Yoav Segal builds magical worlds on stage, and he's an inspiration for any cross-disciplinary creative

There's a moment in Michael Morpurgo's Pinocchio at the Watermill Theatre, Newbury, where the performers raise transparent umbrellas dripping with cherry blossoms, bathed in hot pink neon light. It's the kind of image that stops an audience cold. And it couldn't exist without the work of Yoav Segal, a multidisciplinary creative whose recent run of theatre projects demonstrates what happens when visual storytelling is awarded true creative ambition.

Yoav's set and costume design for Pinocchio, directed by Elle While and Indiana Lown-Collins, was nominated for Best Design at the UK Theatre Awards 2025, and the production was selected in the Guardian's top 10 shows of 2024. Their review called every aspect of the stagecraft outstanding. And I'm not surprised.

It's a bold, maximalist piece of design (trees, lanterns, cascading flowers, neon strips) that somehow coheres into something atmospheric rather than cluttered. The stage becomes a living environment the story inhabits rather than merely a stage the story sits on.

Different palette, same instinct

Yoav's design for The Wizard of Oz at TBTL in Keswick, directed by Sarah Punshon, shifts things into a completely different gear. A wall of mismatched screens glows emerald green, faces flickering across the monitors like digital ghosts. Where Pinocchio is organic and lush, this is industrial and eerie. But the underlying instinct is the same: create an environment that does dramatic work, not just decorative work. The screens aren't there because they look good. They turn the Wizard's world into something surveilled and unsettling; an Oz that feels contemporary and slightly sinister.

The more of these sets you see, the clearer it becomes: Yoav's willingness to commit fully to a design concept and trust the audience to come along. There's no hedging, no halfway. Each production has a distinct visual identity that you could recognise from a single photograph.

A family story on stage

Take Cable Street, a musical which dramatises the events of October 1936, when a hundred thousand East Londoners (Jewish communities, Irish workers, communists) blockaded their streets against Oswald Mosley's fascist marchers. For Yoav, this is not abstract history. His grandfather was one of the organisers of that demonstration. It's a family story.

The production sold out two runs at Southwark Playhouse in 2024 and was selected as one of The Stage's top shows of that year. It's currently playing at the Marylebone Theatre until 28 February before making its international debut Off-Broadway at 59E59 Theaters in New York this spring. But each venue has demanded a rethink.

Moving from thrust staging to a proscenium end-on configuration at the Marylebone meant Yoav had to reimagine the spatial dynamics entirely. His solution was to open out the world with a smashed wooden arch and metal portals, placing the East London block of flats from which the characters are being evicted directly on stage.

Consequently, the front of the stage becomes a domestic interior, ripped open to the outside world as politics and ideology crash in. To make the most of the stage depth and width, Yoav used old-school forced perspective techniques; the kind of optical trickery that predates digital projection by centuries but still works because it engages the audience's imagination rather than doing the imagining for them. He's described it as feeling like "a risky roll of the dice" while it was still in the drawing and construction stages.

That honesty about the gap between design intent and realised production is worth noting. Because after all, that theatre design is speculative work. You commit to ideas months before you see them, under stage lighting with performers moving through them. The confidence to push a concept, knowing it might not land, is all part of the craft.

The wider picture

Yoav's background helps explain this range. He's an Arts Foundation award-winning theatre designer, but he's also a BAFTA-longlisted filmmaker and D&AD-nominated creative director. His animated title sequence for the Sky Originals documentary Once Upon a Time in Londongrad made the BAFTA longlist. He's done stop-motion work for the BBC, projection design for shows at Sadler's Wells and the National Theatre. He was the founding creative director of RightsInfo, a human rights communications project, and has made films with the charity Hope Not Hate.

This isn't a designer, then, who arrived at theatre through a single pipeline. The cross-pollination between disciplines (film, animation, digital, and campaigning) feeds into stage work that thinks in terms of images and environments, not just flats and furniture. When you look at that wall of screens in Oz or the neon-lit forest in Pinocchio, you're seeing someone who knows how images work across multiple media and has brought that thinking to the stage.

For any creative working across disciplines, Yoav's trajectory is a useful reminder that the most interesting theatre design often comes from people who don't only do theatre design.

The skills transfer. The visual thinking transfers too. And the willingness to take risks—to commit to forced perspective when it feels like a gamble, to fill a stage with cherry blossoms and neon, to put your grandfather's story on stage—that transfers most of all.