Truth & Reconciliation
The Royal Court
Designer Lisa Marie Hall miraculously makes you feel you've never been in this attic venue before - I've been going there since it opened forty years ago - and there's notably subtle lighting and sound by Matt Haskins and Gareth Fry.
Michael Coveney Whats On Stage
Dream Story
Gate Theatre
(Anna Ledwich’s) production is compelling - beautifully lit by Matt Haskins, brilliantly designed by Helen Goddard and with a subtle, insinuating sound design by Adrienne Quartly.
Giles Cole Whats On Stage ****
The play is impeccably acted by a four-strong cast. Helen Goddard’s striking design has a movable double-bed centre stage, and Matt Haskins’ atmospheric lighting renders the cast iron partition into both a bedstead and the bars of a prison, underlining how our repressed desires can hold us hostage.
Theatre World
The Years Between
Royal & Derngate
Although a common problem in productions revolved around one central location, the drawing room setting of The Years Between is far from static; set and lighting designers Helen Goddard and Matt Haskins both worked with aplomb to create and aesthetically stunning set design, combining convincingly vintage furniture with a cleverly thought out backdrop behind faux glass windows; which subtly changes colour throughout scenes to reveal the turning of the weather.
Rachael Martin The Public Reviews
Turn of the Screw
Opera North
To paraphrase a cliché, it’s rare to leave a theatre humming the lighting. But here, Matthew Haskins’ lighting designs help make this production so powerful and evocative, whether projecting grotesque, distorted shadows on the back wall of Madeleine Boyd’s claustrophobic set, or illuminating characters’ subtle facial expressions. Dawn and dusk are both beautifully realised, and when we’re finally shown a brightly lit stage at the opera's shocking close, you almost have to shield your eyes.
Graham Rickson The Arts Desk
Together with his designers Madeleine Boyd (sets and costumes) and Matthew Haskins (lighting), Talevi conjures up a weird and compelling picture of the isolated country house in which Henry James’s ghost story takes place. Bedroom, drawing room, nursery and exterior are all piled pell-mell into one expressionistically skewed tableau. Everything here is spooked with ambiguity and uncertainty. A rocking horse appears to rock unaided, shadowy figures flit past misted windows – and for once the ghosts of Quint and Miss Jessel don’t walk on and off stage so much as materialise through the gloaming. The prim, pallid Governess paranoiacally locks doors, but how does she keep the fear out of her dreams?
Rupert Christiansen Telegraph*****
How the director chooses to portray Peter Quint and Miss Jessel tends to define the production – its style, if not its enactment. South African-born Alessandro Talevi, making a bold Opera North debut, lets them haunt from the shadows. The more you strain to see them, the more they shrivel into darkness. This absorbing, disconcerting new staging, designed by Madeleine Boyd with lighting by Matthew Haskins, never relaxes its claustrophobic grasp.
Fiona Madocks Observer
Talevi fuels the suspense and the sense of the supernatural  without over-egging the special effects. The atmosphere of claustrophobia and psychological terror is brilliantly maintained, aided by Matthew Haskins' subtle lighting changes from the brightness of an idyllic uppercrust country life to a menacing atmosphere of half-light and shadows.
Geoffrey Mogridge Opera Brittania ****
Matthew Haskins’ precise and dramatic lighting finds all the dark corners of Madeleine Boyd’s stylishly skewed set.
Ron Simpson Whats on Stage****
Pelléas et Mélisande
Independent Opera
Alessandro Talevi’s staging skips the symbolist mystique – it’s all there in the words – in favour of a psychological drama, more akin to Strindberg or Ibsen than Maeterlinck. Aided by Madeleine Boyd’s ingenious three-tier set and Matthew Haskins’ subtle lighting, he homes in on the personal relationships… Pelléas emerges as very modern and very scary.
Andrew Clark Financial Times
Marriage of Figaro
English Touring Opera
The late eighteenth-century Spanish colonial setting is wonderfully evoked through masterful lighting: early-morning sun streams through the slats in the vast Mediterranean-style blinds that adorn the windows in the Count’s home; the orange-hued arid late-afternoon turns the packed hall at Figaro and Susanna’s wedding party into a sauna – a vivid sense compounded by the cast taking off jackets and frantically fanning themselves. Strikingly, we first see the Countess in silhouette against an emerald blue sky, standing on the balcony outside her bedroom; the exquisite ‘forgiveness’ ensemble at the end of the opera takes places, with great poignancy, as dawn slowly breaks. The combined effect of high emotion, sublime singing and breathtaking sun-rise is deeply moving.
Arnold Jarvist Classical Source