AT THE TENDER age of 56, Bill Dudley is revolutionising British theatre design. Back in the Sixties, when he was learning trompe-l’oeil set painting at the amateur Tower Theatre in Islington, about the most revolutionary thing ever seen on the London stage was the ironing board in Look Back in Anger.

After that, the Seventies favoured more brutalist, Brechtian effects, while the Eighties followed with the ostentatious elephantiasis of such shows as Starlight Express and Les Misérables. Then followed the conceptual chic of the Nineties, epitomised by Ian MacNeil’s doll’s house design for Stephen Daldry’s production of An Inspector Calls.

Now, Britain’s most wanted stage designer reckons his use of 3-D computer animation will transform theatre for the 21st century, and his claims cannot be doubted by anyone who saw his set for Tom Stoppard’s epic Russian trilogy The Coast of Utopia at the National Theatre. Dudley’s vast projections of budding woodlands, teeming piazzas and tossing seascapes made everyone sit up and take notice. The critics certainly did: the Critics’ Circle named him Best Designer this year.

Dudley is now re-employing the technology on Terry Johnson’s new play at the Royal Court, Hitchcock Blonde, which involves the discovery of some previously unknown footage shot by cinema’s master of suspense. Dudley is hoping to replicate the classic cinematography of Alfred Hitchcock’s work.

For Dudley, who originally studied painting at St Martin’s School of Art and stage design at the Slade, historical changes in design are led largely by technical innovation. It was the advent of the home computer that particularly shook Dudley’s world, unchaining him from the bondage of pen, ink and scale models.

But nothing compares to his childlike excitement at the discovery of 3-D imaging. “The software has been around for years in computer games, but it never ceases to amaze me the way you can turn in space a person, a building, or a tree. I was immediately taken by it, but I thought I had the wrong side of the brain and it was for all those other half-brainers who are brilliant at maths.”

Luckily there was one piece of software, Cinema 4D, which Dudley did feel he could get his head around. He realised that he could use it to create sets which many theatres can no longer afford to build. The first opportunity to test his suspicions came with the commission to design Trevor Nunn’s production of The Coast of Utopia last year. Dudley immediately saw a synergy between the possibilities of 3-D imaging and the cinematic leaps through time and space in Stoppard’s drama.

His only fear was of the National’s Olivier Theatre, where the production was to be staged. In line with many designers, he calls the Olivier “a dog’s breakfast” because it was designed by committee. The one thing it did have going for it was that it has a circular stage.

“The curvature of the stage defeats the eye because it has real depth relative to the actors and it says to the eye that there is something real out there. That way you’re environmentally involved.

“I’d taken two one-day lessons in the software and I did a trial run for Tom Stoppard and Trevor Nunn on a semi-circular screen about 100ft across and 7ft high made of seven panels with wicket doors so the actors could walk through. We stood in the middle of the stage and Trevor did what we call in the trade a “single Trevor”, which is one arm round your shoulder — and he said ‘I feel like the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk’.”

Since then, what excites Dudley most about the new kit in his tool bag is its potential. On this his enthusiasm is as fervent as it is well placed. He insists that once you’ve got the projectors, 3-D design is cheap because you don’t need to hump around cumbersome sets or record on expensive film — all you need is a DVD. It is, he claims, “eminently tourable”.

Indeed he hopes to prove its tourability with his design for David Hare’s play The Permanent Way. Directed by Max Stafford Clark, it’s about the privatisation of the railways, and starts a national tour in York in November.

The other joy of 3-D design is that you can go wherever you like in the known or unknown universe. With such freedom, Dudley thinks that video facilities will soon be as established in theatres as sound and lighting boards.

However, 3-D imaging won’t change the essential nature of theatre. It isn’t going to stop theatre being something which is performed by living people in the presence of others. There are also inevitable limits to its usage in certain plays. For example, it’s hard to imagine the estate of Samuel Beckett allowing virtual dustbins in End Game.

Further good news for Luddites is that Dudley reckons there’s no need to fear the tail of technology wagging the dog of drama. Designs must answer the needs of the play, not the other way round. Dudley was certainly quite happy to employ a conventional, single-set design for Howard Davies’s recent production of Hare’s The Breath of Life at the Haymarket Theatre.

“The designer will always want to control the design, as will the director and the author,” he says. “There are many plays it will never be used for, but theatre needs to expand its tool kit.”

Not only that, the best is yet to come from 3-D design. “Its potential for live theatre is just one possible way in which the theatre in its more populist form will survive through the 21st century,” says Dudley.

“There’s a belief among younger people that theatre is a ‘locked-off’ camera. People come from computer games and all sorts of visual source material and it’s a shock how static theatre can seem.

“But computer graphics is turning the heads of all the kids who are going to art school now. And they’re going to be brilliant at it — if they’re not brilliant already.”

• Hitchcock Blonde is in preview and opens on Wednesday at the Royal Court, London SW1 (020-7565 5000)