COSTUME designer Sue Blane is seeing triple this spring as she dresses three Figaros in three different operas.

Sue, who has worked with internationally renowned theatre, opera and dance companies for more than 40 years and is probably best known for designing the costumes for The Rocky Horror Show, is designing a whole season of Welsh National Opera productions.

And the spring 2016 trilogy has one theme in common – the character of Figaro. The season begins tonight at Mayflower Theatre with a new production of Rossini’s comic opera The Barber of Seville, in which Figaro is the eponymous barber. This is followed by Mozart’s comedy of manners The Marriage of Figaro. And to complete the trio, WNO is premiering Figaro Gets a Divorce composed by Elena Langer with a libretto by the company’s artistic director David Pountney.

To make the challenge for Sue even greater, all three operas are set in different periods, have different tones and have different directors.

But it’s a task Sue has relished. “It is a big challenge because all three operas have the same set which is very contemporary, quite minimalist and very striking which means the costumes need to story-tell visually,” she says. “The costumes need to make each production stand out on its own while also making very strong connections between all three.

“The Barber of Seville is the funniest of the three with Figaro a really larger than life character so I wanted this production to have a bit of the variety hall about it. The costumes are actually quite classic but if you asked me to state a period I would say 1950s. Sam Brown the director and I felt very strongly they should have plenty of colour so they are incredibly colourful.

“With Marriage of Figaro, the director Tobias Richter wanted to emphasise the story as actually being very contemporary. It may be more than 200 years old but the storyline, in which people mistake love for lust and cause all that confusion, still exists today and he wanted to explore the longevity of that storyline. For me Mozart’s music deserves some big reference to the 18th century whilst also making it contemporary. What I really wanted was costumes which are very beautiful and great fun but with a wild factor in a really big way.

“Figaro Gets a Divorce is another matter entirely. This piece is very strongly theatrical and visually powerful. The music is extraordinarily beautiful. It’s operatic but for me it’s also swing meets classical and modern. Director and librettist David Pountney sets it in the 1930s but it’s the 1930s with a real edge to it. With Divorce it is more muted and we’ve been able to buy more clothes off-the-peg but they have a really three-dimensional feel to them with an almost film like quality.”

To realise the final outfits, Sue has worked very closely with the costume department at Welsh National Opera.

“They are a fantastic team,” says Sue. “I rely very heavily on their technical expertise and experience to realise my ideas. My drawings are very much what the end costume looks like but it needs people with real technical knowledge to achieve that. The drawings are very much my own and the costumes themselves are a team effort.”

And Sue certainly gave her colleagues some difficult tasks.

“We actually hit a snag really early on,” she admits. “But the team came up with an ingenious solution.

“With the Barber of Seville the idea is that the whole male population of Seville are actually barbers – the point being that Figaro is the best of the lot. So I wanted to really pull out the stops for the barbers and have the cast to have the feel of a barber shop quartet. So I was looking for lots of different stripes to reflect the idea of barber shop singers.

“Now you would think there would be loads of fabrics out there we could use but we just couldn’t find the type and depth of fabric that we needed. I didn’t want them all to look like cotton deck chairs!

“So the solution the team came up with was ribbons. They decided to sew ribbons onto all the costumes. But there must be about 18 or 19 of these costumes so it turned into this massive labour of love to get them all done. In fact if we had known what a massive task it was going to be I’m not sure they would have done it!”

Welsh National Opera’s Figaro Forever season continues at Mayflower Theatre until Saturday.

Tickets: 023 8071 1811 or mayflower.org.uk