Love's Labour's Lost
Royal Shakespeare Company - Stratford-upon-Avon
"....Joanna Scotcher’s fetching luxury spa hotel set.....Neil Austin’s lighting adds a bronzed glow to the palm tree surroundings."
Clive Davis - The Times
Shifters
"...the overall effect is stunning (helped by Neil Austin’s mood-shifting lighting and XANA’s ambient music). Yes, this is the best new writing currently on the London stage."
Aleks Sierz - The Arts Desk
"... and over the course of their relationship each remembered moment seems to glow with its own colour in Neil Austin’s lighting. Sometimes the space feels infinite, sometimes shallow and empty: it’s beautifully managed."
Frey Kwa Hawking - Whatsonstage.com
"There’s no faulting an A-list creative team that includes Neil Austin, whose overhead lighting posits a flickering constellation all its own. "
Matt Wolf - LondonTheatre.co.uk
"Neil Austin’s stunning lighting illuminates the stage. The lighting is visually striking as we walk into the theatre and throughout the show, these lights effectively capture the shifting timelines in the story. The bold hues of greens and reds during Des and Dre’s youthful years, become dimmer as we move to present-day."
Rachel Agyefron - RachelReviewed.co.uk
""Shifters’ lighting design is one of the best I’ve seen from a theatre production. Rosmersholm’s Neil Austin echoes the blue and orange costume design (complementary colours, I should point out) of Alex Berry with a beautiful warmth, intensifying and switching off with the highs and lows of an emotional relationship (involving panic attacks, parties and goodbyes); the jagged tube lights alluding to crossed paths, and the otherworldly and existential ideas explored in a script by Benedict Lombe
Liam O'Dell - LiamODell.com
"The other element which did give me a degree of pleasure was the lighting design of Neil Austin. He has used fluorescent tubes artfully and artistically, enclosing the playing area and using them to mark the shifting passages of time. He has also employed a variety of colours to suggest the relevant moods of the different sections enhancing the work of the actors as their emotions change. "
John Chapman - 2nd From Bottom
"Set designer Alex Berry and lighting designer Neil Austin work in tandem to create a bare but atmospheric staging - the stage is framed on all sides by tubes of light which extinguish and later reignite in powerful moments of dramatic change, and add an almost dreamlike quality to the non-liner, time-jumping structure."
Sam Waite - AllThat Dazzles.co.uk
" Neil Austin’s lighting sharply illuminates the traverse stage while handling intimate moments with ease."
Louise Penn - LouReviews.blog
""Neil Austin’s lighting design was beautifully subtle yet highly effective. Beams of ominous blue hung from either side of the stage and outlined the space. From cool blues and warm yellows to bright reds and greens, Austin’s lighting undistractedly distinguishes the pivoting scenes and reflects the continuously changing emotion. As friction develops between Dre and Des, the beams of light fade, leaving the stage in almost darkness.
Zoe - TheatreAndTonic.co.uk
The Enfield Haunting
Ambassador's Theatre - West End
"But the kindest thing would be to cut the power to the theatre altogether, and allow the company to rest in peace."
Patrick Marmion - The Daily Mail
The Secret Life of Bees
Arifa Akbar - The Guardian
"The set designer Soutra Gilmour gives us the bare frame of a barn or house, drenched in Neil Austin's evocative golden lighting."
Clive Barnes - The Times
"Bathed in the ochre glow of Neil Austin's lighting, the stage is suffused with heat and sunshine throughout the performance."
Neil Norman - Daily Express
"... American director Whitney White’s sensuous production, beautifully designed by Soutra Gilmour and stunningly lit by Neil Austin, that provides the atmosphere."
Mark Shenton - Plays International & Europe
"...warmly lit by Neil Austin to evoke every degree of the southern heat..."
Theo Bosanquet - Whatsonstage
"From the opening number with its fan-waving heat of Southern summer, when Neil Austin’s warm lighting seems to match every moment, bringing Soutra Gilmour’s stylishly simple set to life, The Secret Life of Bees has a joyful feeling."
Hoard Loxton - British Theatre Guide
"With its honied musical textures, rich lighting, some beautiful design......The Secret Life of Bees has a lot going for it"
Andrzej Lukowski - Time Out
"....beautifully lit in honeycomb shades by Neil Austin...."
John Cutler - The Reviews Hub
"When the soft glowing lights hit the stage at the Almeida Theatre, we're taken back to 1964, during the height of the civil rights movement........Here Neil Austin's lighting design really sines, creating a soft, dreamlike quality....."
Abbie Grundy - Broadway World
"The set design by Soutra Gilmour has a beautifully defined yellow and red colour palette that is wonderfully enhanced by Neil Austin's lighting work, blending seamlessly in to the surrounding Almeida Theatre itself."
Callum Wallace - WestEndBestFriend
Tammy Faye
David Benedict - Variety
"The set design from Bunny Christie is simply glorious. A pristine white stage greets you ready to be completely transformed thanks to the varied but always stunning lighting design from Neil Austin, effortlessly adapting itself from a holy glow to a Pride rainbow in a millisecond."
Daz Gale - All That Dazzles
"Neil Austin’s lighting illuminates a cross beautifully"
Amy Rye - Lost in Theatreland
Frozen
Theatre Royal Drury Lane - West End
Sarah Crompton - Whatsonstage
"Yet Austin's wonderfully inventive lighting, and the simple tricks of curtains covered with crystals, does make the new ice palace the most magical place."
Sarah Crompton - Whatsonstage
"There are nimbly executed freezing effects when Elsa unwittingly casts her spell and then, at the end, the landscape melts back to warm colours. These transformational moments video-designed by Finn Ross are big and blinding, and there are breathtaking displays of fizzing light (by Neil Austin) and crackling sound (by Peter Hylenski)."
Arfa Akbar - Guardian
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
Curran Theatre - San Francisco
"And then there’s the stunning lighting design, by Neil Austin, which can make a Bizarro world as creepy as if it were all lit by flashlights underneath ghost-story tellers’ chins, then the same space, a moment later, as warm and inviting as a hearth. He can make light seem as solid as a wall, so that when actors’ bodies walk through it, it’s as if they’re piercing and shattering glass. It’s light that, throughout the show, elevates the characters of “Cursed Child,” so that their flaws and foibles, their crushes and fears, their desires and aversions, seem like the feelings and qualities of Greek gods."
Lily Janiak - San Francisco Chronicle
Jay Barmann - SFist.com
"With an excellent creative and production team (lighting by Neil Austin and illusions by Jamie Harrison are especially notable)"
Leslie Katz - San Francisco Examiner
"Undoubtedly, the set and lighting design and special effects are also stars in Harry Potter. In fact, I don’t think you could’ve pulled off a show like this without the incredible efforts of Christine Jones (set), Neil Austin (lighting), and Jamie Harrison (magic and illusions)..... Clever light and shadow manipulations conceal and reveal.... At one point, it looks like Scorpius and Albus Potter are swimming in a massive aquarium in the theater, a trick that uses light.... In the last scene of the show, golden light pours through the ceiling of the theater, illuminating the stage’s wooden arches and bringing the play to a peaceful end. "
Grace Li - SF Weekly
National Theatre - Olivier
"The audience enters the Olivier to witness a landscape on which the low-lying clouds and reddish sky create a sense that everything is about to go up in smoke. While there’s an earthy realism to designer Rae Smith’s evocation of 19th century Baile Beag, on which the ramshackle classroom of a "hedge school" sprawls open to the elements, Neil Austin’s smouldering lighting design stokes the latent tension from the start."
Rachel Halliburton - The Arts Desk
"Rae Smith’s excellent set fills the Olivier stage with a churned up but untamed field for characters to trek across and Neil Austin’s lighting design is nothing short of stunning."
Sophie Adnitt - BritishTheatre.com
Demetrios Matheou - Hollywood Reporter
Blues in the Night
Kiln Theatre
"Robert Jones’s stylish set and Neil Austin’s lighting convince us that we have wandered into a 1930s gin joint where the bar never closes."
Clive Davis - The Times
"...Neil Austin's lighting is crucial in setting the mod for each number...."
Marianka Swain - The Arts Desk
""lighting design by Neil Austin makes good use of extremely slow fades to heighten the drama of the opening riffs of each number, with an apt neon hotel sign above the stage.
Fiona Scott - BroadwayWorld
"Combined with the authentic and imaginative set design from Robert Jones, Neil Austin’s suitably varied lighting that enhances the emotion of the songs and performances well and Lottie Collett’s lovely costume designs, Blues in the Night is as wonderful to look at as it is to listen to."
Emma Clarendon - LoveLondonLoveCulture
"Robert Jones’ set design makes full use of the Kiln’s deep stage, scattering it with art deco lamps, and Neil Austin’s wonderfully evocative lighting transports us to a place where free-flowing Bourbon can drown an abundance of sorrows."
Stephen Bates - TheReviewsHub
"With set design by Robert Jones, and atmospheric lighting from Neil Austin,"
TheSoulHouse.net
The Night of the Iguana
Nöel Coward Theatre - West End
"Rae Smith has created a monumental set dominated by a sheer, weather-beaten cliff and Neil Austin’s lighting, poetically capturing the stormy sunsets of the tropics, is as moving as anything in the evening."
Michael Billington - The Guardian
"Under Neil Austin’s lighting, a background of crags glows like a sinister fake-coal fire."
Susannah Clapp - The Observer
"Rain cascades down Rae Smith’s rugged mountain set, as Neil Austin’s lightning flashes across the rickety cabanas."
Natasha Tripney - The Stage
"It's surprisingly low-key, but when you have actors of this calibre, simply swapping tales while illuminated by a transcendent shaft of light, it becomes spellbinding theatre. "
Marianka Swain - BroadwayWorld
"Neil Austin's lighting and Max Pappenheim's jungle sounds plunge the set into an oppressive tropical heat."
Lucinda Everett - WhatsOnStage
"Neil Austin and Max Pappenhei's lighting and music create both the terror of tro[ical storms and the almost religious shafts of illumination."
Aleks Sierz - The Arts Desk
"Although this place can seem like paradise with cool light streaming through the canopy, when lighting director Neil Austin introduces a burning sunset glow, it can look an awful lot like hell."
Matt Trueman- Variety
"Designer Rae Smith gives the buildings the makeshift feel of favela shacks, upon which lighting designer Neil Austin casts sunbeams that almost convince of the outdoors, and whose interiors are bathed beautifully in yellow lamplight."
Demetrios Matheou - The Hollywood Reporter
"Neil Austin’s lighting combined with a full-blown rainstorm makes for stunning staging, and sets the level of anticipation high."
Greg Stewart - TheatreWeekly.com
" if there’s a real show-stealer it’s between Rae Smith’s design, Neil Austin’s lighting and Max Pappenheim's sound, which bring the tropical location and the storm at the centre of the play to dramatic life."
Nick730 - PartiallyObstructedView
"the set from Rae Smith is stunning with incredible lighting and sound design from Neil Austin and Max Pappenheim."
Shanine Salmon - ViewFromTheCheapSeat
"The arrival of a tropical storm is achieved in stunning fashion in combination with Neil Austin’s lighting and Max Pappenheim’s sound design."
Kris Witherington - WestEndWilma.com
"stunning lighting by Neil Austin creates a beautiful in-house thunderstorm."
Jessica Handscomb - A Younger Theatre
"Creative lighting (Neil Austin) suggests the day’s suffocating heat, the oncoming night, and the approaching storm."
The Prickle
The Hunt
Almeida Theatre
"Es Devlin’s magnificent design. A dinky little house – simple as a child’s drawing or a garden shed – is perched on a revolve. In darkness it is impenetrable: this is a play about secrets that continually questions whether we can ever know each other. When irradiated with Neil Austin’s lighting (sometimes unsparingly white, sometimes murky), it becomes transparent and rapidly changing: it is a place of wistful innocence"
Susannah Clapp - The Observer
"...Es Devlin's set which builds a circle of blond smooth wood and sets within it a sort of greenhouse, its frame outlined in bright light (courtesy of Neil Austin) with windows that switch from clear to opaque, that becomes a classroom, a hunting lodge (packed with grunting shouting men) and a church.."
Daisy Bowie-Sell - WhatsOnStage
"Designer Es Devlin is one of the stars of a show that also has one of the most extraordinary soundscapes from sound designer and composer Adam Cork to ratchet up the tension, while Neil Austin's lighting contributes its own terrors. "
Mark Shenton - LondonTheatre.co.uk
"Es Devlin’s set, a house as simple as a child’s drawing, which Neil Austin’s lighting renders either opaque or brightly transparent, becomes a metaphor – for what (or who) we keep in or out, for the things we hide, for the community that repels or embraces us."
Jordan Levin - CultureViewMIA
"Neil Austin's lighting adds to the sense of place and drama."
Lizzie Loveridge - Curtain Up
" It blackens or becomes iridescent with Neil Austin’s lighting which also makes darkness visible."
Simon Jenner - Fringe Review
""Neil Austin provides comforting lighting for home and school but the cold neon strip and stark steel that come and go suggest all is not well.
Richard Beck - BroadwayBaby.com
Duke of York's Theatre - West End
"Rae Smith (set and costumes) and Neil Austin (lighting) have created – it is one of the most transporting design collaborations of the year – a place suffused by uncertainty and difficult feeling."
Susannah Clapp - The Observer
"The lighting, by Neil Austin, is extraordinarily evocative."
Ann Treneman - The Times
"Rae Smith's set has an eloquence of its own: a vast mausoleum of a room, with looming ancestral portraits and shuttered windows, it gradually opens up and glows bright (Neil Austin's Lighting is outstanding), only to darken again as reactionary forces take hold."
Sarah Hemming - Financial Times
"Lighting designer Neil Austin fills the room with the kind of light that moves from chilly morning, to radiant, golden afternoon to final darkness."
Sarah Crompton - Whatsonstage
"A magnificent, high-walled interior (designed by Rae Smith, beautifully lit by Neil Austin)"
Dominic Cavendish - The Telegraph
"...the glowering architecture of the room acquires an infernal glow courtesy Neil Austin's lighting as events gather to their ruinous head."
Matt Wolf - The Arts Desk
"Rae Smith’s set is a thing of brooding majesty. And Neil Austin’s dolorous lighting is beyond exquisite."
Andrzej Lukowski - Time Out
"Neil Austin casts an orange sunset across the third act like a fire burning itself out. It leaves spotlights licking at oil paintings, bringing old family portraits to life.....Austin’s lighting, cleverly, casts people in different lights at different times, warm candle glow and cold moon shine, in a reflection of Rosmer’s uncertainty and, indeed, our own. "
Matt Trueman - Variety
"The real marvels here are Rae Smith’s design and Neil Austin’s lighting. Quite honestly, I could have very happily spent the entire two and half hours watching the light fall through the windows that overlook the mill race where Rosmer’s wife lost her life.... A light lingers on an empty chair, magnifying absence; a curtain blows. Those are the moments when you lean forward."
Lyn Gardner - Stage Door
"The production is beautifully designed too. Rae Smith’s magnificent set, gorgeously lit by Neil Austin, perfectly captures the faded grandeur of the Rosmer residence, a ghosted home with flaking paintwork and shrouded family portraits on its walls. As the dustsheets are taken down and the portraits revealed, the house gradually fills with life; the room reawakening as shafts of sunlight streak across the floor. Towards the end, as the sun starts to set on Rosmer and Rebecca, the whole stage looks as if it is aflame."
Natasha Tripney - The Stage
"Rae Smith's austere, painterly design is like a crumbling mausoleum, and Neil Austin's expressive light - filtered through the dirty, rain-streaked windows - is eerily effective in suggesting that local gossip about ghosts haunting the house might have some foundation. The armchair where Rosmer's wife Beth habitually sat, before she committed suicide, is often picked out in a beam of chilly sunlight, keeping her present"
Marianka Swain - BroadwayWorld
"Rickson’s production fills the set, beautifully designed by Rae Smith as a dilapidated ancestral home, with added servants to give some sense of the working population, whose emancipation is so earnestly discussed by the privileged elite, and a gloomy Scandinavian mood is aided by Neil Austin’s austere Nordic lighting and Stephen Warbeck’s gothic music."
Aleks Sierz - The Theatre Times
"Rae Smith’s set design and Neil Austin’s lighting combine to haunting effect."
Alice Saville - Exuent
"Lighting designer Neil Austin floods the room with nordic light that hangs in the air like mist."
John Nathan - The Jewish Chronicle
"Rae Smith’s exquisite set and Neil Austin’s superlative lighting, which take us from Nordic impressionism to naturalistic gloom."
Jarlath O'Connell - The American
"With Neil Austin’s lighting design sending beams of light through the reopened windows and Rae Smith dressing the set with baskets of freshly cut wild flowers, there is hope and opportunity for all kinds of new beginnings."
Maryam Philpott - Cultural Capital
"Often eerie, sometimes unsettling, and occasionally stunning - as when the whole stage becomes flooded with the piercing russets of a ravishing evening sunset - the startling aptness of Neil Austin’s breath-taking lighting adds immeasurably to Duncan Macmillan’s meticulous new adaptation, casting light into every corner. "
Clive Burton - Theatre World Internet Magaizne
"Finally, that set. It is so beautiful. The actors could go home, I would happily stare at it for several hours. Neil Austin’s lighting is genuinely exquisite, and little touches like having an outside breeze move the curtains when the window is open move me on a spiritual level."
Grace Patrick - A Younger Theatre
"...wonderfully spacious design and moody lighting from Rae Smith and Neil Austin respectively..."
West End Whingers
"Neil Austin’s lighting design in Rosmersholm at the Duke of York’s Theatre is a thing of beauty ....creatively, this is a triumph. Neil Austin’s hauntingly perfect lighting of Rae Smith’s austerely grand designs is a thing of pure beauty as it evolves throughout the show."
Ian - ThereOughtToBeClowns.com
""Neil Austin’s superb lighting design often makes scenes look like an oil painting come to life.
Tim Masters - The Man In The Grand Cirlce
"Neil Austin’s lighting is similarly evocative, with striking shafts of light breaking through the dusty windows to expose the age and dereliction of this once great home."
Joseph Prestwich - TheSpyInTheStalls.com
Ink
MTC Friedman Theatre - Broadway
"Neil Austin’s evocatively seedy lighting is filtered through a curtain of (be warned) cigarette smoke"
Ben Brantley - New York Times
" Neil Austin’s lighting design turns crepuscular"
Robert Hofler - The Wrap
" juiced up with fancy lighting (Neil Austin)"
Toby Zinman - The Philadelphia Inquirer
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
Princess Theatre - Melbourne
"Neil Austin’s lighting design is crucial both in creating atmosphere and in helping with the illusions and magic (created by Jamie Harrison)."
Jo Litson - Limelight
"The effects (illusion and magic, Jamie Harrison), the lighting (Neil Austin), the sound (Gareth Fry, with music by Imogen Heap), the costumes (Katrina Lindsay), the movement (Steven Hoggett), are all equally brilliant, and all, at times, breathtaking."
Fiona Blair - Daily Review
"....technical aspects are impressive and dramatic, especially Neil Austin’s superb lighting design and Jamie Harrison’s sophisticated stage illusions and magic..."
Richard Watts - Performing Arts Hub
"Given the single setting, not to mention the proliferation of illusions and magical effects, Neil Austin’s extraordinary lighting design is crucial to the play’s success."
Simon Parris - Man in Chair
"The stage comes alive with trickery and movement – the use of robes and lighting is breathtaking."
Amanda Walters - Mugglenet
Company
Gielgud Theatre - West End
"Bathed in the midnight blues and hot pinks of Neil Austin’s lighting, Craig’s Bobbie glides from scene to scene, peeking into other people’s marriages."
Matt Trueman - Variety
"Neil Austin's excellent lighting and Bunny Christie's sliding neon-rimmed rooms, painted in a creepily elegant, monochrome grey, add to the impression that we are inside Bobbie's head."
Paul Taylor - The Independent
"Designer Bunnie Christie has taken the bleakness and darkness of a city like New York and with a colourful costume palette and some lighting magic from Neil Austin given Elliott’s re-gendered characters an amazing playground upon which to spill their guts about relationship, marriage, love and life."
Douglas Mayo - BritishTheatre.com
"Bunny Christie’s inventive design of sliding boxes and neon lighting from Neil Austin give it an excitingly unique look"
Ian Foster - Official Theatre.com
:"But then all the elements are gorgeously thought through. Neil Austin‘s lighting of Bunny Christie‘s elegant, crisp and sometimes witty sets of neon-trimmed rooms makes sure it is never less than lovely to look at."
West End Whingers
"Neil Austin’s Lighting design is subtly complementary"
Peter Yates - LondonTheatre1.com
The Lieutenant of Inishmore
Nöel Coward Theatre - West End
"....Christopher Oram’s pleasingly detailed set, atmospherically lit by Neil Austin...."
Natasha Tripney - The Stage
"....Neil Austin's lighting soaks the start of the second art in an infernal glow hinting at the bloodbath to come."
Matt Wolf - The Arts Desk
National Theatre - Olivier
"Stephen Warbeck's score is superbly judged, and Neil Austin's lighting is revelatory. The landscape really does seem to shift from day to night, season to season, the mists coming alive and colouring the emotional landscape too."
Marianka Swain - Broadway World
"there’s no flash, no gimmickry. But, like the fog that hangs in unmoving sheets over the stage, imperceptibly thickening throughout, Rickson’s production grows dense with meaning and melancholy."
Tim Bano - The Stage
"Billowing smoke and imposing lighting design (from Neil Austin) create atmospheric, oppressive cloudscapes that hint at a mythic past and threaten to consume the scene at any moment."
Sally Hales - Exuent Magazine
"One of the most striking elements of the production is the staging. Designer Rae Smith cleverly constrains the action to the small school, marked simply with a low wall. The remainder of the vast, sloping Olivier stage is scraggy grassland over which mist slowly unfurls. Lighting Designer Neil Austin’s broad sheets of light cut through the swirling haze, illuminating an enchanting countryside."
Nick Wells - Radio Times
"Neil Austin’s lighting is wonderful in its suggestion of vast spaces beyond sight"
Edwin Evans-Thirlwell - City AM
"Rae Smith’s setting of a stone barn classroom among peaty moorland a triumph of evocative scenery in complete contrast to her bin bag chic aesthetic of Macbeth’s blasted heath. Mist hangs in the air around the back of the Olivier stage: supplemented by Neil Austin’s lighting it both reminds us of the villagers’ isolation and the encroachment of British troops."
Scott Matthewman - The Reviews Hub
"Directed by Ian Rickson and with a fixed Olivier stage, we’re confronted with a panorama of shifting clouds and darkness, partly dry ice in Neil Austin’s starkly beautiful lighting."
Simon Jenner - Fringe Review
"Neil Austin’s lighting works beautifully in tandem with the (mainly) exterior set, to create some stunning landscape ‘views’."
Mike Scott Harding - Afridiziak
Wyndhams Theatre - West End
"Neil Austin, the excellent Lighting Designer, makes the pictures glow and throb and fade and there's a shocking moment when Ken switches on the overhead fluorescent lights - an action that rudely flattens the canvases, banishing the magic."
Paul Taylor - The Independent
"Christopher Oram’s design is still the best incarnation of an artist’s work and mind that I have seen in the theatre. It punches into the auditorium and steers to the heart of the play in a series of blood-red and bile-black canvases. Neil Austin’s lighting sends a force through these: they fade and flare; they have a pulse and rhythm."
Susannah Clapp - The Observer
"But ,most magical is Neil Austin's lighting, which quite literally illuminates the art in new ways transforming shape, colour and our emotional response."
Mariank Swain - The Arts Desk
"Grandage’s polished production, however, goes some way to countering this. Christopher Oram’s set is a kind of glorious abattoir-temple, ravishingly lit by Neil Austin."
Natasha Tripney - The Stage
"The design team bring truth and tension to the production. Christopher Oram’s set is every bit the archetypal artist’s studio from late-50s NYC, while Adam Cork’s sound grounds the action. But it is Neil Austin’s lighting that does the most here. He crafts great, deep pools of smooth red velvet in which you lose yourself. It’s awesome."
J.N. Benjamin - Exuent Magazine
"Neil Austin's lighting design is equally wonderful, especially as the lighting changes the way in which the audience sees the paintings themselves. Lighting is a frequent topic of conversation in the play as Rothko is very particular about the level of light that his paints and made and shown in, forcing the audience to pay more attention to the lighting of the play itself."
Nicole Ackman - Broadway World
"Ingenious lighting design from Neil Austin is shown to full effect when strip lighting is suddenly flicked on, transforming the set into a space resembling an abattoir. When switched off again, the audience is able to fully appreciate the way in which the soft warm glow lends a luminescence to the paintings exactly as Rothko wishes."
Rachel Coombes - Reaction
"The team behind Michael Grandage's original production at the Donmar Warehouse — which went on to win six Tonys on Broadway — once again delivers stunning results, with designer Christopher Oram's pulsating blood-red pastiches enhanced by Neil Austin's glowing lighting, backed by Adam Cork's throbbing music."
Neil Dowden - The Londonist
"Neil Austin’s lighting is equally important – such as when Rothko discusses the way in which lighting changes the way a work of art appears to the eye, the audience begins to see it with the help of Austin’s soft and perceptive lighting design, making the point clear."
Emma Clarendon - Love London Love Culture
"The set and costume design, capturing Rothko’s studio, sealed off from natural light, is another triumph for Christopher Oram, and lighting designer Neil Austin introduced me to more shades of red than I thought possible."
Paul T. Davies - BritishTheatre.com
"It is dominated by the overbearing, majestic, mysteriously edgeless, tragic and challengine reds and blacks of his Seagram- project canvases. Neil Austin’s lighting design, a miracle in itself, makes them glow and threaten, palpate and shiver in just the way the artist eloquently insists in John Logan’s astonishing play."
Libby Purves - Theatre Cat
"Neil Austin’s lighting perfectly complements the staging, giving the prominent ‘Red’ colours and incredible intensity. In one short scene the importance of the lighting is effectively demonstrated when the stage lights are replaced with harsh neon strips."
Greg Stewart - Theatre Weekly
"This is a handsome and at times mesmerising production. Thanks to a wonderful set design by Christopher Oram and lighting by Neil Austin, the huge art works on display become secondary characters in their own right.
All red and black, they glow, pulsate and radiate an energy and we can understand why Rothko treated them as his children. "
Matthew Hyde - Attitude
"Christopher Oram once again designs an impressive setting of the artist's windowless studio full of detailed painting paraphernalia and together with the lighting designer Neil Austin, creates the few truly dramatic insightful moments of the play. When the bank of fluorescent lights are switched on we see clearly the dramatic effect on how we view his art which becomes dull and flat losing its vivid pulsating impact in the glare of general lighting."
Nick Wayne - Pocketsize Theatre
"And, stacked against the walls, several enormous Rothko replicas—vast squares of ruby, magenta, ochre, vermillion, scarlet. A million shades of red. They’re not the real thing, but they’ve still got a palpable resonance. “They ebb and flow and shift, gently pulsating,” remarks Rothko. Under Neil Austin’s dusky lighting, they really do."
Elephant
Travesties
Roundabout - American Airlines Theatre - Broadway
"Abstract considerations are rendered with an extravagantly theatrical zeal that never flags. The first-rate design team includes Tim Hatley (costumes and a set that suggests a ransacked library of the mind) Neil Austin (lighting) and Adam Cork (sound and music)."
Ben Brantley - New York Times
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
Lyric Theatre - Broadway
"This stately mansion is the work of the ace set designer Christine Jones and has been shrouded in beckoning, velvety and inventively concealing shadows by Neil Austin’s lighting."
Ben Brantley - New York Times
"Christine Jones’s swirling breakapart set pieces and Neil Austin’s lighting effects are marvels, too.'
Peter Marks - Washington Post
"And when you get a load of the illusions pulled off right before your eyes — mostly with old-fashioned sleight-of-hand and crafty lighting; only occasionally with more elaborate techno-trickery — it's not hyperbole to call the show sheer magic.....The bold strokes of the design team are in evidence from the atmospheric first image — set designer Christine Jones encloses the empty stage with the ribbed girders and ornate wooden walls of a Gothic Revival English train station, and lighting magician Neil Austin floods rays through the massive railway clock that becomes a key visual motif......In addition to Jones' imposing sets and Austin's chiaroscuro lighting with its splashes of cathedral-like grandeur, the work of everyone on the design team deserves kudos."
David Rooney - Hollywood Reporter
"Set designer Christine Jones and lighting designer Neil Austin keep much of the stage shrouded in mystery, the better to accommodate a continual stream of thrilling illusions and effects."
Adam Feldman - Time Out
"The staging—Christine Jones' design, Neil Austin's lighting, Gareth Fry's sound, Ross and Woodward's video—is so clever and inventive."
Tim Teeman - Daily Beast
"The sets are minimal but extravagant, a strange combination that shows a mark of artistry from designer Christine Jones, with game-changing lighting from Neil Austin"
Mark Snetiker - Entertainment Weekly
"Major, major kudos to director John Tiffany, lighting designer Neil Austin, and Illusions and Magic guru Jamie Harrison for taking something that existed solely in imaginations and turning it into art that is real and live — particularly impressive without the benefit of movie CGI."
Erin Stricker - Mashable.com
"Harrison’s work — along with set designer Christine Jones, lighting designer Neil Austin, sound designer Gareth Fry and many others — make this one of the most visually majestic, consistently surprising Broadway productions ever mounted."
Christopher Kelly - NJ.com
"Great credit is also due to Neil Austin’s sharply articulated lighting design, whose deep swaths of shadow and streaks of blinding brightness facilitate much of the show’s misdirection."
Sarah Holdren - Vulture
"The play is directed by Tony award winner John Tiffany and features the work of illusionist Jamie Harrison and lighting by Neil Austin.... The magical quality of the scenery, lighting and uillusions carries the viewer to a new dimension."
Nat Bernan - TV Overmind
Cinderella
Matthew Bourne's New Adventures
"Lez Brotherston’s superbly evocative sets and Neil Austin’s clever lighting move us seamlessly from scene to scene – most hauntingly from ravaged London streets to the devastated Café de Paris, which transforms into the scene of the ball through a reverse-time sequence.'
Siobhan Murphy - Time Out
"The staging is faultless thanks to Lez Brotherston’s dashing costumes and sets, which won an Olivier Award for his original designs, lighting by Olivier Award-winning Neil Austin and the characters lifted from his favourite films."
Rachel Nouchi - LondonDance.com
"It’s a gorgeous production with typically excellent set and costume design by Bourne’s long time collaborator, Lez Brotherston.... Add to this the thrillingly immersive lighting design of Neil Austin and some very high quality projections by Duncan Maclean and the visual impact is stunning."
Rym Kechacha - BachTrack
Albion
Almeida Theatre
"...the captivating beauty of Rupert Goold’s season-shifting production – an understated, virtuoso combination of Miriam Buether’s grassy set, Neil Austin’s sumptuous lighting, and Gregory Clarke’s subtle sound."
Fergus Morgan - Exuent Magazine
"...it is deftly tended by Rupert Goold on Miriam Buether’s simple garden set, exquisitely lit by Neil Austin."
Sarah Hemming - Financial Times
"But, there is one element of Albion which proves truly exceptional: aesthetic. Prolific German designer Miriam Buether has outdone herself here.... Coupled with Neil Austin’s subtle but impressive lighting design, there’s a real organic beauty to Albion, rivalled only by nature herself. Moments look as though they could have been lifted straight out of storybooks, with rich colours being illuminated by sparse beams of light shining through the leaves of the towering beech tree..... As far as aesthetic is concerned, this is surely one of the most stunning shows in London at the moment."
Matt Owen - The 730 Review
Ink
Almeida Theatre
"The set design by Bunny Christie is gorgeously complimented by lighting and sound by Neil Austin and Adam Cork, and together they create the ever grey, clunking and dusty environment of the 70’s printing press on Fleet Street. All suits, cigarette smoke, projections, spotlights and lurking in shadows, the tone of the play is permanently ominous."
A Younger Theatre
Woyzeck
Old Vic Theatre
"The production, directed by Joe Murphy, has a dark clarity. Tom Scutt has provided a set of padded moving panels that float in from above and from the sides. When they are punched or damaged, bloody entrails are shown beneath; by the close, they have vanished, leaving Woyzeck and his demons alone in a vast, disorientating space, with deep shadows created by Neil Austin's lighting and a sense of doom conjured by Isobel Waller- Bridge's threatening music."
Sarah Crompton - WhatsOnStage
The Treatment
Almeida Theatre
”Neil Austin’s lighting washes each scene in one single colour, again underscoring the artifice of the whole play.”
Tim Bano - The Stage
"Giles Cadle's cool design, a series of self-contained boxes, and Neil Austin's lighting, emphasise reds and greens, pure opposites of colour that underline the appositions of the text: truth or illusion, goodness or corruption, city or forest, simple or sophisticated, blindness or clear-sight."
Sarah Crompton - WhatsOnStage
Travesties
Apollo Theatre - West End
”Neil Austin's chameleon lighting neatly transports us from the music hall to an Anna Karenina-style railway and back out of the rabbit hole again.”
Alexandra Coghlan - Broadway World
”Stoppard’s witty and moving play is realised with energy, against Tim Hatley’s layered set design and clever lighting from Neil Austin.”
Christina Caré - Londontheatre1.com
Buried Child
Trafalgar Studios - West End
”Derek McLane’s set and Neil Austin’s lighting are exemplary in conjuring the family’s bleak, rain-lashed shithole of a home.”
Andrzej Lukowsky - Time Out
”...Derek McLane's set, thoughtfully lit by Neil Austin...”
Marianka Swain -Broadway World
”The silences and deadpan humour really enhance the atmosphere as does Derek McLane's great naturalistic set and Neil Austin's evocative lighting, which give us the feeling of time passing and life ebbing away.”
Jarlath O'Connell - The American
The Entertainer
Garrick Theatre - West End
”With the help of Neil Austin’s theatrical lighting design, Archie Rice’s dancers and the live band, ‘The Entertainer’ offers a stylish pizzazz”
Alexa Terry - BritishTheatre.com
”Christopher Oram’s set is gorgeously decayed, with holes in its heavenly frescos and silt stains up its walls. Lighting designer Neil Austin picks out its gilt edges with old low-watt lightbulbs.”
Matt Trueman - Variety
”Neil Austin’s lighting is breathtakingly good and some of the images he creates with light – including the stark, back image of Branagh’s Archie rehearsing in a spotlight, wrapped in haze, as the play opens – are gorgeous.”
Jarlath 'Connell - The American
“Christopher Oram’s evocative design suggests a blurring of reality by positioning a once-grand proscenium arch within the Rice’s family home, and Neil Austin’s lighting casts a shimmer that can turn ominous at will.”
Matt Wolf - New York Times
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
Palace Theatre - West End
”Harrison’s magic, Katrina Lindsay’s costumes and Neil Austin’s lighting achieve triumphant fulfilment in the creation of...”
Michael Billington - The Guardian
”Certainly Jamie Harrison deserves his own special Olivier for his illusion work, while Neil Austin’s lighting design is stupendous and absolutely key to the success of the magic.”
Andrzej Lukowski- Time Out
”Jamie Harrison’s illusions, sleight of hand and misdirection would be nothing without Neil Austin’s exquisite lighting.”
Matt Trueman - Variety
“Along with a team that includes Katrina Lindsay (costumes), Neil Austin (lighting) and Imogen Heap (music), Mr. Tiffany and his cast conjure the self-contained world(s) of Ms. Rowling’s books with imagistic wit, precision and, occasionally, stark terror.”
Ben Brantley - New York Times
“Neil Austin’s lighting is crucial to the battle of darkness and light: it seems to irradiate.”
Susannah Clapp - The Observer
“Set Designer Christine Jones, Costume Designer Katrina Lindsay and Lighting Designer Neil Austin have created a playground for Harry Part 8 bringing to life a plethora of locations, familiar characters and some absolutely gobsmacking treats. Illusionist Jamie Harrison uses this playground to full effect creating some jaw-dropping moments. This is technical theatre at its absolute best.”
Douglas Mayo - BritishTheatre.com
Hughie
Booth Theatre - Broadway
”Mr. Grandage, the ace British director of “Red” and “The Cripple of Inishmaan” on Broadway, and the designers Christopher Oram (set and costumes), Neil Austin (lighting) and Adam Cork (sound and music) have transformed the play’s seedy hotel into what feels like a halfway house between the living and the dead.”
Ben Brantley - New York Times
“The production is gorgeous, of course (you would expect something else from Grandage?), with a strikingly dilapidated set from Christopher Oram and elegant ghostly lighting from Neil Austin.”
Alexis Soloski - The Guardian
“At one point, Erie stops talking….and eerie takes over, courtesy of sound designer Adam Cork’s original music, and Neil Austin’s superb lighting design. During this brief interlude, which seems to suggest in an instant the passage of the day from sunrise to sunset, it struck me that Erie’s late night encounter with the night clerk was somehow a metaphor for the passage of his entire life, perhaps even the passage of his way of life.”
Jonathan Mandell - DC Theatre Scene
“Lighting designer Neil Austin applies Hopper green liberally throughout the show, signaling not so much changes in the day as the gradual ebbs and flows of an otherwise stagnate life.”
Robert Hofler - The Wrap
“The very handsome production features an imposing, ghost-like hotel lobby interior by Christopher Oram, who also designed the costumes, with properly unsettling lights (Neil Austin) and sound (Adam Cork).”
Michael Dale - Broadway World
“Lighting designer Neil Austin casts a murky pall over the scene with the smoky interior illumination, filtering the outside world through the revolving doors and leadlight windows above them...... Grandage and his team of frequent collaborators have honored the inherent theatricality of the slender piece while fortifying it with an immersive cinematic presentation.”
David Rooney - The Hollywood Reporter
“And the sickly, sooty lighting by Neil Austin—dissolving into saturated green washes—adds to the ghostly underworld feel.”
David Cote - Time Out New York
“The latticework of shadows cast across the set by lighting designer Neil Austin adds to the sense of this cavernous old lobby as a place where Erie can hide, find some relief from the bleakness of his days”
Peter Marks - The Washington Post
“A neon “Hotel” sign is partially visible through the window. Muffled traffic sounds and subdued lighting add to the mood of quiet, otherworldly unease.........Christopher Oram’s gorgeous set is so detailed and evocative, it almost becomes a third character in the drama. Adam Cork’s brooding original music and sound design and Neil Austin’s muted and affecting lighting design also play a major part in the play’s success, creating a pervasive, ominous sense of dread and foreboding.
Shari Lifland - Center on the Aisle
“Thus, at play’s beginning, for several minutes, we have been staring at the huge staircase in the murky depths of a once grand hotel lobby trying to make out the details of former glory. Slowly, lighting designer Neil Austin brings on the light of day, eery, portentous, depressed.......With the assistance of designer Neil Austin’s silken lighting, director Grandage punctuates Erie’s monologue—the play is essentially one long monologue – into three mood divisions which the night clerk simply endures.”
Eugene Paul - Theaterscene.com
“Neil Austin’s lighting and Christopher Oram’s scenic and costume design are exceptional. The hotel looks rundown, the actors look rundown and even the air in the lobby appears rundown.”
Jeff Myhre - NT Theatre Guide
”Under Neil Austin’s crepuscular lighting, the place looks like a cross between the Hotel Cortez in “American Horror Story” and the Haunted House at Disneyland.”
Marilyn Stasio - Variety
“....within the imposing set and Neil Austin’s entombing lighting, all gorgeous.”
Jeremy Gerard - Deadline Hollywood
“"Hughie" does feature a very beautiful set (by Christopher Oram) and lighting design (by Neil Austin); employing somber shades of ochre, the designers gorgeously evokes a place (and an entire way of life) gone to seed. “
Christopher Kelly - NJ.com
“He’s been given a first rate production, designed and costumed by Christopher Cram and lit by Neil Austin which greatly support the writing and the performance. One can feel the aching loneliness of this unnamed hotel, one can almost smell the damp and fading walls and we recoil at the scariness of the vast and winding staircase that leads to even more despair upstairs in the shadowy floors where people sleep.”
Richard Seff - DC Metro Theater Arts
“It's all dimly reflected through designer Neil Austin's atmospheric almost haunted lighting. “
Simon Saltzman - Curtain Up
“It is, however, lighted with an eye toward emotional illumination by Neil Austin.”
Matthew Murray - Talkin’ Broadway
“....dramatic shifts in Neil Austin’s noirish lighting and Adam Cork’s purple original music during pauses in the action.”
David Sheward - Cultural Weekly
“The lights begin hazy and dim, but swell, along with music (designed by Neil Austin and Adam Cork, respectively) at moments such as when Erie brings out his dice for a game of craps at the lobby desk right as the show nears its ambiguous ending. “
Jessica Derschowitz - Entertainment Weekly
“This shabby lobby, lit so sickly green that it seems more submerged shipwreck than earthly building, is the setting for this rarely-performed Eugene O’Neill play from 1942.”
Hermione Hoby - The Telegraph
“This is the Michael Grandage Company’s first project direct on Broadway and he, along with the invaluable assistance of composer Adam Cork and lighting designer Neil Austin, invests it with lots of atmosphere”
Mark Shenton - The Stage
Evening at the Talkhouse
National Theatre - Dorfman
”....Neil Austin’s poetic lighting.”
Michael Coveney - Whatsonstage.com
The Winter's Tale
Garrick Theatre - West End
”And Neil Austin’s lighting would have won gasps of admiration from David Lean.”
Lloyd Evans - The Spectator
“The lighting from Neil Austin is breath-taking: subtly he changes mood and indicates perspective with light. You see
Hermione and Polixenes as Leontes sees them, but also as they actually are; you feel the power of the Oracle at Delphi;
the magical moment when Dench/Time tells of the passage of 16 years is so beautiful as to be almost painful; and then
the introduction of Florizel and Perdita is achieved with a clever lighting device. But the immaculate beauty of the statue
Paulina reveals to Leontes at the last is Austin’s greatest achievement here, and there are many more, too numerous to list.”
Stephen Collins - BritishTheatre.com
All On Her Own
Garrick Theatre - West End
“Wanamaker looks fabulous in a pencil skirt and a brunette hairdo so finely shaped and delicately illuminated that it might be the work of Vermeer.”
Lloyd Evans - The Spectator
“Neil Austin's lighting is a key player: vast shadows dance behind Wanamaker, like ghosts come to cruelly mock her loneliness.”
James Fitzgerald - The Londonist
Photograph 51
Nöel Coward Theatre Theatre - West End
”Neil Austin’s forensic lighting, cutting through clouds of haze, sees to it that as Edward Bennett and Will Attenborough’s Crick and Watson finally unravel a secret held from mankind for millennia, all hint of rosiness in Rosalind’s face vanishes, a deathly pallor taking its stead. Can one image tell us almost everything? Yes, it can. A triumph.”
Dominic Cavendish - The Telegraph
”Grandage and his usual collaborators – designers Christopher Oram, Neil Austin, and Adam Cork, preeminently – are here at the top of their considerable game, Cork's sound design punctuating the 95-minute piece with the pulsating beat of a thriller even as Austin's ravishing lighting shifts from the faded hues of a period photograph to shafts of blinding illumination in keeping with the more breathless passages of the text.”
Matt Wolf - The Arts Desk
“Meanwhile, Grandage and his satisfyingly constant team could make a doodle look like the model of a double‑helix. Adam Cork’s urgent snatches of music and Neil Austin’s darts of lighting haunt Christopher Oram’s grand, lugubrious design, giving it unsuspected dimensions.”
Susannah Clapp - The Observer
Our Country's Good
National Theatre - Olivier
“....With its sumptuous lighting (Neil Austin)...”
David Jays - The Observer
“While Neil Austin’s lighting was exceptionally good,”
Stephen Collins - BritishTheatre.com
Bend it Like Beckham
Phoenix Theatre - West End
”Chadha’s production, Aletta Collins’s choreography and Neil Austin’s lighting between them neatly overcome the problem of putting football on stage”
Michael Billington - The Guardian
”The staging is stunning, from Neil Austin's lighting, Katrina Lindsay's costumes and Miriam Buether's sets. Everything is bright, colourful and intelligent, and there are even impressive moments involving footballs and a stand-in David Beckham.”
Tom Eames - Digital Spy
Dara
National Theatre - Lyttelton
"Together with Neil Austin’s lighting - a master class in chiaroscuro - the design effectively conveys an atmosphere of obfuscation and secrecy; of whispering in corners around an imperial fortress where no-one, servant or brother, is to be trusted”
Laura Barnett - Telegraph
”It also looks consistently beautiful in Nadia Fall’s production with the sliding lattice screens of Katrina Lindsay’s design and the soft hues of Neil Austin’s lighting proving richly atmospheric.”
Michael Billington - The Guardian
”Katrina Lindsay's design, elevated by Neil Austin’s exquisite lighting, is both sumptuous and sparse, colourful and stark”
Matt Trueman - Whatsonstage.com
Assassins
Menier Chocolate Factory
”The overarching conceit is simple but ingenious, and Lloyd – a clever director with a gift for visual sensation – serves it brilliantly, with artful help from set-designer Soutra Gilmour, who deposits chunks of funfair attractions here and there, and lighting wiz Neil Austin, who creates a canopy of bulbs that blaze in synchronicity with gun-shots.”
Dominic Cavendish - The Telegraph
”Sound designer Gregory Clarke relishes every click of the catch and squeeze of the trigger, and Neil Austin’s immense lighting doubles gunshots as the flashbulbs of press cameras.”
Matt Trueman - Variety
Shakespeare in Love
Nöel Coward Theatre Theatre - West End
”further enhanced by Neil Austin’s lighting, delineating spaces and contrasting moods with unshowy aplomb”
David Benedict - Variety
”Neil Austin’s stunning lighting that at times feels like an oil painting”
Matthew Amer - OfficialLondonTheatre.co.uk
Macbeth
Park Avenue Armory
”The deluxe design team for “Macbeth” — which includes Christopher Oram (set and costumes) and Neil Austin (lighting) — has conjured a world that feels as lonely and immense as a blasted heath and as confining as a mausoleum...
Mr. Austin’s lighting summons shadows pregnant with menace...”
Ben Brantley - New York Times
“a Stonehenge-like arrangement of upright stones, backlit by unearthly shafts of light emanating from some unholy place.......
But the entire design team deserves a collective rave: Christopher Shutt, for the unnerving sounds of live battle; lighting designer Neil Austin, for causing the heavens to crack open and spill its radiance; and Christopher Oram, for his heroically scaled set and minutely detailed costumes — the yin and yang of a boundless visual imagination.”
Gordon Cox - Variety
“....a brilliant design team.....Stunning stage pictures punctuate the production, bathed in the piercing shafts of Neil Austin's sepulchral lighting. Among them is the disturbing image of the witches, who at one point appear to levitate between Oram's stone pillars”
David Rooney - The Hollywood Reporter
The Silver Tassie
National Theatre - Lyttelton
”The entire cast is united in a vision of a play that erupts in design terms during its neo-expressionist second act. Neil Austin’s lighting lends a sulphurous fury to Vicki Mortimer’s epically bombed out set.”
Matt Wolf - The Arts Desk
“Neil Austin's lighting drizzles despair on to Vicki Mortimer's impressive design.”
Susannah Clapp - The Observer
"Act II begins with one of the most affecting and impressive scene changes I have ever witnessed. Set and sound designers, Vicki Mortimer and Paul Groothuis respectively, and lighting supremo Neil Austin create an impressive array of scarily realistic explosions using a party of pyrotechnics that resonate and vibrate throughout the vast auditorium."
Samuel Sims - A Younger Theatre
Birdland
Royal Court Theatre
”Neil Austin's lighting alarms with fluorescent glare.
Susannah Clapp - The Observer
“MacNeil’s whole design is almost distractingly gorgeous – a brutalist triumphal arch or Stonehenge lit by Neil Austin in a multi-dimensional array of album cover friendly, polychromatic hues.”
Alice Saville - AuditoriumMag.com
“Visual props and lighting are almost another character in
the play....”
Eleanor MacFarlane - The Upcoming
The Night Alive
The Atlantic Theatre - New York
”The otherworldliness of these scenes is accomplished partly by subtle shifts in lighting (by Neil Austin) and sound (by Gregory Clarke).”
Ben Brantley - New York Times
”Neil Austin's evocative lighting and Gregory Clarke's soundscape deepen the moodiness of the drama.”
David Gordon - Theatermania.com
The El Train
Hoxton Hall
”The El.Train turns out to be more of a moody occasion than a theatrical discovery but there's some terrific sound and lighting by Alex Baranowski and Neil Austin”
Michael Coveney - Whatsonstage.com
Henry V
Nöel Coward Theatre Theatre - West End
”Neil Austin's lighting genuinely illumines two scenes: one where Ron Cook's turkeycock Pistol parts from Noma Dumezweni's touching Mistress Quickly has a flickering, firelit glow and the eve-of-Agincourt ruminations are accompanied by the "watchful fires" exactly specified in the text.”
Michael Billington - The Guardian
”This provides a stage-wide canvas for lighting designer Neil Austin who produces his most exciting work since his Tony-winning design for Grandage’s “Red.” On this standing set, Austin’s shifting intensities and walls of light create thrillingly contrasted moods and locations that, crucially, allows audiences to focus completely on the actors.”
David Benedict - Variety
“What it does wonderfully well – it is the main surprise of the production – is to conjure episodes of intimacy. Neil Austin's lighting, a fundamental part of the design, continually creates small enclosures. The scene in which a disguised Henry visits his faltering men at night is staged with great beauty: with camp fires below and stars above, as if light was falling to earth”
Susannah Clapp - The Observer
“Christopher Oram’s set is austerely spectacular, stripped timbers given dramatic framing by Neil Austin’s lighting.”
Dominic Maxwell - The Times
“Subtle changes in lighting can make the set look as steely as armour, or gilded in a courtly light, while the anxious eve of Agincourt is most beautifully done, the soldiers crouched around their wood fires in their homespun cloaks, armed with simple axes, rather than expensive swords, the starry sky above.”
Christopher Hart - Sunday Times
“Simplicity makes for fluidity and this, together with eloquent use of lighting by Neil Austin, keeps the play moving.”
Sarah Hemming - Financial Times
”Neil Austin’s lighting glows offstage for the death of Falstaff,”
Michael Coveney - The Stage
Le Corsaire
English National Ballet
”...lighting designer Neil Austin washes the minarets and pirate encampments with a seductive, filmic glow.”
Luke Jennings - The Observer
Julius Caesar
St. Ann's Warehouse - New York
”Bunny Christie is the designer, and Neil Austin did the artfully harsh lighting.”
Ben Brantley - The New York Times
”The lighting by Neil Austin, the sound by Tom Gibbons and the movement by Ann Yee are all superlative.”
Michael Giltz - The Huffington Post
Evita
US National Tour
”Oram’s detailed sets and costumes and Neil Austin’s spectacular lighting wouldn’t be amiss at Glyndebourne.”
David C. Nichols - Los Angeles Times
Macbeth
Manchester International Festival
”Neil Austin’s superlative lighting glints through murky air, a bank of pillar candles glowing at one end of the stage; church windows are uncovered at strategic moments.”
David Jays - The Sunday Times
”Set off by a chancel at one end, where a constellation of votive candles burn wanly and in vain, this linear stage is a limited space. Yet as lighted by Neil Austin, it feels both infinite and claustrophobic, in the way that deep darkness often does. (Patrick Doyle’s immersive ecclesiastical music and Christopher Shutt’s sound enhance this impression.) I have never seen a “Macbeth” in which “light thickens” so obscuringly and illuminatingly.
When the sunlight finally streams through a rose window for the coronation scene, it is pale and watery. Otherwise, you have the sense that everyone onstage is straining to see through muck and murk, whether indoors or out. Partial vision, and the hard lessons of war-torn Scotland, keep all the characters on edge, their fight-or-flight mechanisms in overdrive. You never know, after all, who’s lurking nearby, as servants, soldiers and that macabre threesome — an exceptionally lithe and orgasmic set of witches — keep materializing at unwelcome and unexpected moments.”
Ben Brantley - The New York Times
”Christopher Oram’s design suspends a large crucifix from the ceiling, lit by daylight (clever stuff by designer Neil Austin). This comes into its own in the ‘England’ scene, where a boyish Malcolm (Alexander Vlahos) tests Macduff (an energetically splendid Ray Fearon) with his false confession, backed by an illuminated stained-glass window.”
Michael Coveney - The Stage
”St Peter’s, a 19th-century Anglican church.... has been converted for the production into a space that is more installation art than theatre. High-ceilinged and low-lit, with a cluster of candles flickering at the altar, it is an almost overwhelming setting for a play about sin and the supernatural – as if the place itself were a character, or force, in the drama....
Neil Austin’s lighting and Christopher Shutt’s sound design serve mostly as intensifiers....
In the gloom and sudden spotlight, everything is sinister, double-edged.....
Branagh and Ashford’s gets to the terrifying heart of Macbeth’s mystery and bleakness.....
And there is no interval, no respite from this truly immersive experience. It does not simply rely on its setting....but harnesses its resonant power, yielding a host of compelling performances.”
Griselda Murray Brown - The Financial Times
”At one point the screened rose window above suddenly clears to flood Duncan’s funeral procession with natural light and give the usurper false dignity.””
Libby Purves - The Times
The Night Alive
Donmar Warehouse
”Music is used strikingly throughout, especially at the play's opening; combined with Neil Austin’s lighting, the powerful and vivid sound plunges the audience into a state of intrigued anticipation””
Alice Chappell - BroadwayWorld.com
Children of the Sun
National Theatre - Lyttelton
”They’re back, and this time it’s Gorky. Dream team director Howard Davies, translator Andrew Upton, designer Bunny Christie and lighting designer Neil Austin have repeatedly attached tragicomic jump-leads to the unfamiliar (Bulgakov’s The White Guard) and the well-worn (The Cherry Orchard) to explode the myth encapsulated by Ira Gershwin’s lyric: “I’ve found more clouds of grey/Than any Russian play could guarantee.
The heat conveyed by the ensemble cast, Austin’s gleaming sunlight and the climatic coup de theatre that it would be unfair to reveal, create the kind of richly theatrical world unimaginable outside of subsidy””
David Benedict - The Arts Desk
24 Preludes
Royal Ballet - Royal Opera House
”Placed against cloudy projections, very well lit by Neil Austin, the women in the obligatory dainty frocks and the men in curious silvery blousons, the cast dance through Ratmansky’s fluent and ingenious encounters evoking sudden joys and mysterious despairs...”
Clement Crisp - Financial Times
”The fluent lines and bright footwork suggest shifting relationships, as changeable as the skyscapes Neil Austin’s lighting paints on the backdrop. Colleen Atwood’s elegant, silvery dresses and tunics shimmer in the shifting light.”
Zoë Anderson - The Independent
“The first of these is also one of the ballet's wonders: against a twilit, watery sky, dancers spin delicate traceries of movement that shimmer, coalesce and fade like the clouds themselves.”
Judith Mackrell - The Guardian
”It takes place against an aqueous backdrop, lit by Neil Austin to reflect changing moods and times of day.”
Jann Parry - DanceTabs.com
”Neil Austin’s lighting design projects a different mackerel sky for each prelude, usually with sunrise or sunset colors”
Alastair Macaulay - New York Times
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Richard Rodgers Theatre - Broadway
”...this is a cavernous mausoleum, drenched in Neil Austin’s sepulchral lighting and ominous shadows, which pour in through those aforementioned drapes.”
David Rooney - The Hollywood Reporter
Red
Mark Taper Forum - Los Angeles
”Grandage’s Tony-sweeping design team literally dramatizes the age-old aesthetic conversation -- reason vs. chaos; Apollo vs. Dionysus....
Most striking of all is Neil Austin’s amalgam of realistic and expressionistic lighting, in which a normal floodlamp can suddenly pinpoint a character’s terror. Austin keeps transforming plainly objective illumination sources into subjective creative statements, inspiring both insight and discomfort in the spectator -- just as Rothko’s art does.
The world brought alive under Austin’s instruments is completely recognizable. So is the excruciating pain at its heart.”
Bob Verini - Variety
“Christopher Oram’s imposing recreations of massive Rothko paintings, lit with superb nuance by Neil Austin create quite a show...”
Don Shirley - LA Stage Times
“...Rothko’s massive, messy loft, a sepulchral place rendered with masterful detail by Christopher Oram (scenic designer) and Neil Austin (lighting).”
Paul Hodgins - OC Register
“...his Bowery studio (superbly realized by set designer Christopher Oram and lighting designer Neil Austin).”
David C. Nichols - Backstage.com
“The set and lighting designers’ work is outstanding. One feels as if in an urban warehouse and is brought into the world that Rothko preferred, dimly lit, bleak, dark, like all the hues and tones of the color “red”.”
Firemoonrage
The Doctor's Dilemma
National Theatre - Lyttelton
”...both Peter McKintosh's design and Neil Austin's lighting strikingly contrast the bland affluence of a private medical practice with the death-haunted atmosphere of Dubedat's studio.”
Michael Billington - The Guardian
”Peter McKintosh’s turn-of-the-century designs are supremely handsome, taking in Shaw’s Harley Street consulting rooms, a Bond Street gallery and an aesthetically disarrayed studio, all lit evocatively by Neil Austin.”
Alexandra Coghlan - The Arts Desk
“The play is handsomely and ingeniously designed by Peter McKintosh, gorgeously lit by Neil Austin...”
Michael Coveney - Whatsonstage.com
“Lighting designer Neil Austin throws around some gorgeous colours and Peter McKintosh’s set complements the richness.””
Quentin Letts - The Daily Mail
“The ingenious set design by Peter McKintosh was beautifully lit by Neil Austin;...”
Christina Folkard - TheGoodReview
“...The sets, designed by Peter McKintosh and lit by Neil Austin, deserve their own accolades as they alternate between the sterile affluence of the doctor’s office to the clutter and ironic liveliness of Dubedat’s studio.”
James Drew - The Londonist
“Neil Austin’s lighting is particularly effective in a beautifully muted death scene”
Neil Dowden - Exuent
Evita
Marquis Theatre, Broadway
”Christopher Oram’s design re-creates the grandeur of the capital’s architecture, and Neil Austin’s lighting stunningly modulates spark and shadow........succeeds at delivering stunning theatrical beauty.”
Brendan Lemon - The Financial Times
“Neil Austin's brilliant lighting makes use of low front and side angles to give everything a film-noir touch. His interiors are dark, almost clammy, with brilliant bursts of lighting shooting through open doorways or half-shaded windows; thanks to his contribution, the very air reeks with corruption.”
David Barbour - L&S Online America
“”From designer Christopher Oram’s stately sets and superb 1930s and ‘40s costumes to Neil Austin’s celestial lighting, this is a ravishing spectacle.”
David Rooney - The Hollywood Reporter
“Christopher Oram's monumental sets are satisfyingly old-fashioned, and Neil Austin has lighted them in a spectacular manner that put me in mind, appropriately enough, of "Triumph of the Will."”
Terry Teachout - The Wall Street Journal
“Grandage puts on a well-paced, strongly executed show, making clever use of Christopher Oram’s enchanting and detailed sets and Neil Austin’s fabulously expressive lighting.”
David Sheward - Backstage.com
“Grandage....reunites with his design team.... Christopher Oram (sets and costumes) and Neil Austin (lights). Everything looks stunning.”
Steven Suskin - Variety
“Christopher Oram's balconies, palace facade and a piazza – all warmly lit by Neil Austin – are stunningly lifelike and rich.”
Mark Kennedy - The Washington Post
“The wonderful set of exterior mansions and balconies, as well as costume design is by Christopher Oram. It comes alive with Neil Austin’s subtle lighting techniques.”
Sandi Durell - Examiner.com
“a lavishly designed and lit affair that would be right at home in an opera house......Enriching Oram's stunning stage pictures and true to the period costumes is Neil Austin's spectacular, mood and narrative enhancing lighting......Stagecraft doesn't get much better than this”
Elysse Sommer - CurtainUp.com
“Grandage takes advantage of the impressive scenic design of Christopher Oram and the lighting design of Neil Austin to paint pictures on stage. Oram’s set creates a feel of the Casa Rosada with its arched windows, and Austin’s dramatic top and back-lighting set the mood.”
Andrew C McGibbon - TheAndyGram
“Neil Austin’s lighting lends the required regal presence to the Casa Rosada, where Eva Peron memorably addresses the Argentine people.”
Robert Kahn - NBC New York
“Smoky Atmospherics and well-detailed background movement further enhance the musical’s already significant charms. Designer Neil Austin often casts a richly golden light upon Eva as she ascnds from the gutter theatrtical to her short-lived glory as a Madonna of the masses.”
Michael Sommers - New Jersey Newsroom
“The new show's look is gorgeous, with a set, designed by Christopher Oram, that suggests an elegant Buenos Aires courtyard, with arched entryways, pillars and balconies, dramatically lit by Neil Austin.”
Robert Feldberg - The Record, North Jersey.com
“The sets are enhanced by Neil Austin’s lighting, which creates an atmosphere that alternates between worshipful and menacing.”
Jonathan Mandell - The Faster Times
She Stoops to Conquer
National Theatre Olivier
“...designer Mark Thompson and lighting designer Neil Austin so tame the space and shape the action that the ebullient cast always look gloriously at home.”
David Benedict - Variety
Company
Sheffield Crucible Theatre
“Jonathan Munby’s world-class revival..... With Neil Austin’s gorgeous lighting arrangements complementing the impeccable design (by Christopher Oram) of Bobby’s Manhattan loft apartment (so that tessellated floor panels glow and flash with mood-setting – even disco-mimicking – colour), the stage is set for ensemble playing of the highest order.”
Dominic Cavendish - The Telegraph
“The set is complemented admirably by Neil Austin’s superb lighting design, which very ably transforms a bachelor's apartment into a busy discotheque with no set change required.”
Ruth Deller - Broadway World
“The set is a perfect New York loft created masterfully by Christopher Oram and lit by Neil Austin using mosaic flooring that captures every mood from late night confessions to disco frenzy.”
Sheena Hastings - Yorkshire Post
Death and the Maiden
Harold Pinter Theatre
“...the expert lighting of Neil Austin...”
Mark Shenton - The Stage
The Veil
National Theatre, Lyttelton
“...Rae Smith’s high-ceilinged set and Neil Austin’s atmospheric lighting are a continual delight.”
Veronica Lee - The Arts Desk
“...Neil Austin’s moody lighting on the dwindling grandeur of Rae Smith’s detailed house...”
David Benedict - Variety
The Cherry Orchard
National Theatre, Olivier
“...the expressive texture of Neil Austin's ravishing lighting”
David Benedict - Variety
“Neil Austin’s lighting expertly charts the progression toward the doomsday of sorts traveled by the text”
Matt Wolf - New York Times
“Howard Davies’s production, which is breathtakingly well designed by Bunny Christie and beautifully lit by Neil Austin, delivers an urgent, engaging and unsentimental production of a prophetic masterpiece.”
Michael Coveney - Whatsonstage.com
“Neil Austin’s soft autumn light casts a gentle glow on Bunny Christie’s beautifully designed dacha set, its stripped floorboards speaking of a grandeur and sparkle that is long gone.”
Ben Dowell - The Stage
“Thankfully, Neil Austin's atmospheric lighting gives us an idea of [the Cherrry Orchard’s] warmth and draw.”
Naima Kahn - Spoonfed
King Lear
Brooklyn Academy of Music
“Christopher Oram's set is deceptively simple, with just towering slats of wood decorated as if Jackson Pollock had dripped pastels on them. And yet the storm scenes come alive when Neil Austin's lighting seeps through the gaps in the planks and smoke swirls across the stage.“
Mark Kennedy - ABC News
“Director Grandage is aided greatly by Christopher Oram’s simple wooden design, which allows Neil Austin’s lighting to flare through the cracks to vivid effect.
All the elements combine brilliantly when Jacobi delivers Lear’s speech in the storm -- “Rage! Blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes.” Rather than bluster at full voice, the actor speaks in a harsh but clear whisper illuminated from below.”
Ray Bennett - The Hollywood Reporter
Betty Blue Eyes
Novello Theatre
“Tim Hatley's versatile succession of sliding shop-fronts and houses is set against a vista of green hills shown in streams of sunlight and extravagantly colored sunsets by Neil Austin's lighting. It's a highly effective contrast to his deliberately washed-out depiction of dowdy lives, as epitomized by the faded colors checks of Hatley's pitch-perfect period costumes.“
David Benedict - Variety
The Children’s Hour
Comedy Theatre
“...Mark Thompson's evocative, clapboard-house designs lit with haunting pale intensity by Neil Austin“
David Benedict - Variety
“...there’s great design back-up in Mark Thompson’s tall, grey, slightly indefinite setting and Neil Austin’s beautiful lighting.“
Michael Coveney - Whatsonstage.com
Cinderella
New Adventures - Sadler’s Wells
“Neil Austin’s virtuoso lighting conjures the flaming London skies and leads our eye around the crowded stage.“
Louise Levene - Sunday Telegraph
“Lez Brotherston’s set is a virtuosic evocation of black-and-white Forties movies into which, as love and hope blossom, lighting designer Neil Austin floods the colours of the Union Jack, rich blue, arresting red, and a soft golden ivory.“
Ismene Brown - Arts Desk
“...a showy, spectacular piece of staging with sets crashing down and inventive lighting...”
Neil Norman - Daily Express
King Lear
Donmar Warehouse
“This beautiful, austere production unfolds on a near empty set.....The production subtly fuses internal and external worlds, most notably in the tempest. It is presaged by Neil Austin’s eerie storm lighting, erupts in a blaze of sound and light that threatens to break down the back wall but then drops to a distant hum as Jacobi delivers “blow winds” in a whisper, so that we seem to be in his mind.“
Sarah Hemming - Financial Times
“Neil Austin’s plain white lighting shines down on the dark-robed figures with an unforgiving clarity...“
Christopher Hart - Sunday Times
“The first half of this production, which is carefully and poetically lit by Neil Austin, is superb.“
Michael Coveney - The Independent
“Vital atmosphere is supplied by Adam Cork's sound score and Neil Austin's lighting.”
Michael Billington - The Guardian
“Christopher Oram’s characteristically simple design, brilliantly lit by Neil Austin, consists of nothing more than whitewashed planks.”
Charles Spencer - The Telegraph
“Wonderful lighting design by Neil Austin — I loved the silhouettes as Lear is seated to await his meeting with Cordelia”
Mark Ronan - Mark Ronan’s Theatre Reviews
Madame Butterfly
Houston Grand Opera
“The final revelation is Neil Austin’s exquisite lighting design, which is possibly influenced by his recent work on the Broadway production of John Logan’s Red, a play based on the life of painter Mark Rothko. The production glows with an energy reminiscent of Rothko. Austin’s plots take us from dawn to dusk several times over, bringing a haunting luminosity to the opera.
I haven’t seen such a subtle, rich design since Robert Wilson’s Lohengin at the Metropolitan Opera.“
Theodore Bale - Culture Map Houston
“Breathtakingly beautiful to see and to hear,....We often hear of "synergy" as an ideal in collaborative art; here, we experience it....all enhanced by Austin's magical lighting.”
Everett Evans - Chron Entertainment
“...subtle lighting shifts complete the magical atmosphere.”
Mike Silverman - Associated Press
Passion
Donmar Warehouse
“Scarlett Strallen steps through these raucous scenes, seemingly borne through the air by Neil Austin's miraculous lighting and her own luminescence”
Claudia Pritchard - Independent on Sunday
“Jamie Lloyd’s production creates moments of jewelled poignancy, and Christopher Oram’s frescoed design, perfectly lit by Neil Austin, has a characteristic mix of grandeur and moodiness.”
Henry Hitchings - Evening Standard
“Evocatively designed by Christopher Oram and lit with precise attention to its shifting moods by Neil Austin, everything about Passion is breathtaking.”
Mark Shenton - The Stage
“...Neil Austin’s beautiful lighting...lovely chiaroscuro effects with raised glasses and candlelight...”
Michael Coveney - Whatsonstage.com
“...with lighting from fellow 2010 Tony-winner Neil Austin (Red) that near the start bathes Clara in a palpably sensual embrace, turning shivery across various hallucinatory sequences that recall director Lloyd's comparably high-voltage work on Piaf.”
Matt Wolf - The Arts Desk
“...lighting designer Neil Austin gives Strallen's blondness even greater radiance and underscores Roger's late blossoming with apt subtlety.”
Ray Bennett - The Hollywood Reporter
“Neil Austin’s lighting is a thing of beauty, flooding the set in light so that the production literally shimmers.”
Julia Rank - A Younger Theatre
The Prince of Homburg
Donmar Warehouse
“Angela Davies's design, Neil Austin's lighting and Dominic Haslam's music lend the opening sequence a phantasmagoric quality.”
Michael Billington - The Guardian
“...great lighting (by Neil Austin)...”
Michael Coveney - Whatsonstage.com
“Eerie song and balefully subjective lighting atmospherically establish the treacherous nature of the "reality" the protagonist is forced to traverse.”
Paul Taylor - The Independent
Women Beware Women
National Theatre, Olivier
"Elliot's staging is often spectacular. Lez Brotherston's huge revolving set is all gleaming marble and cut-glass chandeliers on one side (seductive lighting by Neil Austin)."
Kate Bassett - The Independent
Piaf
Teatro Alcala, Madrid
“On an almost bare stage, where the warm light of Neil Austin cleanly defines the action, the principal characters in Piaf’s life come and go.”
Javier Vallejo - El Pais
Red
Golden Theatre, Broadway
“...exquisitely presented in facsimile by the designers Christopher Oram (set) and Neil Austin (lighting) in ways that reflect Rothko’s own conscientious theatricality...”
Ben Brantley - The New York Times
“This is the kind of production that many people will say features a "simple" lighting design, but I beg to differ. Working with reportedly the smallest rig on Broadway at the moment -- you will look in vain for front-of-house or boom positions -- Neil Austin seemingly uses a handful of period work lights to create the dark, hushed atmosphere that Rothko apparently preferred. (One of the most shocking moments comes when Ken, making the point that Rothko's paintings depend on a certain kind of lighting, turns on a set of overhead fluorescent units, violently altering the atmosphere.) In addition, there is a burst of daylight seen from the upstage right doorway and a backlight system behind the upstage wall. Austin continues to be one of the most interesting new talents around.”
David Barbour - L&S America
“...the show is electrifyingly lit by Neil Austin, who uses both footlights and practical working lights to create a moodiness that only further pulls theatregoers into this gripping piece of theater.”
Andy Propst - TheaterMania
“Particularly impressive is Neil Austin's lighting design, which literally forces one to look at the art in new and exciting ways.”
Frank Scheck - The Hollywood Reporter
“The artistic team is as crucial as Grandage’s direction..... Lighting designer Neil Austin’s work is critical -which is all too appropriate, as the audience will discover.”
Bill Canacci - APP.com
“Lighted with considerable beauty and drama by Neil Austin”
Michael Sommers - New Jersey Newsroom
“But what is on display, thanks to set designer Christopher Oram and especially lighting designer Neil Austin, are a couple of reproductions of Rothko’s paintings of the period (with their famous ability to appear to be glowing)...that help explain, in a way that words alone cannot, what all the fuss was about.”
Jonathan Mandell - The Faster Times
“Neil Austin's lights make us see the Rothko paintings in myriad ways”
Erik Haagensen - Backstage
“Who could fail to admire London design work as gorgeous as the sets and lighting for Red?”
Michael Feingold - Village Voice
“There's a little too much talk of how paintings ''pulse'' — though Neil Austin’s lighting simulates the effect magically”
Melissa Rose Bernardo - EW.com
“The success of this 90-minute, intermissionless evening is considerably aided by Christopher Oram's sets and costumes, Neil Austin's lighting and Adam Cork's sound design which, like Rothko's paintings, hover between passion and decay.”
David A Rosenberg - The Online Hour
“Christopher Oram is the marvelous set designer who not only painted these quasi-Rothkos, but also devised colors to accommodate stage lighting, very different from the subdued kind Rothko stipulated and that Neil Austin, the staunch lighting designer, sometimes simulates and sometimes bypasses.”
John Simon - Bloomberg.com
“Credit production designer Christopher Oram and lighting designer Neil Austin for making this leap to the larger house work, allowing us to feel we are sitting right in Rothko’s ill-lit New York studio”
Andy Humm - ChelseaNow.com
“...lighted with inspiration by Neil Austin...”
David Finkle - The Huffington Post
“Adam Cork makes an enormous contribution, as does Neil Austin with his fluid, nuanced but vivid lighting design.”
Robert Trussell - The Kansas City Star
“This atmosphere has been nicely achieved by Neil Austin’s lighting.”
Charles Giuliano - BerkshireFineArts.com
“Rothko feels that daylight has an adverse affect on his paintings and this is firmly established when expert lighting designer Neil Austin bathes the stage in daylight creating a wan hue over his works.”
Joseph Cervelli - NorthJersey.com
“Lighting Design by Neil Austin is thrilling and enlightening, particularly when the light changes on the center canvas and it seemingly becomes three-dimensional as the colors begin to dance with each changing hue.”
Buzz Bellmont - Houston Chronicle
“Set (by sound designer Adam Cork) to a thunderous suite of classical music and lighted (by Neil Austin) in Stygian gloom, the scene finds the artist and his assistant preparing a fresh canvas.”
Marilyn Stasio - Variety
“...cannily designed by Christopher Oram and lit by Neil Austin.”
Joe Dziemianowicz - Daily News
“The production values overall are superb, with the London design team aboard. Lighting designer Neil Austin most effectively and subtly highights the shifts in emphasis on the red and the black panels.”
Elyse Sommer - Curtain Up
The White Guard
National Theatre, Lyttelton
“But much of the triumph lies with Bunny Christie's design, Neil Austin's lighting and Christopher Shutt's sound, which transport us from the Turbins' spacious quarters to the turbulent battlefront with a deftness that shows even chaos can be theatrically ensnared.”
Michael Billington - The Guardian
“The apartment set, which looks so solid, trucks back to create a vast, empty, ruined hall, hauntingly lit by Neil Austin”
David Benedict - Variety
“Bunny Christie’s sets are beautiful and technically wizard (describing how would spoil your fun), while Neil Austin’s lighting adds to the spectacle.”
Veronica Lee - The Arts Desk
As One
Royal Ballet - Royal Opera House
“...beautifully lit by Neil Austin...”
Vera Liber - British Theatre Guide
“...the lighting by Neil Austin was excellent.”
Mark Ronan - Mark Ronan’s Theatre Reviews
Red
Donmar Warehouse
“...under Neil Austin's magical lighting, a hidden cadmium orange suddenly phosphoresces amid the coal black, like a door opening into a furnace. Well worth seeing.”
Kate Bassett - The Independent on Sunday
“Red and black slabs of colour hang at the back of the action; Neil Austin's clever lighting makes them fade and glow.”
Susannah Clapp - The Observer
“The third star of the show must be Neil Austin’s clever lighting, which low-lights the copies of Rothko’s paintings expertly, supporting Rothko’s hatred of natural light. A canvas that seems dull and flat in the cold light of day positively glows under Austin’s lighting.”
CB - Society of London Theatre
“Vividly lit by Neil Austin, almost exclusively using footlights and practical working lights”
David Benedict - Variety
““Red” would be exciting enough as a piece of total theater that draws in Neil Austin’s lighting and Adam Cork’s sound design to push a potentially dry text toward moments of purposefully operatic frenzy”
Matt Wolf - The New York Times
“...always lit and designed with great artistry...”
Caroline McGinn - Time Out
“Neil Austin’s lighting is particularly effective”
West End Whingers
“Lighting designer Neil Austin most effectively and subtly highights the shifts in emphasis on the red and the black panels. ”
Elyse Sommer - Curtain Up
“In the closing scenes Neil Austin lights the paintings so that they lose that dark, dried oxblood red and become something more vibrant.”
Lizzie Loveridge - Curtain Up
Mrs Klein
Almeida Theatre
“In Thea Sharrock's absorbing production the three women coil around each other, twisting between antagonism and affection, in a crimson room which Tim Hatley's design and Neil Austin's lighting turn into the essence of Middle Europe in Hampstead. As light slants through the heavy curtains, a cello plays.”
Susannah Clapp - The Observer
Life is a Dream
Donmar Warehouse
“The challenge of the play lies in creating a plausible world on stage; Munby does this with the aid of Neil Austin's soft-hued lighting, Dominic Haslam's eerie sound-score and Angela Davies's design”
Michael Billington - The Guardian
“The set is minimal – little more than a black wall decorated with gold leaf and a throne.. What creates the play’s disconcerting atmosphere is the lighting.”
Charles Spencer - The Telegraph
“There's steel-colored chill to lighting designer Neil Austin's eerie twilight; it appears to enfold and isolate Segismundo, whose troubled reveries are underscored by hovering strings.
The shivery bleakness of Angela Davies' wide-open set is balanced by high-lying gold leaf on the black back wall that gleams from gold through bronze to a bloodied crimson that bodes ill. And in a quiet masterstroke of counterintuitive staging, an advancing army is superbly realized by a snap lighting change, revealing four men lit up from below, dancing on the spot against the back wall to a defiantly unmarchlike rhythmic drumbeat.”
David Benedict - Variety
“another classic Donmar design by Angela Davies, prison and court – where a great golden astrolabe signifies grandeur – beautifully differentiated in Neil Austin’s lighting”
Michael Coveney - Whatsonstage.com
“In the Donmar's cavernous, box-like space, the play's horizons - from reeking dungeon to flowery court to Polish mountains (Poland is a neat disguise for Calderón's 17th-century Spain, tormented by succession concerns) - are beautifully drawn in Angela Davies's unfussy design and Neil Austin's evocative lighting.”
James Woodall - The Arts Desk
Hamlet
Broadhurst Theatre - Broadway
“...exquisitely lighted by Neil Austin...”
Ben Brantley - New York Times
“...lighted with furtive menace by Neil Austin...”
Charles McNulty - Los Angeles Times
“Neil Austin's stunning lighting design pours in from the side and through the clerestory windows angled high above the stage, creating one boldly directional look after another It's a brilliant study in the use of white light to create different locations and atmospheres, as well as a heightened sense of theatricality “
David Barbour - L&S America
“Designer Christopher Oram has built monolithic marbled walls pierced by lofty windows through which Neil Austin pours shards of dungeon-like light. The austere stage pictures are arresting...“
David Rooney - Variety
“The Donmar Warehouse production of "Hamlet" opens with a spotlight on Jude Law, crouching and anguished in darkness. It's a striking image, created by Neil Austin's imaginative lighting”
David Sheward - Backstage
“Law is front-and-center from the moment the curtain rises, crouching in a spotlight, (shadowy, evocative lighting is by Neil Austin)”
David Gordon - THReviews
“black-on-black sets and costumes (by Christopher Oram), shadowy lighting (by Neil Austin) and eerie ambient sound (by Adam Cork)... creates an ominous world of deception and betrayal in his staging.”
Joe Dziemianowicz - New York Daily News
“...Neil Austin's piercing, dramatic lighting adding greatly to the ominous mood.”
Frank Scheck - Reuters
“Physically, the show is spectacular. Neil Austin's brilliant lighting design is noticed far more than the actors. It's almost like God is shining down, watching the action unfold.
Bill Canacci - MyCentralJersey.com
“Under the direction of lighting designer Neil Austin, the play presented a wholly original and ingeniously effective method of marrying the lighting and the stage. The play was presented with an enormous castle set consisting of three walls with considerably large windows from the left and right sides—through which the lighting for the stage would pour into the room. Both worked to recreate Hamlet’s world and captivating the audience in the process.”
Denise Battista - Play Shakespeare.com
“Under the direction of lighting designer Neil Austin, the play presented a wholly original and ingeniously effective method of marrying the lighting and the stage. The play was presented with an enormous castle set consisting of three walls with considerably large windows from the left and right sides—through which the lighting for the stage would pour into the room. Both worked to recreate Hamlet’s world and captivating the audience in the process.”
Robert Mathis - inklingnews.com
“...a striking lighting design...”
Tom Geier - EW.com
“The harsh lighting by Neil Austin, along with Adam Cork's work as the show's composer and sound designer, are excellent.”
Judd Hollander - The Epoch Times
Parade
Mark Taper Forum - Los Angeles
“The legal and domestic dramas play out with plangent clarity within Neil Austin's light plot which, for the range of its effects with relatively few instruments, should be studied by pros and academics for years to come. His sculpting of Christopher Oram's solid brown but versatile space....adds unforced Expressionistic touches reminiscent of the great prewar design pioneers (while adding a subtle hint of yesteryear).Wooden furniture is brought on and off; that's it for spectacle. Effects are all achieved through a carefully chosen head turn or a lighting instrument's iris-in to black.”
Bob Verini - Variety
“Christopher Oram’s scenic design... and Neil Austin’s sublimely atmospheric lighting contribute greatly to the production’s visual panache.”
Charles McNulty - Los Angeles Times
“Mr. Ashford’s sensitive production, beautifully designed by Christopher Oram (sets and costumes) and Neil Austin (lighting), makes the real news here.”
Charles Isherwood - New York Times
“...eerily lit by Neil Austin’s effective and sometimes cleverly ironic lighting”
Jason Kehe - Daily Trojan
“Christopher Oram's inspired set and costumes and Neil Austin's exquisite lighting capture the faded glory of the old South, as well as the story's potent aura of moral anarchy.”
Les Spindle - The Hollywood Reporter
“You see this play’s historical context and ambiguity in the rotting second level tapestry which, via Neil Austin’s lighting, is restored to a scene of Antebellum glory.”
Evan Henderson - Curtain Up
“Christopher Oram's set...under Neil Austin's lighting, is gorgeous to look at.
...Confederate mural, which Neil Austin’s lighting design brings into sharp focus or reduces to a tattered vestige. Pinpoint lights strategically illuminate single faces, like angels, watching the proceedings below.”
Steven Leigh Morris - LA Weekly
“Through it all, Christopher Oram’s decaying wood plank set and Neil Austin’s shadow-filled lighting maintain a nightmarish essence. It’s as though the story has appeared in the mist, only to vanish again with the last strains of Brown’s score.”
Jeff Favre - LA Downtown News
“beautifully illumined by Neil Austin’s lighting design...Hanging above them all is a huge wall mural that, with Austin’s superb lighting, brings out the glorious past”
Carol Davis - San Diego Jewish World
Judgment Day
Almeida Theatre
“The strengths of the production are James MacDonald’s detailed direction and Miriam Beuther’s technically ingenious design, elucidated by Neil Austin’s clever lighting.”
Henry Hitchings - Evening Standard
“...revival ... as staged by James MacDonald, comes complete with the steam, red lights and screeching wheels of passing expresses.”
Benedict Nightingale - The Times
“The rush of the trains, and the sense of both physical and moral danger throughout, is brilliantly sustained in Neil Austin’s amazing lighting and Christopher Shutt’s expertly chilling soundtrack.”
Michael Coveney - Whatsonstage.com
“The set is lit dramatically and atmospherically by Neil Austin. We can feel the oppressively enclosed tedium and gossip of small town life....James Macdonald's superb production impresses with its dramatic design and all round gripping issues.”
Lizzie Loveridge - Curtain Up.com
“The passing trains are atmospherically evoked by steam, as well as the lighting of Neil Austin and sound of Christopher Shutt, so that we almost feel the locomotive blast ourselves.”
Neil Dowden - Music OMH.com
A Streetcar Named Desire
Donmar Warehouse
“Neil Austin's carefully contrasted, haze-filled lighting subtly opens up the spaciousness of nights outdoors and ramps up the claustrophobia of a sweaty card game”
David Benedict - Variety
“Christopher Oram’s beautiful set pushes the New Orleans tenement out into the very fabric of the Donmar, Neil Austin’s lighting abetting Adam Cork’s fevered sound design to delineate the point at which reverie topples over into nightmare.”
Matt Wolf - New York Times
“Neil Austin's lighting makes you imagine heat and Spanish moss”
Paul levy - Wal Street Journal
“Oram's design is beautifully lit by Neil Austin”
Michael Coveney - Whatsonstage.com
“Oram’s spectacularly vertical set is complemented by some excellent atmospheric lighting by Neil Austin.”
WestEndWhingers
“Between the actual airless theatre (it did get a bit stuffy), Christopher Oram's evocative set, and Neil Austin's transcendent lighting, the whole production just seemed to sweat and steam away like the hot nights of Louisiana.”
Tapeworthy
Hamlet
Donmar West End - Wyndhams Theatre
“Christopher Oram's set, dominated by gaunt, arched stone walls, also acquires a distinct character: as light, beautifully designed by Neil Austin, filters through high, narrow grilles we share Hamlet's perception that "Denmark's a prison".”
Michael Billington - The Guardian
“Christopher Oram’s set, a combination of stone towers and wooden gates, is ominous, and Neil Austin’s lighting arrows through its embrasures, suggesting Elsinore is almost a locked ward, claustrophobic and institutional.”
Hehry Hitchings - Evening Standard
“Grandage seizes on the fact that whatever else it might be, Hamlet is an absolutely cracking psychological thriller, and his mostly monochrome staging, set in a grim granite castle of dark shadows and shafts of light, has the atmosphere of film noir.”
Charles Spencer - The Telegraph
“I liked the fact that the scenes were made almost entirely by lighting rather than by scenery"
Susannah Clapp - BBC Radio 3 Night Waves
“...gilded by criss-crossing shafts of light...”
Kate Bassett - The Independent on Sunday
“...a monochrome Elsinore which is lit by shafts of silvery light streaming through clerestory windows. It feels almost like a prison."
Quentin Letts - Daily Mail
“...Neil Austin's piercing shafts of light that ignite Christopher Oram’s flagstone-floored castle set...”
David Benedict - Variety
“...Beautifully lit, all the way through, and lit from really high up. I’ve no idea how hard that must be to do but I’m guessing very difficult.”
Natalie Haynes - BBC Radio 4 Saturday Review
“...German expressionist shadows and film noir....”
Tom Dyckhoff - BBC Radio 4 Saturday Review
“A skillful lighting design by Neil Austin contributes to the play's clean, striking presentation.”
Ray Bennett - Hollywood Reporter
“...atmospherically lit by Neil Austin."
West End Whingers
Madame de Sade
Donmar West End - Wyndhams Theatre
“Never mind the stars, this show is brilliantly lit by Neil Austin.”
Natasha Tripney - The Guardian Theatre Blog
“And no praise is too high for Christopher Oram, Neil Austin and Adam Cork for their design, respectively, of set, lighting and sound.”
Michael Billington - The Guardian
“Oram's tarnished silver set of a towering Paris mansion not only reeks of money and status, it acts as mottled canvas for Neil Austin's lustrous lighting that grows ever richer, more saturated and more emotionally articulate as the characters sink into reveries of past events.”
David Benedict - Variety
“These walls glisten. Sometimes, this seems like the glitter of wealth, sometimes it looks as if seminal fluid is seeping through the respectable divisions. In the course of the evening, Neil Austin's clever lighting changes the colour of these walls from verdigris to silver and cinder.”
Susannah Clapp - The Observer
“Christopher Oram’s silvered, eighteenth century corridor is gorgeously lit by Neil Austin”
Michael Coveney - Whatsonstage.com
“Grandage's production is beautifully staged. Christopher Oram's salon set of gilded panelling subtly changes colour with the mood and Neil Austin's expressive lighting.”
Sarah Hemming - Financial Times
“...the lighting (Neil Austin) is highly atmospheric.”
West End Whingers
Twelfth Night
Donmar West End - Wyndhams Theatre
“...Neil Austin's mood-setting lighting...”
Wall Street Journal
“...Neil Austin delivers some very effective Mediterranean lighting.”
West End Whingers
Piaf
Vaudeville Theatre
“Any doubts that Jamie Lloyd's hit transfer would fail to scale up from the Donmar's legendary intimacy to the grander environment of a playhouse are swiftly dispelled by the bravura confidence of his exquisitely lit production and the panache of Roger's Piaf.”
Dominic Cavendish - The Telegraph
“Piaf is at its most intriguing when it is like a painting with songs - a painting from the impressionist school, but touched by that inner light you get in 17th-century religious canvases..”
Lyn Gardner - The Guardian
“designer Soutra Gilmour and lighting designer Neil Austin ensure that the smoky intimacies of the Donmar are preserved between the now more imposing black proscenium of the little sparrow’s final stage post.”
Michael Coveney - Whatsonstage.com
“Twenty years ago I'd only have been familiar with the names of a handful of lighting designers, now I look out for their names on press releases and can recognise their work as if I were looking at a painting by Francis Bacon or Titian. Oh that's a Jean Kalman, that's a Neil Austin....
Canny directors know that lighting can transform a production. I'm thinking of shows such as Jamie Lloyd's production of Piaf, lit by Austin so it looked like an impressionist painting, with a spotlight that always seemed to follow the doomed Piaf as if it were the luminous hand of fate itself. It is its own character in the unfolding drama.”
Lyn Gardner - Guardian Theatre Blog
No Man’s Land
Duke of York’s Theatre
"This is a compelling revival much aided by Neil Austin's lighting and Adam Cork's subliminal sound."
Michael Billington - The Guardian
“The setting, designed by Giles Cadle and gorgeously lit by Neil Austin”
Peter Lathan - The British Theatre Guide
Piaf
Donmar Warehouse
"Neil Austin lights the production like a painter. Starkly angled beams highlight Roger against the surrounding crepuscular space, making her appear lonely, raw and unfinished. Not only does this delineate her tiny, clawing physicality -- emphasized further by high-waisted costumes -- it also adds tangible mood to underwritten scenes. Roger's ferocious performance of "Bravo pour le Clown" is made more terrifying by having it viciously lit by a giant, mobile arc light, pushed around the stage and splashing her marionette-like shadow against the back wall."
David Benedict - Variety
"The lighting really is excellent, and Jamie Lloyd’s production rattles on at a cracking pace."
Louis Wise - Sunday Times
“.....a luminous snapshot quality, framed in Soutra Gilmour’s crumbling baroque proscenium of the Olympia Music Hall and its lush red curtain, lit by lightning flashes on a pock-marked black wall by Neil Austin, played with a headlong, reckless sensuality.”
Michael Coveney - WhatsonStage.com
“ The lighting design of Neil Austin adds to the realism of the design concept. At times Piaf might perform in semi-silhouette, her form lit by spotlights invisibly operated high above the rear of the stage. At other times, actors carry industrial-sized lamps onstage, thrusting them blindingly into Piaf’s eyes and projecting a giant shadow of the tiny figure on the rear wall. Lastly, the stage-effect conjures the ultimate iconic image of the aging Piaf who, standing in front of her single microphone in little black dress and with short dishevelled hair, is confined within a shaft of white light as she pours her heart and soul into her passionate songs.”
Kevin Quarmby - roguesandvagabonds.co.uk
“...atmospherically lit by Neil Austin...”
westendwhingers.co.uk
The Seafarer
Booth Theatre - Broadway
"Lockhart continues by describing the joys of heaven, his words echoed in an expansive universe suddenly suggested by Neil Austin's entrancing lighting effects."
David Rooney - Variety
"Seafarer The offers one of several fully realized houses on Broadway stages; here, Rae Smith's is aptly grungy and grungily lighted by Neil Austin to an early-winter glow.
Jeremy Gerard - Bloomberg.com
"A bedraggled Christmas tree, battered furniture and smeared windows are among the features of the ratty interior designed by Rae Smith and illuminated by Neil Austin with shifting shadows."
Michael Sommers - Newark Star Ledger
"The lighting by Neil Austin confers a sepulchral gloom on the place, as the play begins on the morning of Christmas Eve"
Malcolm Johnson - Courant.com
"Rae Smith's untidy set conveys the desolation and darkness of Sharky and Richard's existence, while Neil Austin's lighting shades it and reveals the bright morning that marks the final curtain."
David Sheward - Backstage.com
“ Set and costumes by Rae Smith are just right, lighting by Neil Austin enhances everything”
Richmond Shepard - Performing Arts Insider
“Rae Smith designed a setting of a decrepit house -- bottles and glasses strewn about, furniture far beyond better days. In the corner is a scrawny Christmas tree and on the wall hangs a religious picture lighted by a votive candle that flickers ominously as Mr. Lockhart states his case. Smith's costumes suit the characters who dwell in or visit the house. The shadowy lighting by Neil Austin and sound design by Mathew Smethurst-Evans enliven the home fires of these dysfunctional brothers.”
Elizabeth Ahlfors - Citistage.com
“What makes this play all the more gripping are the ingenious touches from the haunting lighting and sound designs offered by Neil Austin and Matthew Smethurst Evans, respectively.”
Steve Loucks - SteveOnBroadway
Parade
Donmar Warehouse
"Neil Austin's career-best lighting
Austin's consummate control of the emotional temperature takes auds from the prickly heat of dusty yellow sunny days to the lacerating chill of a nighttime hanging. He uses haze like a sculptor, shooting light through it from different angles to carve out a wealth of contrasting spaces from governor's mansion to graveyard, from a riverside idyll to a bald prison cell.
Like every element in the production, the lighting enhances the flow. Following Ashford's lead, book writer Alfred Uhry and composer-lyricist Jason Robert Brown have refashioned and strengthened their material, trimming transitions to step up the pace."
David Benedict - Variety
"...beautifully lit and designed production..."
Paul Taylor - The Independent
“Ashford’s production, beautifully designed and lit by Christopher Oram and Neil Austin...”
Michael Coveney - WhatsonStage.com
“With the help of lighting designer Neil Austin, Christopher Oram’s barren set exudes the atmosphere of factory, court house and jail, while the shadow of the American Civil War is never far away.”
Lisa Martland - The Stage
King Lear
RSC - International Tour
"Neil Austin's lighting and Fergus O'Hare's sound design are wonderfully evocative, particularly in a chilling scene in which the blind Gloucester is left alone, listening to the sounds of the nearby battle."
Dan Bacalzo -TheaterMania.com
"Neil Austin's lighting is flawless. He captures the detail and nuances of the players, as well as adding exquisite details of his own, such as incidental shadows of dancers and light entertainment elsewhere, as deceit unfolds downstage."
Kate Ward-Smythe - TheatreReview.org.nz
"Maintaining the palace as a constant setting that slowly disintegrates, and fades or comes forth as illuminated by Neil Austin's superb lighting design, has the dual effect of dramatising the demise of the old order and pointing up the proposition that Lear's journey is more through his mind than a literal landscape."
John Smythe - Theatre Review New Zealand
"Christopher Oram delivers a literally, mightily impressive set, a colonnaded balcony festooned with scarlet swags, while Neil Austin's atmospheric and beautifully modulated lighting is immaculate."
Peter Wood - WhatsOnStage.com
“Neil Austin’s lighting design is an exercise in subtlety, imperceptibly shifting the illumination of the players in order to enhance the mood as well as allow for seamless scene changes.“
Wendy Attwell - The Shakespeare Revue
The Seagull
RSC - International Tour
"...lovely to look at and highly nuanced, a feature it shares with Lear, thanks to Christopher Oram's sparsely beautiful design and Neil Austin's superb lighting."
Peter Wood - WhatsOnStage.com
Frost Nixon
Jacobs Theatre - Broadway
"Christopher Oram’s set and Neil Austin’s terrific lighting help keep the play fast and fluid."
Ben Brantley - New York Times
“ Neil Austin's spectral lighting add atmosphere.”
David Sheward - Backstage.com
Philistines
National Theatre -
Lyttelton
"While the lodging lothario proposes to one girl, another weeps in the corner; as Neil Austin's lighting flushes with rosy expectancy, hope dies."
Susannah Clapp - Observer
Dying for It
Almeida Theatre
"The designer uses the Almeida's beautifully curved back wall to create a dingy, over-populated stairwell lit, paradoxically, with expressive shadows by Neil Austin"
David Benedict - Variety
John Gabriel Borkman
Donmar Warehouse
"When the scene moves outside, any sense of escape is overshadowed by the dangerously hostile Nordic weather. A carpet of pristine snow is rolled out whilst the lighting turns stark and flurries of frozen blizzard falls."
Charlotte Loveridge - CurtainUp.com
"Then, in a visual coup igniting the final scene, the back wall flies out revealing a vast carpet of snow edged with tall pines as Neil Austin's hard white moonlight illuminates everyone's crushed hopes. The thrillingly fulfilled ambition of the moment is typical of Michael Grandage's production"
David Benedict - Variety
Ghosts
Gate Theatre
"Neil Austin's lighting design and Olly Fox's plaintive violin theme add to the sense of circumambient gloom"
Michael Billington - The Guardian
"Lez Brotherston's design, finely lit by Neil Austin"
Susannah Clapp - The Observer
Much Ado About Nothing
RSC - Swan Theatre
"Elliott literally heats up the atmosphere by setting everything in 1950s Cuba. This isn't mere fancy. The play is crucially about men who are soldiers. Ideas about hierarchy and service are easily delineated as the men maneuver themselves in and out of uniform in lighting designer Neil Austin's hot haze of a Cuban day."
David Benedict - Variety
Don Juan in Soho
Donmar Warehouse
"The strength of this extraordinarily cohesive production is made manifest in its quietest moment. In what turns out to be the calm before the thematic storm where the statue comes shockingly, and brilliantly, to life, Ifans and Wight gaze up at the stars. Neil Austin's high-angled light picks their faces out of a cold night sky, and the spell of their sudden wonder is cast across the entire auditorium. That this charged, still moment resonates so powerfully is a tribute to the world conjured by a captivating show."
David Benedict - Variety
"Christopher Oram's beautiful design, and Neil Austin's lighting, get it right: in shades of grey swept by a shimmering silver curtain, and with the white stone statue looming out of the darkness (finally, wittily pedalling Don Juan towards his death on a fairy-lit rickshaw), they create a fascinating, glimmering, smutty faubourg"
Susannah Clapp - The Observer
Therese Raquin
National Theatre - Lyttelton
"Elliott brings tremendous theatrical flare to the staging. There's a sensuous scene between the first two acts where Thérèse silently washes herself and, in the second half, a long cinematic nightmare sequence depicting the mother of all bad nights. There's much painterly detail throughout. Hildegard Bechtler's dingy apartment and Neil Austin's atmospheric lighting provide the backdrop for some stunning pictures, although at times, the Lyttelton space feels a little too large for this intimate breakdown of two people tearing each other apart."
Simon Thomas - MusicOMH.com
"One intends no disrespect to Elliott or her able cast, headed by Charlotte Emmerson and an impressively impassioned Ben Daniels, to point out that to some extent they're all pawns within a piece of Total Theatre that makes equal stars of Neil Austin's shadowy lighting, Hildegard Bechtler's forbiddingly grey set, and a soundscape from Christopher Sheet that tightens the vice on two central characters whose ostensibly liberating act of violence in fact ends up sealing their doom."
Matt Wolf - Theatre.com
" with the assistance of a brilliant design team that includes Hildegard Bechtler (sets) and Neil Austin (lighting), Ms. Elliott goes beyond anthropological realism to achieve a somber visual poetry that summons the working-class portraits of Degas. (This painterly quality is especially haunting in the scene where Thérèse bathes herself after the murder of her husband and in the subsequent series of tableaus of the adulterous lovers in stages of guilt-tortured sleeplessness.)
More than any narrative production I can think of, “Thérèse Raquin” opens a resonant dialogue in your mind between theater and a style of painting. The specificity of the images onstage, down to the curve of a shoulder or slope of a back, inspires you to think anew about the implicit interior lives suggested by the work of portraitists in the age of Zola (a man who fraternized with painters). “Thérèse Raquin” makes you want to hop a Paris-bound train and hit the Musée d’Orsay to continue the conversation."
Ben Brantley - New York Times
"Marianne Elliott's direction blends a naturalistic take on the play with flourishes of a more fantastical nature, while Neil Austin's lighting is always a subtle reflection of the mood: a single lamp for the introspective washing scene; a fire-lit red wash in the aftermath of murder."
London Theatre Guide
"Hildegard Bechtler's set, which is perfectly complemented by Neil Austin's atmospheric lighting, is an impressive realisation of the Raquin household."
David Gavan ICSouth London.co.uk
"It’s brilliantly under-lit by Neil Austin (if that’s not a contradiction in terms) and intensely atmospheric. Chiaroscuro, moody music and more than a touch of expressionist lighting."
West End Whingers
"[Marianne Elliot's] production....is a miracle of sound and light, music and movement."
Michael Billington - The Guardian
"Lighting Designer Neil Austin swathes the place in spooky twilight and shadows."
Nicholas de Jongh - Evening Standard
"Neil Austin's lighting reveals all three characters reflected murkily in the black-lacquered back wall. It's a perfectly ghostly image that captures the spirit of this flawed but frightening play."
David Benedict - Variety
“Hildegard Bechler’s bleak set, sometimes seen through a gauze, Olly Fox’s eerie music and Neil Austin’s lighting design, by turns dramatic and ghostly, combine to complete Elliott’s world, both realistic and full of suggestion”
Heather Neill - The Stage
The Seafarer
National Theatre - Cottesloe
"[Karl Johnson's Sharky] Ablaze with anger and fear, looking at once haunted and harried, frightened and bemused he emerges from the knife-edge game, metaphorically and actually touched by sunlight."
Nicholas de Jongh - Evening Standard
Tom and Viv
Almeida Theatre
"This chamber piece has a stark, neat structure. It is fluidly staged, with j
ust a few chairs and pools of light on a parquet floor."
Kate Bassett - Independent on Sunday
Frost/Nixon
Donmar Warehouse
"Neil Austin's lighting allows audiences to see not just the two combatants etched dramatically out of darkness but also their live TV selves splashed across '70s-style TV sets"
David Benedict - Variety
"The set uses a backdrop of five by five monitors to show close ups... Neil Austin's lighting provides excitement and the play is broken up dynamically with lots of side scenes."
Lizzie Loveridge - Curtain Up
Love Counts
Almeida Opera
"Neil Austin’s lighting is crucial, the numbers that variously affect the lives of the protagonists not only chalked up on the walls but suspended in fluorescent tubes of red and blue."
David Gutmna - The Stage
The Canterville Ghost
English National Ballet
"...Neil Austin delivers some splendid Lighting Effects."
Rupert Christiansen - Mail on Sunday
The Taming of the Shrew
Bristol Old Vic
"...Padua sprinkled with marble statues by designer Hannah Clark and beautifully backlit by Neil Austin."
Dominic Cavendish - Daily Telegraph
"Slick, witty and expertly-lit,"
Robin Markwell - BBC Online
"...devilish lighting and the frenetic soundtrack...all help to give the production bite and edge."
Helen Reid - Bristol Evening Post
“Anne Tipton's production of Taming of the Shrew is a gorgeous feast of a piece. Luscious lighting, a richly elegant set and exuberant music all combine to make this piece a sensory delight”
Theatre BA Reviews
Romeo & Juliet
RSC - Royal Shakespeare Theatre
"...wonderful balmy lighting."
Radio 4 - Saturday Review
"...there’s much to enjoy in Meckler’s staging, which ...is beautifully and imaginatively done, aided by the designs of Katrina Lindsay and the beguiling lighting of Neil Austin."
Pete Wood - What's On Stage.com
"The entire ensemble, Meckler's direction, Katrina's Lindsay's design, Neil Austin's lighting and Ilona Sekacz' music combine to produce a powerful and moving version of what is probably the best known play in the English language"
Peter Lathan - British Theatre Guide
The Long, the Short and the Tall
Sheffield Lyceum - UK Tour
"Lighting designer Neil Austin has also excelled himself again, capturing the passage from dawn, through dusk and into darkness in the rays that stream through the boards of the hut and are cut up by the humidity inside."
Chris Ingold - MusicOMH.com
Comfort me with Apples
Hampstead Theatre
"Such a bald encapsulation of Miss Leyshon's themes gives little idea of the atmospheric power and imagination with which they are conveyed in Lucy Bailey's production. No director makes the stage a more thrilling place than the expressionistic Miss Bailey - with a little help from her designers."
Nicholas de Jongh - Evening Standard
Tamburlaine
Barbican & Bristol Old Vic
"David Farr’s direction also earns ‘Tamburlaine’ its place in the Barbican’s Young Genius season. The aesthetic is both stirringly simple and ravishingly beautiful, as Ti Green’s minimal set is sumptuously lit by Neil Austin. When it is asserted that Tamburlaine’s looks ‘do menace heaven’ we see Hicks illuminated from below in a rich sunset gold, as if already gilded by the immortality his character so clearly craves.”
Rachel Halliburton - Time Out
" Farr's stark, swift production is equally poised, executing abrupt switches of scene through sudden volte-face movements, stylised battle sequences and surgically precise lighting effects. "
Dominic Cavendish - Daily Telegraph
"Ti Green's marvellous design is richly coloured but unadorned: on an almost bare stage, tall, bright banners slowly unfurl; the different parts of Tamburlaine's expanding empire appear in turn, spotlit among the smoky air"
Susannah Clapp - The Observer
"Greg Hicks electrifies the stage with a taut muscular performance in David Farr's ravishingly lit production. Marlowe's flawed text is really made to merit its place in the Young Genius Season."
Critics' Choice - Time Out
"It's an evening of mighty verse, glittering imagery and compulsive violence."
Robert Gore-Langton - The Independent
"Ti Green's stark set aptly contains Farr's post-modernist vision, all things-on-strings, timber chests and metal poles, caught in the remorseless glare of Neil Austin's stunning lighting."
Rina Vergano - Venue Magazine
"Ti Green's sparse set, expertly lit by Neil Austin..."
Gerry Parker - Bristol Evening Post
"Much of the dialogue is presented in static tableaux but an intense sense of movement is maintained by cutting instantly from one scene to the next using pinpoint lighting and thrilling sound."
Peter Patson - Bath Chronicle
"The clash of war is superbly evoked on a beautifully lit, minimalist set through which the actors disappear into smoke as faint, agonised screams echo in the distance."
Susie Weldon - Western Daily Press
Much Ado About Nothing
Sheffield Crucible
"Rourke's production boasts a beautiful set by Giles Cadle imaginatively lit by Neil Austin. We are in a russet-stoned Mediterranean courtyard where washing is hung out to dry, wheelbarrows evoke bosky arbours and where the air is bathed in a smoky orange light."
Michael Billington - The Guardian
"...a Mediterranean Courtyard of russet terracotta tiles bathed in mellow light"
Paul Taylor - The Independent
"Rourke's production is wistful and humorous. The caustic couple mellow in a sun-washed Messina created by Giles Cadle's design and Neil Austin's Lighting."
Susannah Clapp - TheObserver
"The lighting is subtle, but with such absolute precision of tone that it alone carries your imagination to the setting of each scene."
Benjamin Hazell - Steel Press
"The design by Giles Cadle is handsome and Neil Austin's lighting adds atmosphere"
John Highfield - The Stage
"It's set in something that might be an italian villa - an impressive design by Giles Cadle, beautifully lit by Neil Austin."
John Highfield - Sheffield Star
"Set on an expertly lit stage that has all the ambience of a Mediterranean village piazza, the atmosphere is one of brooding tragedy, recalling Lorca."
www.musicOMH.com
The Found Man
Traverse Theatre
"Director, Philip Wilson has designed the sparest of sets and asked excellent lighting designer Neil Austin to minimise the illumination on the wooden stage. This creates a haunting effect that matches the subject matter."
Philip FIsher - British Theatre Guide
"In stark contrast the pale white lighting gives the forces of darkness at work. "
Lynne Walker - The Independent
Henry IV pts.1 & 2
National Theatre - Olivier
"Nicholas Hytner's production, with a powerfully atmospheric set by Mark Thompson and very good lighting by Neil Austin..."
Paul Webb - LastMinute.com
"Hytner employs Mark Thompson's superbly spare set and Neil Austin's sharply specific lighting to terrific cinematic effect, filling the frame as a filmmaker."
Ray Bennet - Hollywood Reporter
"Nicholas Hytner's new National Theatre production isn't perfect, but I've encountered none so interesting. Mark Thompson places the action on a wooden central avenue between "bare ruin'd quires". Neil Austin's lighting is devoid of mellowness: our feeling is that we and the plays are surrounded by darkness."
Alastair Macaulay - Financial Times
Rhapsody
Royal Ballet - Royal Opera House
"Curtis's backdrop shows a stormy-pink Turner sky that varies in broodiness with Neil Austin's lighting"
Jenny Gilbert - The Independent
"The much-loved slow section, which belonged to the two leads, was exquisitely danced and, as with the rest of the ballet, Jessica Curtis’ designs and Neil Austin’s lighting added greatly to Rachmaninov’s atmospheric score."
Paul Webb - Last Minute.com
"Jessica Curtis's new backdrop shows a changeable sky, its clouds lit in sunset reds and golds."
Zoe Anderson - Independent on Sunday
Insignificance
Sheffield Lyceum - UK Tour
"The lighting on the stage is creatively organised by lighting designer Neil Austin, with twinkling lights above the bedroom portraying the night sky. Neon lights from the city street shine through the window and the hotel room itself is subtly lit, representing the safe interior."
BA Magazine
Macbeth
Almeida Theatre
"Christopher Oram’s design offers a Dunsinane of anthracite walls... and an atmosphere of haunted, candle-lit gloom. In a sole concession to technical effect, the paved performing space is cleverly lit by Neil Austin to create a flickering dry ice circle for the pale, ageing Weird Sisters."
John Thaxter - The Stage
Chorus!
Welsh National Opera
"The lush red and black setting, reminiscent of music hall, and the imaginative costumes are designed by Niki Turner. The atmospheric lighting is the work of Neil Austin"
Jon Halliday - The Stage
Julius Caesar
RSC - UK Tour
"They are complemented by Rachel Pickup's anguished Portia, the aural bravura of Martin Slavin's sound design and Neil Austin's pinpoint lighting."
Michael Billington - The Guardian
The Soldier's Tale
ROH2 - Royal Opera House
"Neil Austin's smoochy lighting and Lez Brotherston's design spectacularly transform the Linbury into a faded art-nouveau cabaret club. The candlelit cafe tables that seat part of the audience intensify the sense of sardonic intimacy that has always lain at the heart of this mock morality play."
Jenny Gilbert - The Independent
Henry IV
Donmar Warehouse
"Christopher Oram’s palatial classical columns, later coloured by the theatricality of a red-plush curtain, are enhanced by Neil Austin’s mellow lighting"
Timothy Ramsden - Reviews Gate
Still Life
Liverpool Playhouse
"Beautiful and evocative lighting design by Neil Austin leant a sepia look to Still Life."
Live Magazine
Wind in the Willows
West Yorkshire Playhouse
...Neil Austin's lighting is beautifully toned.
Kevin Berry - The Stage
“...ingenious sets by [Dick] Bird, ravishingly lit in shades of gold, silver and green by Neil Austin...”
Sam Marlowe - The Times
After Miss Julie
Donmar Warehouse
“Special Mention is owed Neil Austin's lighting, in which daybreak is almost palpable.”
Matt Wolf - Variety
True West
Bristol Old Vic
“A highly enjoyable evening out from a fantastic production. Strong script, stunning set and lighting, fantastic cast, and brilliant direction/staging...it’s everything you could ever wish for…”
Ben Furness - nowt2do.com
Othello
Royal Theatre - Northampton
“The sound, designed by Adam Cork, gives the production a big movie feel and enhances the action and Neil Austin's lighting is very atmospheric.”
Martin Borley - BBCi
Sharon's Grave
Druid Theatre Company
"[the set's] darkly textured walls gave it a convincing eeriness, which was very effectively brought out by the lighting of Neil Austin"
Drama League of Ireland
Caligula
Donmar Warehouse
“Grandage's production qualities are extremely high. The design by Christopher Oram is very simple and with sympathetic lighting from Neil Austin achieves levels of great beauty. This peaks as the narcissistic hero lifts a full-length mirror from a pool of water and revolves around the stage looking at himself like a lover.”
Philip Fisher - The British Theatre Guide
“Christopher Oram's design aesthetic is at its most shimmering, the Donmar's defining back wall glistening with gold off of which Neil Austin's lighting twinkles, as if to suggest the galaxy that is about the one thing Caligula cannot have.”
Matt Wolf - Variety
"The Warehouse rear wall glistens and shines with lighting brightening Christopher Oram's gold, silver and copper paint effects. I liked the turquoise, verdigris lighting effect of the final stabbing."
Lizzie Loveridge - CurtainUp.com
A Prayer for Owen Meany
National Theatre - Lyttelton
“...but the main pleasure comes from the fluency of Gordon's staging. He fills an initially empty space with emblems of America reinforced by Neil Austin's lighting design which wittily uses pools of light to evoke a baseball pitch.”
Michael Billington - The Guardian
“No film set could be as involving as Dick Bird's bare floorboard stage, which Neil Austin's inch-perfect lighting enables to morph in a flash from nativity play to baseball pitch to riverbank to Thanksgiving dinner.”
Dominic Maxwell - Metro
“The lighting by Neil Austin (an up-and-coming talent on the London scene) is quite beautiful, with large squares of color covering the stage like lawns and carpets, or isolated pools of light for the narrator.”
Ellen Lampert-Gréaux - Entertainment Design
Monkey!
Young Vic
"The lighting is highly stated and dramatic"
Lizzie Loveridge - CurtainUp.com
La Navarraise
Guildhall School of Music & Drama
“...quite beautifully directed (Stephen Langridge), designed (Jessica Curtis) and lit (Neil Austin).”
Rodney Milnes - The Times
Further Than The Furthest Thing
National Theatre - Cottesloe
“Niki Turner's sets, along with Neil Austin's lighting, play no small part in creating the right mood for the play.”
Peter Lathan - The British Theatre Guide
"Equal accolades must go to designer Niki Turner for a splendid set. Also to lighting designer Neil Austin and sound designer Duncan Chave for creating exciting visuals and atmospheres, particularly in the impressive eruption and boiler explosion scenes."