Another especially celebrated aspect of the production was the set, designed by John Bury, who used the work of Karl von Appen and Caspar Neher as his primary visual inspiration. Bury constructed the set primarily from plated steel, even the walls and floors were covered in textured metal, giving the entire stage a cold, metallic appearance. At the back of the stage was a steel trellis and movable walls of triangular shape covered with riveted plates. T.C. Worlsey commented of the set that "we seem to be claustrophobically caught between two swinging metal wings that crush us from one side then from the other." According to Bury, "this was a period of armour and a period of the sword; they were plays about warfare, about power, about danger [...] This was the image of the plays. We wanted an image rather than a naturalistic setting. We were trying to make a world, a dangerous world, a terrible world, in which all these happenings fit."Quoted in Bury employed the notion of "selective realism"; using one or two realistic props to emphasise the social dimensions of the narrative. In this case, such realism was manifested by a massive oval shaped iron council table which took up a large portion of the stage - the constantly changing group of figures who sit at the table visually emphasising the turbulence and political instability of the period. Peter Hall himself wrote of the set, "on the flagged floor of sheet steel tables are daggers, staircases are axe-heads, and doors the traps on scaffolds. Nothing yields: stone walls have lost their seduction and now loom dangerously - steel-clad - to enclose and to imprison. The countryside offers no escape, the danger is still there in the iron foliage of the cruel trees, and, surrounding all, the great steel cage of war."
