Michael Yates (television designer)

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Michael Yates (20 July 1919 – 28 November 2001) was a British theatre, opera, and television designer.

One of five sons (Michael was one of a pair of twins) of James Yates, an English lawyer; the family lived in Brooklands, Surrey. Michael Yates was educated first at the the Downs School near Malvern, where he learned painting from the arts master Maurice Feild, later associated with the Euston Road School and a teacher at the Slade School of Art, who remained a lifelong friend of Yates. At the Downs he also met the poet W. H. Auden, then an English master at the school, who became a lifelong friend after being in love with him with an intensity that Yates learned about only afterward.

In 1933-38 Yates was a pupil at the Bryanston School, where he was honored as head boy. In 1938-41 he studied at the Yale School of Drama; he was admitted to the school by Allardyce Nicoll, an acquaintance of Auden, to whom Auden apparently recommended Yates for admission despite his lack of college-level schooling. At Yale, Yates began a lasting friendship with his fellow student, the poet and dramatist Owen Dodson, and introduced Dodson to Auden, initiating a lasting friendship between the two poets.

During World War II he served with the Royal Marines in Crete where he was taken prisoner by the Germans and sent to a prison camp until the end of the war. In the camp he learned German by talking with the guards, and he designed the sets for the prisoners' productions of Macbeth and other plays, making highly imaginative use of the limited resources available to him.

The experience of designing in a prison camp seems to have liberated his imagination. He later wrote of his teenage years that "claustrophobic family life and the cocoon of public schools at that time" had made him what an acquaintance described as "a nice English schoolboy." But his adult work was imaginative and innovative.

After the war he returned to London where he lived and worked for the rest of life. He entered the theatrical world at the lowest rung of the ladder, serving tea in the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. He later worked for the Carl Rosa Opera Company, where he seems to have begun his adult work as a designer.

He left the Carl Rosa Company for the BBC, where his more notable productions were Heidi (1953) and Troilus and Cressida (1954). He won a Guild of Television Producers and Directors award in 1954 for his BBC production of Amahl and the Night Visitors.

In 1955 he married Marny (Margaret) Yates, who had two sons from a previous marriage; the two sons lived with the Yates until adulthood.

In the early 1950s BBC Television was not deeply committed to visual design, and seemed to Yates to be more concerned with efficiency than aesthetics in its production. In 1955, therefore, he welcomed the chance to become head of design at Associated-Rediffusion, one of new independent television companies in Britain, where the resources available to a designer were far more extensive. He continued to be head of design at Associated-Rediffusion's successor, Rediffusion, and then at London Weekend Television (LWT), which received the franchise for weekend broadcasting in London. He remained at LWT for the rest of his career.

At Associated-Rediffusion he initiated a costume department, with its own autonomous staff, establishing costume as a significant element in design. He proved to be an effective administrator, known for inspiring his staff and protecting their interests, while also keeping strict control over his department. He designed many notable productions, including a 1962 production of Sophocles' Elektra performed in Greek by the Piraikon Greek Tragedy Theatre Company that was broadcast throughout Europe; a 1964 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream that was reshown at the National Film Theatre in 1994; and a production (shown in both the UK and the US) of Léonide Massine's ballet Laudes Evangelii which he staged in the cathedral at Perugia, and in preparation for which he sent members of his staff to interview the composer.

His many other television productions included Richard Whittington, Esquire;;, Benjamin Britten's The Turn of the Screw, Jean Cocteau's The Human Voice (1966), "A Man Inside" (1967), the series Lay Down Your Arms (1970), one episode of Upstairs, Downstairs (1972, with John Clements), the series New Scotland Yard (1972), The Death of Adolf Hitler (1973), the series Within These Walls (1974), the series The Aweful Mr Goodall (1974), and Alan Bennett's Doris and Doreen (1978).

Through his work, he commissioned or advised on stage designs by many well-known English painters, notably John Piper.

After retiring from LWT in 1979, he was a visiting teacher at the theatre department at the Croydon College of Art (now part of Croydon College), a governor of the Medway College of Design (now part of the University College for the Creative Arts at Canterbury, Epsom, Farnham, Maidstone and Rochester), and chairman of the Friends of Charing Cross Hospital. He devoted his last years to volunteer work at the Hospital, where he is remembered as a welcome and benevolent presence.

Relation with Auden:

In the summer of 1934, Yates, together with Peter Roger, a gardener at the Downs School with whom Auden was having an affair, joined Auden on travels through Germany and Central Europe which Auden described in a diary in the Downs School magazine. In the summer of 1936, Yates was one of a group of Bryanston pupils who travelled with one of their schoolmasters to Iceland; they were joined there by Auden (who believed he had Icelandic ancestry and was especially interested in the sagas) and Louis MacNeice. After the rest of the Bryanston party returned, Yates stayed on for two more weeks with Auden and MacNeice; his diary from these weeks was the basis for his 1975 memoir "Iceland, 1936" (see Sources). Auden and MacNeice's book based on the journey Awas Letters from Iceland (1937).

Auden's feelings towards Yates seems to have prompted a number of his poems in the 1930s, notably "A Bride in the Thirties" in 1936 (about the moral choices open to an as yet untouched beloved) and "Lullaby" ("Lay your sleeping head my love") in 1937.

Yates told an interviewer in 2000 about Auden's feelings for him: "There was this considerable affection, you know, which I had for him too in a way. I suppose you could use the word 'son,' but that wasn't quite his feeling." Auden's relations were almost always unequal in the manner suggested by Yates's "in a way" and by Auden's comment in an essay written late in 1937 that evidently refers to their relationship: "Socrates will always fall in love with Alcibiades; Alcibiades will only be a little flattered and rather puzzled" (New Verse, January 1938, p. 16).

In a letter to a friend in 1939, after he had begun the relation with Chester Kallman that he regarded as a marriage, Auden again reflected on the inequality of his earlier relations: "I've spent years believing in that I could only love the world of the Alter Ego, but I was very foolish, because the W[orld] of the A[lter] E[go] doesn't respond. Now I realize that I wanted someone rather like myself" (qtd. in E. Mendelson, Later Auden, p. 35). The "world of the Alter Ego" (a common theme in Auden's writing at this time) refers to the opposite of his own verbal, analytic personality type; examples of these attractions (some of them never consummated) to the world that "doesn't respond" included musicians (Auden's Oxford contemporary Sidney Newman, Benjamin Britten), painters (his school friend Robert Medley, Michael Yates, William Coldstream), medical students (Robert Moody)), most or all of whom were the occasion for love poems that he wrote between 1925 and 1938.

Yates's father provided Auden with legal advice on Auden's marriage of convenience to Erika Mann in 1935 and on his plans to emigrate to the United States in 1939.

In 1947, when Auden was forty, he included Yates's name in an untitled list of five names (originally seven) written in a notebook, apparently either as a list of people he fell in love with (his actual sexual relations with Robert Medley, the first name on the list, lasted only a weekend) or, more probably, as a record of his development from his youthful attraction to the "world of the Alter Ego" to his more adult loves in his thirties.

Yates said in his interview in 2000: "It is a fact that our time together, in Iceland, or going round Europe, or wherever, was a thing that inspired him to write, based on the contentment of our lives together.... I say that in retrospect, because I didn't know at the time.

Yates and his wife Marny were lifelong friends of Auden and Chester Kallman and visited them each summer in Italy and Austria in the later years of Auden's life; they visited Kallman in Austria the year after Auden died. Yates also wrote "Iceland, 1936", a memoir of his visit to Iceland with the Bryanston party, Auden, and MacNeice, for W. H. Auden: A Tribute, edited by Stephen Spender (1975).

[edit] Sources

• Michael Yates, "Iceland, 1936", in W. H. Auden: A Tribute, ed. Stephen Spender (1973).
• Dennis Barker, "Michael Yates", Guardian, 18 December 2001, p. 18.
• (Unsigned), "Michael Yates", Times, London, 21 January 2002.
• Rose Shepherd, "No Weddings and a Funeral", Mail on Sunday, London, 12 March 2000, p. 6.
• Louise Jury, "Auden's schoolboy inspiration tells the truth about their love", Independent, London, 19 March 2000 [1]