for Euripides’ The Bacchae and ten years later, in the group’s own theatre, for Kiss of the Spider Woman, Scoubidou (a revue) and Cuckoo , a play which used Glyn’s erotic imagery on canvases placed on stage. In 1994, Glyn represented Cyprus at the 5th Cairo Biennale together with artists Andreas Makariou and Theodora Pyliotou.