Reviews
THE KING AND I The Curve, Leicester
"This is a full-blown spectacle with classy West End production values and a considerable wow factor. Staged with real beauty and panache."
Lyn Gardener - The Guardian
"The staging is of West End standard"
Libby Purves - The Times 4 stars
"Everything about this production yells spectacle. From the opening Rank-style gong to the closing image shrinking cinematically to a pinpoint, we’re in grand-scale, filmic territory complete with screen projections, giant sets and lavish costumes... Designer Sara Perks has pulled out all the stops. If I tell you that everything from an elephant to fireworks is somehow evoked on the versatile and imaginative set, you'll start to get some idea of the creativity at work."
Michael Davies - Whats On Stage 5 stars
"With a clever use of sliding screens, silhouettes, projections, and large moveable props together with two enormous gold Buddhas which remain on stage for the whole play, we are given a series of ingenious, striking scenes."
Ian Silby - Reviewsgate
"Visually it is stunning - sets and costumes look expensive and appropriate for a Royal household thanks to designer Sara Perks and lighting designer Philip Gladwell. The opening, featuring silhouettes, sliding screens and fans, is jawdroppingly good - and that's before the overture is even finished!"
Lizz Brain - Leicester Mercury at This Is Leicestershire
SPRING STORM and BEYOND THE HORIZON Royal Theatre, Northampton
"The smashed clapboard house on Sara Perks's wonderful set could be the one that flattened the Wicked Witch of the East. Its tilted roof becomes a hill that the lovers climb to get away from the pettiness of the town."
Rhoda Koenig - The Independent 4 Stars
"Sansom's production and Sara Perks's design capture perfectly the stark savagery of O'Neill's world."
Michael Billington – The Guardian 4 stars
"With Sara Perks' beautifully lit austere set, dominated by sinister, grasping old trees - it’s as if we’re hurtled headlong inside the merciless machinery of life itself."
Dominic Cavendish -The Telegraph
"At the start of the play a soaring but dead tree forms a jagged silhouette against the lurid sky; this will turn, like the suits and dresses that become rags, into a featureless, and futureless, black."
Jeremy Kingston The Times 5 stars
"an impressive set design that shows the result of the Southern storms that have plagued the town. Sara Perks once again delivers an excellent, creative background for the story to be told against. Think An Inspector Calls, only one step further."
John Johnstone – British Theatre Guide
FORGOTTEN THINGS - Red Ladder
"Rod Dixon's production is undeniably theatrical. And it’s made more so by designer Sara Perks (one of several fine women designers whose work has enhanced northern stages in recent years). This is despite the cinematic black and white style (or rather black and grey), and a cinematic approach to entrances and exits, as hands, heads or bodies emerge or disappear through floor and walls."
Timothy Ramsden – reviewsgate
"Two of the stars were the scenographer and the set builder: Sara Perks and Andy Wood respectively, who created a set with a rear breezeblock wall and a hollow floor, both with unexpected openings which swallowed or ejected the performers"
Darren East – Animations (puppetry review)
DEPOT - Mercury Theatre @ The Tramshed
"I attended the 10.30pm performance that finished at 1am this morning and consider this to be the most exciting and innovative use of space for a theatre production that I have ever seen locally or nationally. It most certainly was an attack on the senses. This was a captivating experience that had me spellbound throughout"
Ray Hollingsworth – Whats On Stage
LAND OF THE DEAD/HELTER SKELTER - The Bush Theatre
"Sara Perks' set is simple compliment the dazzling word play; perfectly rectangular Perspex sheets hang from the ceiling, which stand for both skyscraper and restaurant windows, reflecting the actors and also making the audience confront themselves."
Claire Whitefield – music.OMH
JOURNEY'S END - Mercury Theatre, Colchester
"10 BEST THEATRE NIGHT'S OF THE YEAR 2008"
"Sometimes a regional theatre gets it spot-on. Tony Casement's revival of RC Sherriff's monument to the First World War slain at the Mercury Colchester gave us ensemble playing at its nuanced best, catching the doomed soldiers' inward terror and outward British bravado to perfection."
Charles Spencer – The Telegraph
WIZARD OF OZ - Royal Theatre, Northampton
"Sara Perks simple yet highly visual set managed to rival the film – it was bright enough to suggest a fairy tale setting, yet never too cartoon like. Costume was clever, with the Munchkins brightly clad and the crows personified as villainous hunters. The apple trees on stilts were clever and memorable"
John Johnson - British Theatre Guide
MACBETH - Mercury Theatre, Colchester
"Style predominates as Sara Perks' amorphous grey set, with symbolic river of fire/blood draining into a cauldron of red, is highlighted by Robin Carter's lighting...Gaultier style kilts give them a swaggering sexuality...The royal robe is Japanese Noh-style, Issey Miyake..."
Mary Redman – The Stage
DEAD FUNNY
"Beautifully directed by Nikolai Foster with first class work by Designer Sara Perks, their individual contributions to the success of the evening are immense."
Richard Burbage ,Manchester Confidential
THE LADYKILLERS Northcott, Exeter
"Sara Perks has designed an impressive and immensely detailed multi-level set to accommodate the fast, furious and increasingly far-fetched action, much of which is played simultaneously in the bedroom and sitting room of this curious Victorian villa. Set near London’s King’s Cross, trains belching out smoke regularly rumble past, and with pictures set at odd angles on uneven walls, nothing is quite as it appears."
Anne Broom , The Stage
FRANKIE AND TOMMY, The Lyric, Hammersmith
"Laurie Sansom's touring production on Sara Perks's design is redolent of the It Ain't Half Hot Mum atmosphere of ENSA, the British army's entertainment corps"
Patrick Marmion – Evening Standard
THE DEEP BLUE SEA - Northcott Exeter
"Sara Perks' set and costume designs are perfect (I could kill for Hester's green silk moiré shirt-waister)."
Hazel Brown - Reviewsgate
ROMEO AND JULIET - English Touring Theatre
"...a superbly simple, good-looking and playable set by Sara Perks"
R & J – The Scotsman Joyce MacMillian
SAUCY JACK AND THE SPACE VIXENS C-Venue Edinburgh – original production 1995
"familiar with bubblewrap?.......it has become the Fringe fashion of this year, setting off audience participation routines of Rocky Horror style proportions...one of the heroines sports glitterboots and a waistcoat cut from bubble wrap...It has become the party-night out, with van loads of revellers vying with each other for the finest design"
Robert Yates - The Guardian