Career
After leaving Messel in 1958, Toms worked on the opera Susanna's Secret for the Glyndebourne Festival and for various West End theatre productions. In 1960 he designed the world premiere of Benjamin Britten's opera A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Aldeburgh Festival. He then worked with many English non-profit companies, including the Old Vic and the National Theatre, where he designed sets and costumes for Shakespear's Love's Labour's Lost, Marlowe's Edward II, Neil Simon's Brighton Beach Memoirs, and The Provok'd Wife for which Toms won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Set Design. He also worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he designed the 1989 production of the Kaufman-Hart comedy The Man Who Came to Dinner and John Osborne's A Patriot for Me. Toms also worked frequently with the English Stage Company.
In 1969, Toms was appointed consultant for the Investiture of the Prince of Wales, for which he received the Order of the British Empire. There followed commissions to redecorate several West End theatres including the Theatre Royal, Windsor, and, most notably, the Theatre Royal, Bath, which he restored to its former glory in 1982.
In 1970, Toms began to work in the American theatre and won a Tony Award and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Set Design in 1975 for his production design of Sherlock Holmes. During this time, Toms met and befriended Tom Stoppard with whom he would work frequently on plays in both New York and London productions. Toms worked with Stoppard on such plays as Travesties, Night and Day, The Real Thing, Jumpers, and Hapgood among others. Toms' more recent design works included productions of two Edward Albee plays, Three Tall Women (1994) and A Delicate Balance (1997), and the Peter Hall production of An Ideal Husband (1996).
In 1990 he took on the task of restoring the Frank Matcham theatre in Richmond, Surrey.
Toms also worked on nine films during his career, including the cult classic One Million Years BC, starring Raquel Welch in a fur bikini of Toms' devising; and other cave epics, including Prehistoric Women (1967) and When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth(1970). He also was the production designer for a 1968 film of The Winter's Tale.
Toms died of emphysema on August 4, 1999 in Hertfordshire, England at age 72.
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