In Memoriam: Sally Jacobs Noted British theatre production designer Sally Jacobs has died of cancer, Lighting&Sound America has learned. She was 87. A longtime associate of the director Peter Brook, she designed (among others) two of his most famous productions: Marat/Sade, seen on Broadway in 1965 - 1966, for which she supplied a stark 18th-century mental asylum setting, and A Midsummer Night's Dream, a seminal high-concept staging. Describing it, the New York Times theatre critic Clive Barnes wrote, "Helped by the designer Sally Jacobs, Brook has placed the play within three white and gleaming walls. Across the back are two white doors, and on top of the walls are battlements where musicians can play, actors run or wait, or even on occasion dangle scenery into the playing cockpit below. Its purpose? And for that matter, the purpose of an Oberon on a trapeze, a Puck who juggles with plates or dashes across the scene on Tarzan rope or runs on stilts? Why all this? Are they merely the tricks of Brook's fertile imagination; conjurations to while the time, and limn out a little talent? Emphatically no." Born in London in 1932, she trained at St. Martin's School of Art and the Central School of Arts and Crafts. She began working as a designer in 1960. According to The Guardian, her "second RSC production was Women Beware Women directed by Anthony Page at the Arts Theatre in 1962, with John Thaw and Nicol Williamson in the cast. She was interviewed by Brook after she had seen his production of King Lear with Paul Scofield in the same year and was invited by him to join the first workshop of his Theatre of Cruelty season in 1963." Following her early successes, she lived in the US for a time, working in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Houston, and New York. Her Off Broadway credits included Samuel Beckett's Endgame (1980), directed by Joseph Chaikin); Botho Strauss' Three Acts of Recognition (1982), directed by Richard Foreman; Antigone (1982), with Lisa Banes and F. Murray Abraham, directed by Chaikin; Michael Cristofer's Black Angel (1982), directed by Gordon Davidson; and Three Birds Alighting on a Field (1991), by Timberlake Wertenbaker, directed by Max Stafford-Clark. Returning to London in the early '80s, she designed Die Fledermaus for the Paris Opera, Turandot and Fidelio for the Royal Opera, and Eugene Onegin and Die Soldaten for the English National Opera. As director/designer her work included Oedipus at Colonus for Mark Taper Forum Los Angeles, Last Tango on the North Circular (an opera by Peter Wiegold), The War in Heaven by Joseph Chaikin and Sam Shepard, The Dancing Room -- which was also filmed for the BBC by Simon Broughton, Me You Us Them -- a performance piece which she devised in response to the Iraq war, and a staged version of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. Other notable theatre productions included Don Gil in the Green Stockings (RSC, 1964), Strike (RSC, 1965), Twelfth Night (RSC, 1965), Love's Labour's Lost, (RSC, 1965), Mahagonny Songspiel (Mark Taper Forum, 1973), The Conference of the Birds (1979, Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord); Three Sisters (Mark Taper Forum, 1976), Antony and Cleopatra (RSC, 1980), and Otello (Royal Opera House, 1985). In film, she served as costume designer on Having a Wild Weekend, starring the Dave Clark Five, and Nothing but the Best, a comedy starring Alan Bates. She also acted as production designer on two Peter Brook films: Marat/Sade and Tell Me Lies. Teaching posts included senior lecturer in stage design at the Central School of Art and Design. In the US, she taught at California Institute of the Arts, University of California Los Angeles, New York University, The Actors Studio, and Rutgers University. Her archive was acquired by the Harvard Theatre Collection at the Houghton Library, Harvard University. She also developed performance art and installations and was a painter. Jacobs' husband, the screenwriter Alexander Jacobs, died in 1979. She is survived by a son. 
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