Sets appeal: jaw-dropping stage designs from around the world – in pictures

Pink elephants and water-worlds are among the groundbreaking creations of contemporary designers featured in a new book. Take a look at eight of their incredible creations – click on each photo to see a larger version. Buy from the Guardian Bookshop: World Scenography 1990-2005 by Eric Fielding and Peter McKinnon. All photographs: World Scenography 1990-2005/Nick Hern Books

  • The Pink Elephant and Five Gentlemen is a Beckettian slice of absurdism that was staged at Haiyuza theatre in Tokyo in 1994. The set designed by Kazue Hatano featured a surreal, 1.95m tall elephant with broken-down legs
    Scenography

  • Nabucco, designed by Stefanos Lazaridis, was staged on Lake Constance as part of the Bregenz festival in 1993 in Austria, directed by David Pountney who said ‘the opportunity to work on this scale somehow triggered Stefan’s most sensitive dramaturgical instincts’
    Scenography

  • Canada’s Michael Levine designed the sets and costumes for this Opéra National de Paris production of Rusalka in 2002, which explored the symmetry of its mortal and fairy worlds
    Scenography

  • This production of Brecht’s Baal at Teatrul Mic in Bucharest, Romania, in 2002 featured a set designed by Dragos Buhagiar that confined the hero inside a transparent cube
    Scenography

  • The designer Rosalie asked ‘what is the modern significance of myth?’ when she designed the set for Wagner’s Ring Cycle in Bayreuth, Germany, in 1994
    Scenography

  • In his award-winning design for Brecht’s Saint Joan of the Stockyards, staged in Mexico City in 2001, Philippe Amand said he aimed to ‘reproduce a mechanical space inspired by constructivism’
    Scenography

  • Spoliarium, designed by Gino Gonzales and staged at the Cultural Centre of the Philippines in Pasay City in 2003, aimed to capture the tempestuous life of the 19th-century painter Juan Luna
    Scenography

  • An Inspector Calls, with set, costume and lighting design by Ian MacNeil and Rick Fisher, opened at the National Theatre in 1992. JB Priestley’s play was directed by Stephen Daldry. MacNeil said: ‘We used the idea that a performance can exist in three time periods simultaneously’
    Scenography
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