The Wild Duck 2025

Director Magnús Thorlacius

Set & Costume Design Amelia Morton

Written by Henrik Ibsen
Designed for Carne Studio LAMDA

In The Wild Duck, Gregers Werle returns home after seventeen years away and is reunited with his childhood friend, Hjalmar Ekdal. Hjalmar now lives in poverty with his wife, his daughter Hedvig, and his elderly father in a cramped garret filled with animals, including Hedvig’s beloved injured wild duck. As Gregers begins to uncover the truth about his father’s corruption and its connection to the Ekdals’ suffering, the wild duck becomes a powerful symbol of innocence, captivity, and lives shaped by lies.

Piece by piece, Gregers sets about exposing and dismantling the illusions upon which the Ekdals’ happiness is based, fragmenting the peaceful household in the name of truth, with ultimately tragic consequences.

Set Research

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Mood Board

Set Research & Mood Board

Led the design through people

It is a people driven play that is relatable to a modern audience although being written in 1884. It was important to make the characters feel real and that they were devleoped within the space through purposeful costume. I did research into photography from 1960s London and created character profiles, we purposefully chose to actively make the characters of Gina and Hedvig people of colour to reflect a modern audience in London today.

We developed the characters of the play to live in 1968 England. The play requires two settings, first the wealthy home of the Werle family for Act 1 and followed by the studio of the poorer Ekdal family for acts 2-5. The families are connected through buisness and history so there needed to be a clear connection between the two spaces.

The Wild Duck

The wild duck is the play’s central symbol, and I wanted my headdress to show how deeply Hedvig is connected to it. Like the duck, Hedvig is trapped in an artificial world and living inside a lie created by the adults around her. She is innocent, but she is also constantly manipulated, watched, and controlled. The hunting imagery in the play makes this even more tragic, as Hedvig seems to have had a target on her from the beginning. By making her wear the wild duck as a headdress, especially in the attic scene where she tries to shoot the bird but kills herself instead, I show that Hedvig has become the hunted creature herself, fragile, trapped, innocent, and sacrificed by other people’s lies.

Costume Designs

White card model

We based the set loosely around the shape of coversation pits. As it felt relevant to the time period and how this whole play is made up of conversations between people until the hidden agenda of Hijlmar Gregers is revealed to all.

It was imporant to not overwhelm the studio space while still creating an immersive design for tha audience to feel almost like they are easedropping on the conversations.

We made the arch smaller and the stairs lower after this to make it feel more natural in the space.

Exploratory Digital Renders

Below shows some different renders created using SketchUP then editied ontop with procreate and photoshop to see how the glass block wall would work with the wooden floor.