There is no coral reef, no bright underwater kingdom, and no easy fairytale romance in this new production of Rusalka. For set designer Charles Davis and costume designer Renée Mulder, Dvořák’s opera opens into something darker, stranger and more psychologically charged.

“The source material for Rusalka is Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid,” Davis says. “Disney took it in a particular direction, whilst the Czech composer Dvořák went in a much darker and sinister direction.”

Mulder agrees. “This version of Rusalka comes very much from a place of nightmares. It’s more of a dark and twisted fairytale. We meet Rusalka not as a mermaid, but a water nymph, trapped at the bottom of the lake.”

Director Sarah Giles’ vision deliberately avoids the familiar imagery of The Little Mermaid. Instead, the production explores what happens when Rusalka leaves one restrictive world only to discover another. “Once the protagonist moves from an underwater world into a human world,” Mulder explains, “she establishes that the problems of being in this world are just as bad as the restrictions and difficulties she had in her original form.

The result is a fantasy world that feels timeless, alien and hard to place. Davis says the team “didn’t want it to be a recognisable environment”, instead creating“an abstract space based on contemporary photography, art spaces, installation artwork, and fashion shoots.”

For Mulder, costume became a way to define the opera’s three distinct realms: underwater, human and supernatural. “For the ‘Underwater’, we’re in this sculptural, conceptual alien world,” she says. “In the ‘Human’ space, characters are led by the constraints and absurdities of fashion and exaggerated proportions. In our ‘Supernatural’ world we lean into magic and fantasy, a world where there are no rules or constraints of form, shape or colour.”

The underwater world is far removed from any romantic idea of the sea. Davis describes it as “an endless monochromatic bleak world in which the creatures inside are trapped.” Mulder extends that sense of sameness through costume. “In the underwater world everyone is bald, there is no identity through hair, there is no individuality.”

Rusalka’s transformation into human form is therefore not just physical, but symbolic. “She is granted hair and changes into human form right in front of our eyes,” Mulder says. Yet humanity brings its own discomforts. “Rusalka’s hair, clothing, and footwear play a big part in the idea of restriction and point out the absurdities of fashion. How we contort the shape of our bodies.”

The human world draws on brutalist architecture, including Carlo Scarpa’s Brion Cemetery near Venice, which Davis describes as “brutalist 1970s concrete morphic shapes existing next to beautiful waterways lined with lily pads.” Water appears not literally, but through “mirrors, reflective surfaces, membranes and the idea of water without putting any water on the stage.”

Ježibaba’s supernatural realm offers something looser and more unstable: “a limbo space that exists extra dimensionally,” Davis says. For Mulder, it is a world with “fluidity of form, shape, colour, gender” and “ultimately no boundaries.”

Dvořák’s music has pushed the designers into bold territory. “We are transported by the music, and it lets the imagination run wild,” Mulder says. Davis adds that the score “cracks open the design possibilities”, even as the production sometimes works against its romance to reveal something more complex.

Davis says the journey will be “visually a kaleidoscopic” one, shifting rapidly between worlds that are bleak, beautiful, restrictive and magical. This Rusalka is not a nostalgic fairytale. It is a dark dream of transformation, longing and the price of becoming human.