The studio of the set designer Es Devlin is a light, open-plan space in a former paint factory in Peckham, South London. It used to be her home as well as her office—she now lives a couple of miles away, with her husband and two children—and it retains a domestic feel. Her staff, seven people in all, tend to be architecture and photography graduates in their early twenties. Bikes and skateboards are propped against the wall next to the door, and when I visited, late last summer, the youngest assistant was crashing on the sofa for a few weeks. The team sat at tables at one end of the room, shifting renderings around on their computer screens, as they prepared for the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Verdi’s “Otello.” It was a new relationship and an important production, opening the Met’s season (it returns there next month), and Devlin wanted the set to be perfect, but she was feeling doubtful. When Devlin is not pleased with something, she waves her hand and declares that it will evolve, that there will be many “iterations” to come.

She lifted a resin model the size of a shoebox onto a table. It was beautiful—a ghostly, icy object—but hard to imagine as a built structure, and to clarify she showed me a computer image. The set was a series of slender transparent boxes, made of Lucite, that could move around the stage, continually reshaping the dramatic area. The boxes had arches, columns, shuttered windows, Palladian doorways, and they fit together to evoke the castle in Cyprus where the drama takes place—grand rooms frozen in glass. They were lit from within, and inside were staircases that characters would use for entrances and exits. This created a feeling of claustrophobia and enhanced the opera’s fixation on eavesdropping and spying. Devlin clicked the mouse and showed me how the structures would move, both revealing and containing the tension. “These glass staircases and dead ends formed in my mind a year ago,” she said. “But it’s a struggle trying to translate that mental landscape into dimensions and mechanics, with materials and budgets that will be right for the Met.”

Devlin’s set for U2’s Innocence+Experience tour featured a walkway flanked by video screens, so that band members sometimes appeared to walk through moving images. Courtesy Es Devlin Courtesy Es Devlin

The set had to move as the narrative moves—slyly, alarmingly—and Devlin spent a lot of time trying to devise a design that would amplify the drama. “For me, the question is always: What is the show really about?” she said. “Why does it need to happen? Why did it need to be written, and who needs to see it, and why?” Preparing for “Otello,” she went back to the letters of Verdi’s librettist, Arrigo Boito, and noticed how he was absorbing the naturalistic innovations of Ibsen. He advised Verdi to avoid comforting the audience. “The drama is desolate,” Devlin said. “Otello’s just bashed Desdemona to the floor, and here was Verdi’s desperate attempt to cheer things up with a triumphal march!” She took down a book from a shelf and read me a letter in which Boito warned Verdi about the risk of dissipating the scene’s claustrophobia—“like a fist breaking the window of a room where two people are about to die of asphyxiation.” Devlin’s glass house had developed as a machine in which to tell lies and to discover them. She seemed to have climbed inside the psychology of the opera. “There is progressively less chorus in the piece,” she noted. “And the characters become more cramped. I found myself designing as if for Ibsen. You know, this is not about castles and ships. It’s about the storms that can rage among three people in a drawing room.”

She turned back to the resin model. “The panels slide,” she said, demonstrating. “They are like knives of glass. It feels like a house to begin with, then it comes apart. I wanted to make a building that would appear to get infected and fall away, because of eavesdroppers and overlookers, just as Otello’s very self falls away.” She bent down and looked through the model, imagining how the performers would move among these jarring angles.

Devlin is forty-four years old and petite, with beautiful skin, dark eyes, and long, lustrous brown hair, usually piled up and held in place with a pencil. She is widely considered to be the world’s foremost set designer. She is an architect of temporary space, making images that can survive only in the minds of the people who see her shows. “I do all this work and nothing physical remains,” she told me. “So what I’m really designing are mental structures, as opposed to physical ones. Memories are solid, and that’s what I’m trying to build.” Around the studio are clues to the unusual range of Devlin’s work, which extends well beyond theatre and opera. There was a photograph of the stage for Miley Cyrus’s “Bangerz” tour (Cyrus sliding down a simulacrum of her own tongue) and, hanging from a hat stand, dozens of backstage passes—Kanye West’s “Touch the Sky” tour, Lady Gaga’s “Monster Ball,” the Pet Shop Boys’ “Electric” world tour, and so on. In the bathroom at the back of the studio, there’s a stash of awards, including an O.B.E. from the Queen. Devlin has become one of show business’s busiest people, and she seems to love the glamour of her crazy schedule and diverse worlds. She told me that she always buys her shoes in Terminal 5 at Heathrow Airport. When I first contacted her, she was about to fly to Rio de Janeiro, where she was involved in designing the opening ceremony for this year’s Olympic Games. She had a Louis Vuitton show coming up in Paris. She was working with the director Lyndsey Turner on a production of “Hamlet” starring Benedict Cumberbatch, and with the Royal Opera House on a new production of Brecht and Weill’s “The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.” A little further off was a concert tour for Adele. This month, Broadway audiences will see her set for the musical adaptation of “American Psycho,” which premièred in London last year. The design is stark and anemic, a white box that sometimes turns blood-red. “That set’s a tunnel—a really tedious one, with no exit,” she told me. “It’s a very eighties situation, right? So it’s a tunnel that wants to be a Sony Walkman.”

Adele performing on a Devlin set. “What I’m really designing are mental structures, as opposed to physical ones,” Devlin says. Courtesy Es Devlin Courtesy Es Devlin

Devlin’s conversation is peppered with references to artists she has worked with, or who have influenced her—Rachel Whiteread, Damien Hirst, Bill Viola, Pina Bausch, Bruce Nauman, Tracey Emin—and she is widely credited with having brought the sensibility and visual vocabulary of the contemporary-art scene into the theatre world. But her achievement goes beyond a particular visual style. “Es doesn’t design plays,” Lyndsey Turner told me. “Or, at least, she doesn’t design the locations in which they’re set. Instead, she designs the ideas, the thought structures, the systems in which the characters operate. Her brain is both forensic and associative: she’s able to X-ray a play and then she begins to dream.” Benedict Cumberbatch told me something similar: “She knows how to bend the mind around corners of our experience.”

I first became aware of this psychological depth in her work in 2014, when I saw a play called “The Nether,” by Jennifer Haley, at the Royal Court Theatre, in London. The play is set in 2050, when the Internet, now known as the Nether, has become a network of virtual-reality domains where users can enact their fantasies. The story follows the investigation of a man who runs a zone of the Nether where pedophiles can have sex with, and even murder, virtual children. Part police procedural and part dystopian thesis about thought crime versus actual crime, the play isn’t entirely successful—often genuinely disturbing yet also sometimes self-satisfied and obtuse. But Devlin’s set was a revelation, a blend of the concrete and the ethereal that perfectly expressed the play’s underlying themes. At one point, a detective asks whether what we do in our imagination isn’t, in a sense, also real, and Devlin’s set enlarged on that question. It was a glass box divided into two levels, within which, sometimes via video projection, appeared brief suggestions from an earlier time—an Edwardian bed, a fireplace, a rocking horse, and sunlit poplar trees so beautiful as to be almost kitsch (in the time of the play, trees no longer exist). The set seemed to suggest the pedophiles’ minds—an aqueous world in which fantasies were never entirely solid, yet never completely without foundation, either—and to raise the question whether we are ever safe from the ghastliest of thoughts.