With less than a fortnight of rehearsals left before the first performance we spoke to the designer of Jemima Puddle-Duck and her Friends, Sophia Lovell Smith, about a country childhood, the power of the imagination and bringing the stories of one of Britain’s best loved children’s authors to the stage.

This is the third time Sophia has collaborated with the Unicorn’s Artistic Director, Tony Graham, on a production of Jemima Puddle-Duck and her Friends. While she has retained her original ‘look’ for this version, the Unicorn’s Weston Theatre has given her the opportunity to create a dynamic two-tiered thrust stage, complete with trapdoors and a swing, providing closer contact with the audience and a versatile space for the performers to interact with. A long-term supporter of the Unicorn, Sophia is thrilled about its new permanent building and the "treats" it holds in store for her to work with: "It’s such a nice thing to see the Unicorn have a home, and to be a part of it."

Those who know the tales of Beatrix Potter will be as familiar with her distinctive illustrations as with the stories themselves. Sophia, who was "brought up on Beatrix Potter", was clear in her mind from the outset that she did not want to simply recreate the original pictures on stage. While she subtly acknowledges her source with a backdrop painted in a style reminiscent of Beatrix Potter’s landscape watercolours and drawings, she has avoided animal costumes. Instead she has chosen to focus on capturing the spirit of "let’s pretend", playing with animal and human characteristics and so showing the audience how we too can imagine ourselves as a squirrel or duck. In doing so she emphasises the ambiguity at the heart of Potter’s stories – are these characters and their relationships animal or human? Inspired by 1920s country wear and children’s clothes, Sophia turned to period magazines for pictures of outfits for traditional country pursuits – farming, fishing, walking and riding. It is from these clothes, she says, that "animal qualities begin to emerge." So Jeremy Fisher wears a long Barbour macintosh, Jemima wears a full white skirt puffed out with white tulle frills, perfect for waddling, the fox, an ‘elegantly dressed gentlemen’, wears a dapper rusty coloured suit with plus fours and Squirrel Nutkin’s deerstalker hat has furry ear flaps.

Sophia is conscious of the sophistication of Potter’s tales and keen to defend them against any charge of being merely quaint or dull. Potter had a strong sense of the cruelty in nature and in the human world, which she does not shy away from in her writing. The natural pecking order in her stories, foxes eat ducks, owls intimidate squirrels, is emblematic of conflicts and hierarchies in human society. Sophia has drawn the human aspect of the tales out further, by using familiar figures of authority to inspire her costume designs and so emphasising the social relationships between the characters. For the owl, Old Brown, Sophia has designed an academic hood and gown. So Squirrel Nutkin becomes a character we can easily recognise or identify with - reminding us of a naughty schoolboy, a role some of us may have played ourselves!

The concepts for Sophia’s designs draw on Beatrix Potter’s background living and farming in Cumbria, as well as memories of her own country childhood, growing up in an "old-fashioned world" of make-do and mend. Talking about her own childhood, Sophia says: "There was plenty of space to play in and my family home provided a rich diet of quirky odd theatrical things and old dressing up clothes. Living out in the countryside, we had to make our own entertainment, you couldn’t rely on cinema. I’ve always loved the theatre, and was introduced to it at a young age. I’m hugely enthusiastic about the value of theatres such as the Unicorn. Live theatre is so important for stimulating and challenging young minds."

A spirit of imaginative play is at the heart of Sophia’s production design for Jemima Puddle-Duck and her Friends and instructs the way the actors communicate the story to the audience. The world of Jemima, Nutkin and co. is not presented to us ready-made. Sophia says, "Director Tony Graham and I wanted the actors to interact creatively with their environment on stage, using everyday objects to bring the tales to life, effectively playing games of make believe – like I used to do as a child - around the set. So we had the idea of using rubber bands as worms, a feather duster as a fox’s tail and a glove for a mole." The creative ‘playing’ in the play involves the audience too. By employing our own imaginations we allow rippling grey silk to transform into a cold English lake. It is a stimulating adventure for young minds, which shows us the liberating power of the imagination.

Since childhood Sophia has always viewed objects with a resourceful and creative eye, delighting in their inventive possibilities. "After all," she says, "what’s the fun in buying something ready-made and complete, when you can invent it yourself"?