Stage engineer and theatre consultant whose innovative use of the latest technology changed the way audiences saw plays
There was a moment in 1988 when the future of theatre suddenly loomed large: in a production of Dion Boucicault's melodramatic classic The Shaughraun, the drum revolve installed beneath the National Theatre's Olivier stage 10 years earlier was used for the very first time. This was a spectacular revelation.
And it was the work, chiefly, of Richard Brett, a leading theatre engineer and the first theatre consultant in Britain, who has died of cancer at the age of 74. With Richard Pilbrow, lighting designer at the birth of the National in 1963, and as his colleague for many years at Pilbrow's company Theatre Projects, Brett matched new theatre design with the latest technology.
As the managing director of Theatre Projects, he and a team of architects and engineers worked on the new National in the 1970s. In the trying, breakneck circumstances of strikes and delays, Brett supervised the power flying and Olivier drum installation, often through the night. A few years later, he worked on the Royal Shakespeare Company's Barbican theatre home, and on the extension of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, opened in 1999, where he pressed for the retention of the Floral Hall and expansion of the stage to the limits of the site.
Brett, like all the best theatre technicians, was a practical visionary, and he empowered the more visibly creative artists. That Boucicault production, directed by Howard Davies and designed by William Dudley (with Stephen Rea, Gillian Barge and Mark Addy in the cast), evoked on the stage the whole of County Sligo, a place both mythical and realistic in its crumbling ruins, abbey arches covered with ivy, statues on promontories, prison walls and peasant cottages. It was a world alive … and it moved, often very quickly.
No one had risked using the drum until this moment, in case it went wrong – as it occasionally still does – and it took time to match the evolving theatre technology to the architectural design and construct. But once in action, the drum allowed for an epic fluency in dramas with multiple scene changes: you can stock a new interior, or even a landscape, behind the scene currently being played. And the drum also rises, twists on its radius, and falls, cylindrically, so that you can vary perspectives and density of location in big outdoor narratives such as Jonathan Kent's spectacular revival in 2011 of Ibsen's forgotten (and still controversial) masterpiece Emperor and Galilean.
Since The Shaughraun, National shows that have benefited from – and even been defined by – Brett's work included Trevor Nunn's historic revival of Oklahoma! (1998), Tom Stoppard's epic trilogy The Coast of Utopia (2002), Nicholas Wright's two-part adaptation of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials (2003), and one of the NT's biggest hits, War Horse (2007).
Brett was the first son of Baillie Brett, a mechanical engineer, and his wife, Lorna, a teacher. He grew up in Shirley, near Croydon, south London, where he first met Pilbrow when they were both young members of the Beckenham Theatre Centre, converting a church hall into a theatre and fitting out the control room. He won a scholarship to Dulwich college in 1950. In 1958, he went to University College London, and read electrical engineering. Immediately after, in 1962, he joined the BBC as one of the corporation's last graduate apprentices in mechanical engineering in radio and television.
He rose rapidly through the BBC ranks to become a senior planning and installation engineer. Plucked by Pilbrow to join the new National in its Aquinas Street offices in Waterloo in 1967, he rode the wave of change and innovation, often brilliantly, and usually with Pilbrow, until parting professional company with his friend and mentor and forming his own consultancy company in 1985: Technical Planning Ltd developed into Theatre Planning and Technology Ltd in 1999 and Theatreplan in 2004.
His award-winning consultancies included the Lyric theatre in Belfast, the Grand theatre in Leeds, the Hampstead theatre in London, the Palace theatre in Watford and the beautiful renovation of the Crucible theatre in Sheffield.
Outside Britain, he was recently assigned to a design study for the renovation of the Sydney Opera House, and that work continues. He led the stage-engineering team on the complex reconstruction of the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, after a catastrophic fire, and was head of the planning and engineering team on the spectacular new Copenhagen Opera House, which opened in 2004.
The stage wagons system in Copenhagen moves around five stages and the rehearsal room, on pinion wheels without the use of ropes, chains or tracks; the wagons are simple wooden boxes with swivel castors that support the weight of the scenery and allow the wagons to change direction easily. A similar system has been installed in the Mariinsky theatre in St Petersburg.
Brett founded a series of quadrennial theatre engineering and architecture conferences in 2002 – the next one is in London, in June – that continue to exert enormous influence and practical innovation in his profession. The proceedings are published in illustrated volumes that are encyclopedic source books on advanced theatre technology and architecture.
He married Marion Elizabeth McMinn in 1976 (they divorced in 1991) and Jenny Straker (nee Lordon) in 1999. He is survived by Jenny and two children, Christopher and Jacqueline, from his first marriage.
• Richard Gordon Brett, stage engineer and theatre consultant, born 24 January 1939; died 9 January 2014