From cartoons to stage design: the genius of Osbert Lancaster

‘Bigger,’ said Sir Osbert Lancaster when asked the difference between his work for the page and for the stage. ‘Definitely bigger.’ For almost 40 years Lancaster was the ‘pocket cartoonist’ for the Daily Express. He had remarked to the features editor that no English newspaper had anything to match the little column-width cartoons of the French papers. ‘Go on,’ said the editor, ‘give us some.’ On 1 January 1939, Lancaster gave them the first of around 10,000 line-drawn cartoons. His subjects were the war, the Blitz, the weather, Stalin, Hitler and Dr Spock, the Swinging Sixties, the Common Market, the test tube baby and the topless swimsuit. His heroine, his alter ego, was Maudie, Countess of Littlehampton, a wasp-waisted symbol of sanity in an increasingly insane world. In the front-page cartoon of 19 March 1963, we see Maudie in a box at the ballet. A shirtless Nureyev-a-like is performing a grand jeté.  ‘Is that the one,’ she whispers, ‘we swapped for Burgess?’

This season, the Royal Ballet’s Christmas show is Coppélia, danced by the company for the first time since 2006 with Lancaster’s sunny, funny sets and costumes. The stage was Lancaster’s destiny. Aged 11, he was taken to Sergei Diaghilev’s 1919 production of The Sleeping Beauty at the Alhambra. Osbert remembered Lydia Lopokova as the Lilac Fairy and the ‘dazzling’ sets by Leon Bakst. ‘For weeks afterwards, my drawing books were packed with hopeful but pathetic attempts to recapture something of the glory of that matinee, and there and then I formed an ambition that was not destined to be fulfilled for more than 30 years.’

Those 30 years between the Alhambra and his first designs for Sadler’s Wells were not wasted. All the while, he was observing, sketching, taking notes for future sets, props and, especially, costumes.