A magic lantern with knobs on

Designer Bill Dudley has used 3-D video projections to bring Tom Stoppard's new trilogy of plays to life. Liz Hoggard takes a peek into the future of theatre

A new Tom Stoppard trilogy at the National is a significant occasion in the theatre calendar. But looking at Bill Dudley's ground-breaking designs for The Coast of Utopia, it's the medium of film that comes most readily to mind.

When he was asked to create a set for Stoppard's nine-hour, 19th-century Russian epic, Dudley was determined to avoid fusty, period trappings. Instead he blew most of his budget on a series of giant video projectors. The result is an extraordinary 3-D backdrop – like IMAX without the goggles.

"Tom's brief to me was to create a form of cinematic, visual storytelling," Dudley explains. "He doesn't want a black box with just the actors illuminated. He wanted a pictorial life to the piece. He saw it as a rich canvas." Dudley, whose award-winning designs have graced productions like The Rise and Fall of Little Voice, All My Sons and My Night with Reg, faced a monumental task with Stoppard's trilogy. For starters, The Coast of Utopia runs from 1833-1865 and spans three continents. It has 31 actors playing 70 characters. And each play has over 15 different locations, making fast scene changes almost impossible.

Hence Dudley's decision to go with video projection. Helpfully, the structure of the scenes is highly filmic, but he was determined not to fall back on archive footage. "I'm projecting walk-throughs and fly-bys, entirely constructed in 3-D software," he explains. "That way you create a kind of virtual reality, which you record like a movie, and then project onto a curved screen on stage." Actors enter and exit via doors in the screen. "They get to walk out through the screens like Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo," Dudley enthuses. "The curvature of the screen defeats the eye's perception, so you get objects in space which appear to have a greater depth." And Dudley worked closely with lighting designer David Hersey to match real conditions on the stage – smoke, rain, snow – with conditions on the video. In Voyage, the first play in the trilogy, there are large-scale video projections of a Russian dacha, a pine forest, an exhilarating boat ride through the river Neva, a zoo, and the death of Pushkin in a duel.

Such fluid staging means it can only be a matter of time before other theatre designers start copying Dudley's 3-D innovations. "The potential for cinematic changes of environment on stage is huge," he insists. "You can programme and re-programme sequences, make something shorter or longer. As computers get ever faster, it'll become even easier." Five years ago, of course, such staging would have been impossible. "We always wait until the big boys in Hollywood have got the money to develop the technology, then we come in like the brokers men or scavengers and pick up stuff and use it when it's cheap," Dudley cheerfully admits.

Stoppard's trilogy celebrates the life of the radical Russian exile Alexander Herzen and features a host of real-life historical figures from Marx to Turgenev. But, true to form, the script is full of literary in-jokes and playful modern allusions. "He's very aware that we're not people in the 1830s," Dudley says of Stoppard. "There's clearly a post-modern sensibility at work. I felt emboldened by that, so what I'm doing is a constructivist, post-Russian Revolution kind of design for what is actually an earlier period in history."

To keep scenes flowing, he and director Trevor Nunn have opted for a revolving stage. At times, during dazzling set pieces like an ice skating scene and a fancy-dress ball, you feel like you're inside a kaleidoscope, or a children's picture book, peeling back the pages. It's also a highly effective way of changing location. "The characters stay on and talk while scenes are being changed," Dudley explains. "It's not naturalism. It's a kind of super naturalism. For me, the play seems at its most Russian when we have the big scene changes where armies of guys come on and move the few physical props we're using – and it suddenly becomes like Revolutionary theatre."

Typically, Stoppard plays around with linear time, so it is up to Dudley to use video projection to help the audience decipher flashbacks. "Audiences are very good at picking up the rules of the game on the night," he insists. "They accept people walking through semi-visible doors – and once you start to be bold about it, and not apologetic, it works." As Voyage progresses, the video backdrops become less naturalistic. During one visit to the zoo, computer-generated images of cages flash before our eyes.

At previews, audiences have emerged excitedly discussing Dudley's designs. At times, there's even a danger of the set upstaging the actors. But Dudley has little time for complacency. With three plays to design simultaneously, the pace is punishing. He's still worrying that the birch forest in Voyage looks unconvincing. "We keep going outside to look at real trees to make sure we've got an acceptable level of air between the leaves," he says. "It musn't just look like a still photograph." Meanwhile, he has 48 hours to come up with a 3-D modelling programme to create the Place de la Concorde for the close of Shipwreck, the second part of the trilogy.

Not that Stoppard will be worrying. Dudley, after all, is an old hand at this game, and as Nunn remarks, "he is limitlessly optimistic". He trained as a fine artist at St Martins in the mid-1960s, but with the backlash against figurative painting, Dudley moved into theatre. He's enjoyed a highly successful 30-year career, designing everything from Tony Harrison's classic 1970s play-cycle, The Mysteries to Joe Penhall's recent hit Blue/Orange (using a design based on a Japanese sumo-wrestling stage). His next project is creating the set for David Hare's new play, The Breath of Life, which is due to open in October starring Judi Dench and Maggie Smith.

Despite his success, Dudley is frustrated about his profession, and feels that set design is still regarded as window dressing. "If our work was exhibited at the Hayward or White Cube [galleries], every nuance would be discussed. It makes you weep." Perhaps this time round, Dudley can afford to hold back the tears. The critics, one feels, are unlikely to ignore "the window dressing" on this occasion.

'The Coast of Utopia', the final production in the Barclays Olivier Theatre season, is currently previewing at the National Theatre, London SE1 (020 7452 3000). Opens 3 Aug; in rep to 31 Aug