William Dudley
Set Designer

William Dudley’s distinguished career as a designer of theatre and opera is recognised with an OBE in the 2020/21 New Year's Honours List. 

Bill is the winner of seven Olivier awards and a further seven nominations, a BAFTA for Roger Michell’s film of Persuasion, and the 2015 Molière Award for Visual Creation for The Dance of the Vampires in Paris.  Recently the National Theatre staged a major retrospective as a tribute to his huge body of work. 

He has designed over sixty productions at the National Theatre, including The Mysteries, Coast of Utopia and The Rise and Fall of Little Voice. At the Royal Court he designed Hamlet, Kafka’s Dick and Hitchcock Blonde (Oliver Award). Work at the RSC includes Julius Caesar (also New York), Merry Wives of Windsor (Olivier Award) Twelfth Night, Richard II & III and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. West End productions include The End of the Rainbow, All My Sons, Woman in White, My Night with Reg and Lenny, with many transfers to the USA.

His most recent credits include Witness For The Prosecution famously set at London's County Hall and - Covid permitting - due to re-open this summer, Joanna Murray-Smith's Switzerland in the Ustinov Studio at Theatre Royal Bath, Comus in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at the Globe:  Ross, The Rehearsal, and For Services Rendered at Chichester; Gaslight for Royal and Derngate and on tour; The Importance of Being Earnest in the West End; Fortune's Fool at the Old Vic, Titus Andronicus at Shakespeare's Globe, and Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be at Stratford East. 

Bill designed the sets for Roman Polanski’s musical The Dance of the Vampires (Vienna, Berlin, Paris and Russia); The Ship (for European Cultural Capital Glasgow 1990); Peter Pan (Kensington Gardens, O2 and US tours); The Last Confession (world tour) and Sunday in the Park with George at the Théâtre du Châtelet.