As co-adaptor of the stories, and also their director, designer and costume designer, Melly Still combined several key roles in the creation of Beasts and Beauties. She explains how the different aspects of the process were to prove inseparable when she was
planning the design: she found it helped to imagine the staging before she could begin to visualise the sets and
costumes. The benefits of combining these roles in one person were a completely integrated vision which created the distinctive look and feel of the production. During the initial process of
choosing the stories, she was already creating a platform on which the stories could come to life.
For the
set designs, Melly created a "model box" of the stage set which the production manager and his team used as a basis for costing and building her dramatic vision. You can also see Melly Still at work on one of the backcloths for 'Beauty and The Beast'. However, as the diary records, the combination of roles of
designer and director also made heavy demands upon her. In breaks in rehearsals she was often to be found in meetings with the creative and technical teams. For production manager Garry Ferguson, the challenge of staging this production
Beasts and Beauties was that they were having to work simultaneously on not one, but
eight separate productions, each with its own setting, costumes, and props. However, he found that
dealing with a director who was also a designer made life easier for him.