I am often asked by design students if a designer shouldn't strive to create a "signature" style. Don't designers gain employment by having an easily recognizable "handle"? I can only answer by briefly recounting my own strange, creative odyssey.

I was fortunate that in the course of my two years of compulsory British military service (as an inept pilot in the RAF) my training took place largely in Canada. This allowed me the chance to make whirlwind visits down to Broadway at a time - the early fifties - when American theatre was at the height of the Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Lerner & Loewe era. Many remarkable productions were being designed by a range of stirringly gifted artists that included Boris Aronson and Jo Mielziner, whose work was truly eye-opening to me.

English stage design in those days was still in an illustrational, decorative mode. The designers there were still credited with 'Décor' as opposed to 'Settings'. Broadway design, by contrast, was already immensely varied: poetic, sculptural, abstract or highly stylized. (More recently this situation has reversed, of course, and England is now in the forefront of imaginative world-class scene design.)

During design training in England, my colleagues and I were greatly stimulated by the much earlier scenic breakthroughs of Gordon Craig and Adolph Appia, each of whom had independently arrived at an elemental approach that mostly made use of blocks, steps, soaring columns, ramps and powerful directional lighting. Revolutionary and thrilling though these designs were, we were somehow not wholly influenced by them and they eventually turned out to have limited general application, mainly impacting the style of opera design throughout the western world.

Appia and Craig favoured simple and all-embracing scenic solutions, but the new Broadway designers who were opening my eyes were powerfully influenced by their American predecessor, Robert Edmund Jones, who had succeeded in getting to the heart of each script through simplification and suggestion. He and his successors struggled to express and intensify the playwright's vision. It was less important for them to represent the drama's realistic environment (as had the designers for Belasco, Irving and others around the turn of the century) than to approach the source material as crucial collaborators in the interpretation of the script.

In New York, Boris Aronson, in particular, was distinguishing himself by seeming to be 'born again' with each new scenic challenge. His design for 'The Diary of Ann Frank' looked nothing like his sets for 'Cabaret', 'Fiddler on the Roof', 'Company' or 'Pacific Overtures'. These productions, despite the individuality of Aronson's own unique and powerful personality and skills, appeared in each case to be the work of completely different designers. And yet could only have been the work of this master.

The English approach, (much influenced by the illustrational or painterly skills of Rex Whistler, Oliver Messel, Cecil Beaton and others) did not change radically until Sean Kenny created the sculptural and skeletal set for 'Oliver' in 1960. This design succeeded in blowing away all the endearingly artificial charms of previous British stage settings and in blowing the minds of most of the British design fraternity. Kenny, inspired by the original material while simultaneously embracing the director's highly energized approach, had found a way to create a truly dynamic setting for 'Oliver' that placed the actors right in the midst of their revolving, three-dimensional environment rather than emoting against a pictorial background.

I confess that my own early designs were all in the English illustrational mode: mostly high-style, and, when possible, a little witty. I had been much influenced by the apparently effortless visual charm of France's magical designer, Christian Berard. Despite my fortunate exposure to the truly dynamic designs of this era, I wasn't really able to assess my work until I had a one-man exhibition at an elegant London art gallery. I looked around at all these somewhat similar renderings and was astonished to discover that I had somehow type-cast myself as a sort of cut-rate Cecil-Messel. I was stunned to realize that I had been using only a fraction of the spectrum of possible visual approaches that had been intriguing me.

It stopped me cold and from then on I wilfully began each project from a completely fresh viewpoint - variety becoming the principal impetus for my work. On commencing each new production I try to clear my mind completely of all the previous design imagery I have employed and absorb the script or score as if it were being delivered by radio. I keep anything visual from popping into my mind until I am clear about the director's own take on the material - if he has one. I hope to become an almost empty vessel and, like Aronson, let the intrinsic nature of the material, coloured by the director's input, course through me and dramatically influence the design.

Unlike creative folk in the Fine Arts - painters, sculptors and so forth - we theatre animals (whether or not we also paint or sculpt in the real world) are not really "primary" creators such as writers. We are not, in musical terms, the composer. Nor are we the Conductor of the composition. He's the equivalent of the stage director. A stage designer is perhaps closer to the featured soloist and the first violin who are able, ideally, to adapt their imaginative and performing capabilities to the special essence of the composer - whether Beethoven or the Beatles, or in theatrical terms, Shakespeare or Mamet.

To answer the students' original question, then, my feeling is that pursuing a "signature" style is probably the last thing one should be concerned with. Our own limitations - in art and craft - ultimately result in some sort of "signature" whether we like it or not. A more valuable approach is to attempt to develop the fullest visual vocabulary with the widest range of stylistic attacks, and thereby become better equipped to serve the particular nature of the source material.

In attempting to "serve the piece" and honour the originality of the material in this way - without reference to previous experience - one hopes to produce a design that is in no way reminiscent of any other production and might belong solely to the work at hand. For me that is the ultimate challenge.

A secondary, and welcome, benefit of this is that each new production becomes a completely fresh and scary adventure. There is never any risk of boredom creeping in, as it all makes for an eternally risky - though intriguing - life, of which variety is, of course, the spice.

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