"With a superb set by Ultz and a shadowy neon-lighting design from Katharine Williams, Clint Dyer's dynamic production ramps up the tension, matching the fractured nature of the story-telling with its own atmospheric bittiness."

Paul Taylor The Independant 2011-11-14

"Scene changes strike like lightning flashes and Katharine Williams' lighting design outshines Ultz's surprisingly simplistic set, leaving us with no idea what we'll face when the lights come up."

Naima Khan Spoonfed 2011-11-09

"as lights blaze bright, then flash and go out, you’re left unsure where the next explosive scene is going to come from"

Zoey Craig Londonist 2011-11-09

"a crisp, punchy script with dreamy slow motion choreography and innovative lighting/soundscapes"

The Stage

"He speaks of thought, and consciousness, of the interplay between his experiences growing up and his adult being now. Dartnell separates the inner “I” and places it within a single beam of light, a place where whatever happens, we as an audience are meant to forget."

Jake Orr A Younger Theatre (blog) 2011-02-23

"These are complicated and highly theoretical concepts, but Dartnell manages to convey them without lecturing like a professor of philosophy. One way this is done is by the creative use of lighting, designed by Katharine Williams. At the start of the show Dartnell explains the two spotlights that will sporadically appear. When he is inside the one with a rosy pink glow he will express his “private” thoughts and self, which the audience is told to ignore. There’s also the white light of religion that shines down, which he states he will skirt around but not dive directly into."

Laura Anderson Extra! Extra! 2011-02-23

"The stage is set up in a mirror image: is he simply talking to his younger self? A former best friend? Towards the end of the play, it seems as if it might be his brother. In Chris Goode's scrupulous production, the lone man casts two shadows on the opposing walls. It is simple science, of course, but nonetheless it feels spooky."

Lyn Gardner The Guardian 2011-02-08

"...on its own terms I was very proud of it, and not least by the extraordinary lighting cadenza which Katharine Williams so beautifully created for the transition between the two plays. "

Chris Goode Thompson's Bank of Communicable Desire

"Michael Vale’s design and Katharine Williams’ lighting together weave pure magic, creating an intricate little world encased in winding tree trunks that seems infused with a mysterious mist, occasionally peppered with extra twinkles and prudent dashes of glitter."

Nuala Calvi The Stage 2010-12-13

"a thrilling combination of light and sound"

poisonkagero.blogspot.com

"An amazing theatrical experience. ...Its concept is beguiling and challenging with inventive staging and clever use of multi-media projections (Paul Burgess) and atmospheric lighting by Katharine Williams."

Robin Strapp The British Theatre Guide 2010-05-10

"the dreamy, white set evokes the different locations of the story by arrangements of mirrors and chairs and changing light, from the elegant Sundhollin swimming baths to the emptiness of an ice field"

Susan Mansfield The Scotsman 2010-08-20

"As the relationships on stage split apart and break, all four of the cast – together with an impressive and well-realised set and lighting design – create a performance that grips throughout."

Edinburgh Spotlight 2010-04-23

"Jonathan Fensom’s New York apartment set, subtly but perceptively lit by Katharine Williams, provides exactly the right level of sophisticated elegance to maximise the impact of the drama."

Thom Dibdin The Stage 2010-04-22

"a beautiful vision for this iconic space"

The Guardian

"the venue was transformed into a magical and otherworldly environment that seemed to suggest a trip to the skies"

The Times

"atmospheric cobalt-blue lighting"

The Telegraph

"a new stage version of Kitano’s film, in which movement, music, visual imagery and language collide to conjure up a strange landscape of sweetness, loss and memory"

Joyce McMillan The Scotsman

"It is in the sheer skill and harmonization of all its individual elements that Hysteria excels. Katharine Williams’ lighting does wonders for the surreal shifts of both time and mood."

Culture Wars

"The lighting shifts in constant rhythm, sometimes illuminating the couple in the throes of a serpentine duet, coiling around each other's bodies while their son looks on from the shadows, excluded from their special relationship. At other times, all three move in and out of thin shards of light, as when Grainger waltzes around the stage with his arms outstretched around an unseen partner in a potent symbol of loneliness and regret."

Neil Norman Daily Express 2008-11-07

"Edie soon finds herself in Kensington Gardens amid luminous shafts of light and in a twilight world of fireflies and faeries with whom she soon embarks on a perilous adventure amid the falling bombs. And it's here, with the introduction of Blind Summit Theatre's terrific puppets, that the magic really begins to glow."

Mark Monahan The Telegraph 2008-07-18

"The characters are marvels of ingenuity, so are the designs. A tiny stage framed by tree roots doubles both as Paddington Station (from which Edie was meant to be evacuated) and Kensington Gardens, where the fast-falling twilight is variously lit by the hellish glow of air raids, the flight of fireflies and the cosy lamps of underground fairy homes."

Judith Mackrell The Guardian 2008-07-15

"The cutest proof of the work's appeal came moments before the close, as Edie, the 10-year-old heroine of this new "faerie-tale", prepared to look inside the all-important Golden Coffin, believed to be jam-packed with treasure. After a teasing hint of golden light emerged from it (not unlike the mysterious briefcase in Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, of all things), one noticed that a dozen or so tiny figures from the audience had silently gambolled to the front and were craning their necks over the front of the stage, desperate to get a glimpse of its contents."

Mark Monahan The Telegraph 2008-07-18

"At twilight, Edie is caught up in a world of fairies, good and evil. Among the twisted trees and firefly lights of Michael Vale’s evocative, Arthur Rackham-ish decor, a different battle is fought, while the explosions and eerie glow of the blitz are worked into Martin Ward’s atmospheric music."

David Dougill The Sunday Times 2008-07-20

"Michael Vale’s atmospheric set, lit by Katharine Williams, is forever shrouded in an eerie mist and comprises a forest of gnarled tree trunks, and - to the delight of the children, who at one strategic point all creep forward for a closer look- a wooden stage with various hidden compartments, and occasional fairy rings that light up."

The Stage 2008-07-15

"Katharine Williams provides another of her excellent lighting designs."

Andrew Haydon Timeout London 2008-10-27

"an imaginative set by Paul Burgess... images projected on the window, and at one point on an actress’s hands, and very atmospheric lighting by Katharine Williams"

British Theatre Guide

"A more luminous depiction of society’s dark recesses you’ll rarely find. "

Timeout London

"The intimate studio setting, stark set and moody lighting all help to create an atmosphere of intense emotion and to bring home the horror of a situation expressed in Joe’s parting words, “I don’t have a mind with room for what were done to you.""

The Stage

"Mesmerising... Johnston's dance of shadows is a cabaret for a nightmarish world. It has it's own logic and haunting, disturbing and quite extraordinary beauty"

Metro

"This exquisite miniature... unfolds on stage like a film and yet is intensely alive even as it deals in the currency of death. Text, motion, lighting and sound often seem to be engaged in their own jostling psychological dance, in which past and present shimmer and merge on a liberating journey into the light."

Lynn Gardener The Guardian 2008-01-12

"Katharine Williams’ lighting flickers and strobes suggestively"

Ian Shuttleworth Financial Times 2008-01-15

"Credit to Edward Lewis's sound, and Katharine Williams's lighting, for whisking us from cliff top to suburban semi in only a bare, black box. But the clincher is Garance Marneur's design that frames the stage like a cinema screen. The techniques that bring movement and text into such a happy marriage have been learnt from the art of the film edit."

Jenny Gilbert The Independant 2008-01-13

"Epic is overrated. Forty minutes is all you need to make a memorable piece of theatre, as succinctly demonstrated by director Carrie Cracknell in her latest piece, I Am Falling. The atmosphere is intimate, with Katharine Williams’ lighting particularly effective. This is a complex reflection on love and its consequences expressed in the most economic terms, and all the better for it."

Lyndsey Winship The Stage 2008-01-10

"Katharine Williams's stunning lighting and Garance Marneur's clever design give a sense of both a small, old fashioned art film house and a dance studio. The intermittent flickering light and Ed Lewis's scratchy soundtrack accompanying much of the action are reminiscent of an early black and white film. Holding this extraordinary vision together is director Carrie Cracknell. Like the memories her atmospheric production attempts to evoke, the images will stay with you long after the final curtain call. A rare treat..."

Lucy Popescu Theatreworld Internet Magazine 2008-01-14

"The program described it as “a dance theater collaboration,” a term that under other circumstances borders on the pretentious. In fact, there’s no better way to describe this (now closed) tiny unclassifiable jewel from a superbly indivisible cast of three and their creative team. Unfair though it is to single anyone out, Katharine Williams' startlingly atmospheric lighting was out of all proportion to her economy of means."

David Benedict Variety

"The pumping soundtrack combines with distinctive lighting effects with smoke and mirrors that masked nothing but illuminate the tale making it very accessible. It's not just flash and flying though - the top rate production values and quality of the soundtrack lift it above the mass of Fringe shows. Well directed, brilliantly performed, thrilling and urgent - go see."

Ade Berry edfringe.com 2007-08-04

"A shaft of light beams down on a single rope which hangs like a great exclamation mark above the centre of the stage. It beckons the lone performer, tolls like a bell calling the faithful and pulls the audience towards a piece which sets out to ponder what it is that drives cult-like worship and the creation of iconic figures, past and present."

Huddersfield Daily Examiner

"Lighting is worth a particular mention for its contribution to the production as a whole."

Cathy Cowell nowt2do.com

"the design is exceptionally fine... overcoming the restrictions of the black box in which the play is performed with a shimmering, fractured photo of the vast South African veldt"

Jane Edwardes Timeout London

"The enormous political changes have left the family eking out a subsistence kind of living under the steamy heat of the South African sun."

Peter Brown londontheatre.co.uk

"The staging grips like a malign hallucination."

Dominic Cavendish The Telegraph 2006-07-24

"The staging too is slick - the multiple time changes within the "classic New York apartment" set nicely managed with snappy lighting (by Katharine Williams)."

Natalie Bennett Blogcritics.org 2006-07-09

"The design team give us a setting with a life of its own as well as sound and lighting to match. I think Molière would have approved."

Anne Morley-Priestman What's on Stage

"Dramaturg Jonathan Young and his team – lighting designer Katharine Williams, set designer Yukiki Tsukamoto, and sound collaborators Carolyn Douning and Adrienne Quartly – have created a funny, innovative and at times disturbing exploration of how humans hang on to their sanity."

Naomi Mapstone Financial Times

"Hysteria regularly tips over into beautifully controlled excesses that expose the divide between public and private behaviour. The exaggerations work largely because the interplay between the cast, sound and lighting design is so sharply timed."

Donald Huthera The Times 2007-01-23

"Light, music and partly audible conversation accompanied by mime and movement shifts attention back to the centre stage, to the table and couple at the restaurant. The audience by now may not be aware that they are party not only to the research but also to the carefully drawn physical space turgid with emotions they cannot lightly dismiss. This is an extraordinary production brilliantly staged and performed."

Rivka Jacobson British Theatre Guide 2006-07-31

"Stamping Ground’s style is truly expressive, the piece is cleverly lit, and the whole piece really does converge around some of the latent hysteria endemic in these over-analytical times."

SG http://www.fringereview.co.uk/ 2006-08-08

"the transitions between chat show and flash-backs worked well thanks to a neat blend of sound and lighting effects"

Peter Brown London Theatre Guide 2006-03-08

"This revival [of of Play] in a double-bill with Not I is ...a clever pairing because of the existence in both plays of a cold, thin beam of light that orders the words into existence."

Jeremy Kingston The Times 2005-07-22

"Studio One at BAC has had the seats ripped out so it looks more like a gallery than a theatre, and it creates a minimalist setting for this journey, from the piercing searchlight interrogation of the three heads in urns in Play, to the lone illuminated jabbering mouth of Not I that is silenced only by the terrible darkness. "

Lyn Gardner The Guardian 2005-07-25

"In Not I the speaker (Lisa Dwan) is no more than a pair of lips caught in the beam of light, a disembodied mouth like an image from a Bacon painting that spouts a torrent of words, on, on, on, not stopping till the beam fades and the mouth, still faintly uttering, vanishes from sight. "

Jeremy Kingston The Times 2005-07-22

"...an evening where the imaginative power of the plays knocks you out."

Jeremy Kingston The Times 2005-07-22

"In Play, the three protagonists seem doomed to repeat themselves and their banalities for infinity, forever under interrogation by an almighty searchlight. In Not I it is obliteration that beckons, the final putting out of the light. Billie Whitelaw described performing it as "falling backwards into hell, emitting cries". Watching it is like falling backwards into hell, hearing cries."

Lyn Gardner The Guardian 2005-07-25

"John Hopkins is a perfect M, ridiculously polite, howling with anguish and blinking his confusion at the spotlight, which switches the characters on and off with the finality of a remote control..."

Lucy Powell TimeOut London 2005-07-27

"Play, the longer piece, is written for three heads extruding from three ageing, earth-clad urns. They take their turns to speak, prompted by a restless, inquisitive spotlight randomly dancing from one face to another. "

Keiron Quirke Metro 2005-07-22

"In Natalie Abrahami's Battersea Arts Centre revival of Beckett's Play, a man and two women housed in urns, their heads picked out by a spotlight, rattle through the details of the affair that binds them together in a sort of Sartrean hell. "

Dominic Cavendish The Telegraph 2005-07-26

"Amanda Drew, John Hopkins and Anna Hewson, as grey as their urns, speak only when the light is upon them... only the mouths move, and the glimpses of tongue and palate, red where all else is grey, are disquieting reminders of a life in death."

Jeremy Kingston The Times 2005-07-22

"A far more comprehensible degree of jabbering hysteria is achieved in the companion piece, Not I, a solo role for a spotlit mouth. Lisa Dwan's - contorting and twitching away high up in the air and far back in the dark - makes an unforgettable sight, and in itself is worth the price of admission."

Dominic Cavendish The Telegraph 2005-07-26

"The design is simple and clever and the whole production is beautifully and thoughtfully lit."

EdinburghGuide.Com

"...the action manages to excape the shackles of storydom and enjoys instead the extraordinary richness of Theatre O's attention to detail, physical ability and newfound technological innovation... with such spellbinding lighting and sound in accompaniment, these moments mean that Astronaut remains an unmissable delight."

Kultureflash

"...conjures up a jammed bar full of enthusiastic football fans in a seriously impressive combination of light, sound and movement."

Emer O’Kelly Sunday Independent (Ireland) 2005-10-01

"brilliant lighting and choreography"

The Telegraph

"a production that is slick and often strikingly beautiful"

The List

"a most remarkable production"

Harold Pinter The Independent

"the design and lighting are fittingly tenebrous"

London Evening Standard

"all four actors get soliloquies to savour and turn in good performances, and they are helped by Katharine Williams’ superbly eerie lighting"

The British Theatre Guide