One of the most prolific and innovative British stage designers of the past half century, William Dudley, who sadly passed away on May 31, aged 78.

Born in 1947 and growing up in London in the 1950s, the son of a builder and decorator and a school dinner lady, Dudley attended Highbury Hill High School for Boys and went on to St Martin’s School of Art, the Slade School of Fine Art and University College London, where he gained a postgraduate diploma in fine art. In his teens he worked as an actor and scene painter at the Tower Theatre, Islington.

After cutting his teeth with a production of Hamlet, starring Alan Bates and Celia Johnson, at the Nottingham Playhouse in 1971, Dudley made his National Theatre debut at London’s Old Vic at the age of 24.

Throughout his career Dudley pioneered the application of digital technology and mechanical engineering in the service of on-stage visual effects.  Director Richard Eyre, who worked with him repeatedly from the 1970s onwards, described him as “an exceptional man and an exceptional artist. Bill was ferociously imaginative, always full of ideas and unusually eloquent not only about design but about art in general”.

For the 1985 musical Mutiny! – based on Mutiny on the Bounty – Dudley created the six-tonne hull of a ship that simulated undulating motion at sea by means of a hydraulic ram and a computerised swivel. Although not without its teething troubles, the ship eventually succeeded in rising nine feet above stage level.

Five years later, Dudley faced another, very different, nautical challenge with The Ship, Bill Bryden’s ambitious play about Glasgow’s shipbuilding past, taking place in an abandoned Harland and Wolff workshop on Clydeside. Every night a ship appeared to be constructed in front of the promenade audience before being spectacularly launched down a slipway.

In the 2004 Andrew Lloyd Webber musical The Woman in White, he used shifting, kaleidoscopic projections to convey the show’s multiple settings, doing away with conventional props and scenery altogether. Reviewing the production in The Guardian, Michael Billington wrote: “Dudley’s transitions from baronial interiors to sunlit cornfields are impressive and open up new possibilities in the marriage of theatre and cinema.

Today’s widespread digitisation of theatre design dates back to Dudley’s early experiments. He said in an interview in the 1990s: “It’s like taking the audience through a big, animated computer game. Yes, we’re feeding off the effects-based film and computer games industry, but if it serves the theatre well then that’s all for the good.”

The ABTT join the whole Industry in mourning William at this time, with his loss deeply felt. Our thoughts go out to his Wife and Children at this sad time.