My father, Douglas Heap, who has died aged 88, enjoyed a successful career as a theatrical designer, creating sets for Rada and the RSC as well as many West End productions.
Doug established the scenic design course at Rada in 1969, delivering 15 sets a year for the acting students’ productions until the late 1980s. In 1971, he came up with the designs for the play Boesman and Lena at the Royal Court theatre, in Chelsea, for the South African playwright Athol Fugard, whose works examined the apartheid system. Their collaboration on Sizwe Banzi Is Dead and The Island took them to the West End and then to New York, and continued through the 80s.
During the late 70s and early 80s Doug created designs at the RSC, notably on Pam Gems’s Piaf, starring Jane Lapotaire. He later worked on Ray Cooney’s Run for Your Wife and Two Into One, and on Pygmalion, starring Peter O’Toole, originally at the Shaftesbury theatre before it transferred to Broadway in 1987.
He was born in Buckhurst Hill, Essex, and first developed a taste for scenic design as a teenager when he put on a marionette show for his parents. His mother, Alex (nee Richmond), a primary school teacher, and father, Clifford Heap, a headteacher, became touring puppeteers after they retired.
Doug excelled in painting at Clayesmore school in Blandford Forum, Dorset, followed in 1952 by national service with the army in Aldershot. Then, at the Byam Shaw School of Art in London (now part of the Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design), his creative skills flourished.
He began a career in London and discovered that his love of art and theatre could be combined. He found work at Rada, designing his first production in 1958. They soon offered him a permanent role.
He met Jenny Pennell, an artist, while painting a set at the Lyric theatre in Hammersmith, west London, and they married in 1963.
At Rada, and throughout his career, Doug mentored many others who were starting out in the industry. When my brother, Simon, and I were children, Doug taught us how to produce scale models and drawings for set builders.
Years later, I worked for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Theatre company and Simon for Cameron Mackintosh.
Jenny died in 2009. He is survived by Simon and me, five grandchildren and a great-granddaughter.
