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Irish Theatre: A Designer’s Theatre

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The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance

Abstract

Collaboration is paramount to the theatre designer’s process, as Irish scenographer Frank Conway argues in his insightful essay “The Sound of One Hand Clapping” (2012). However, Conway also points out that, in the discourses of Irish theatre, the specific role of theatre designers continues to be “undervalued, undermined even, a casualty of an outdated, unchallenged nineteenth-century perception [of ‘doing the backgrounds’] that is still pervasive in the industry”. Departing from several existing published considerations of design in Irish theatre that have tended to examine the role of designers via work by particular directors or writers (sometimes inadvertently reinforcing the conventional positioning of designers as subservient to writers and directors), this chapter seeks to foreground the specific contributions of designers. In addition, it seeks to trace genealogies of the designer’s increasingly co-authorial input in contemporary Irish theatre practice. In order to offer depth as well as breadth, and to trace the genealogies of contemporary practice, I will home in on the work of two designers, focussing in particular on their activities during the 1980s: Bronwen Casson and Monica Frawley. Select works by these artists (for example, their respective contributions to scripts authored by Tom MacIntyre) offer illuminating case-studies on the increasing authority and generative contribution of designers in Irish theatre-making processes, which is central to the modernisation of design in Irish theatre.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Nicholas Grene, The Politics of Irish Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), 132.

  2. 2.

    Joe Vaněk and Helen O’Donoghue, Scene Change: One Hundred Years of Theatre Design at the Abbey, Exhibition Catalogue (Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2005), 19.

  3. 3.

    Christopher Morash, A History of Irish Theatre 1601–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 121.

  4. 4.

    See Sisson, Elaine. “Experimentalism and the Irish Stage: Theatre and German Expressionism in the 1920s.” in Ireland, Design and Visual Culture: Negotiating Modernity, 1922–1992, eds. Linda King and Elaine Sisson (Cork: Cork UP, 2011).

  5. 5.

    Thomas Madden’s The Making of an Artist: Creating the Irishman Micheál MacLiammóir (2015) traces MacLiammóir’s influences, dating back to his youth in London. More recently, Paige Reynolds examines the Gate Theatre in “Design and Direction to 1960,” with a particular focus on the collaborations of Edwards and MacLiammóir during the late 1920s and early 1930s (pp. 207–211).

  6. 6.

    Morash, A History of Irish Theatre 1601–2000, 225.

  7. 7.

    See Christopher Morash’s A History of Irish Theatre 1601–2000 pp. 225–226 for more detail on the design of the 1966 Abbey theatre.

  8. 8.

    Frank Conway, “The Sound of One Hand Clapping”, in Staging Thought: Essays on Irish Theatre, Scholarship and Practice, ed. Rhona Trench (Oxford and New York: Peter Lang, 2012), 20.

  9. 9.

    Ibid., 452.

  10. 10.

    Vaněk and O’Donoghue, Scene Change, 31.

  11. 11.

    Christopher Baugh, Interview by Siobhán O’Gorman in Performing Scenographic Sense Memories, prod. Siobhán O’Gorman and Noelia Ruiz. Dir. Steve O’Connor and Manus Corduff. Perf. Chris Baugh, Lian Bell, Denis Clohessy, Sabine Dargent, Joe Devlin, Emma Fisher, Kevin Smith, Joe Vaněk, Conleth White (Dublin: MART, 2015).

  12. 12.

    My own interview with designer Sabine Dargent, “Sculpting the Spaces of Enda Walsh’s Theatre” (2015), is an example: by virtue its publication within a volume on playwright Enda Walsh, the published version focusses mainly on Dargent’s relationship with that writer, and the production teams with which he has worked. Other examples include Cathy Leeney’s “Patrick Mason: A Director’s Festival Golden Fish” (2008) and Enrica Cerquoni’s ‘“One bog, many bogs”: Theatrical space, Visual Image and Meaning in Some Productions of Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats…” (2003); these important essays examine the work of designers including Monica Frawley and Joe Vaněk via their relationships with a director and a writer respectively. More recently, in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre (2016), edited by Nicholas Grene and Chris Morash, direction and design are combined in surveys focussing mainly on the twentieth century before and after 1960 by Reynolds and Ian Walsh respectively. Although scenography is a collaborative process, I hope to redress hierarchies that have been difficult to avoid in existing scholarship by focussing here in more detail on scenography and the contributions of individual designers.

  13. 13.

    Conway, “The Sound of One Hand Clapping”, 15.

  14. 14.

    Ibid., 34.

  15. 15.

    Joe Vaněk, Irish Theatrescapes: New Irish Plays, Adapted European Plays and Irish Classics (Cork: Gandon, 2015).

  16. 16.

    Christopher Baugh, Theatre, Performance and Technology: The Development and Transformation of Scenography, 2nd ed. (Houndmills, Basingstoke and Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 224.

  17. 17.

    Ibid., 239.

  18. 18.

    Rhona Trench discusses the collaboration between Hughes, Conway, Hunt and Cummins in particular in “Staging Blue Raincoat’s production of W.B. Yeats” (2015). Trench is also author of the book Blue Raincoat Theatre Company (2015), in which she pays special attention to set, costume, sound and lighting design. Noelia Ruiz has published significant research on Pan Pan in essays such as “Mapping Contemporary European Theatres” (2015) and “Positive Acts” (2011). ANU has received attention from a range of scholars. See, for example, Brian Singleton’s “ANU Productions and Site-Specific Performance” (2013), Miriam Haughton’s “From Laundries to Labour Camps” (2014), and Charlotte McIvor’s “A Portrait of the Citizen as Artist” (2015) in which McIvor also traces ANU’s genealogies—in this case to earlier community arts practices.

  19. 19.

    Elaine Sisson, “Experimentalism and the Irish Stage: Theatre and German Expressionism in the 1920s”, in Ireland, Design and Visual Culture: Negotiating Modernity, 1922–1992, eds. Linda King and Elaine Sisson (Cork: Cork UP, 2011), 41.

  20. 20.

    Hilton Edwards, The Mantel of Harlequin (Dublin: Progress House, 1958), 66.

  21. 21.

    A detailed examination of Edwards and MacLiammóir’s engagement with Brecht , situated within its national and international contexts, will be offered in my monograph Theatre, Performance and Design: Scenographies in a Modernizing Ireland (Forthcoming).

  22. 22.

    Vaněk and O’Donoghue, Scene Change, 41.

  23. 23.

    Bronwen Casson, “‘Environmental Design’ and the Plays of Tom Mac Intyre”, in The Theatre of Tom Mac Intyre: “Strays from the Ether.” Eds. Bernadette Sweeney and Marie Kelly (Dublin: Carysfort, 2010), Kindle edition. n.p.

  24. 24.

    Ibid.

  25. 25.

    Ibid.

  26. 26.

    Ibid.

  27. 27.

    Ibid.

  28. 28.

    Ibid.

  29. 29.

    Joseph McMinn, “Theatre Review: The Bearded Lady by Tom Mac Intyre”, in The Theatre of Tom Mac Intyre: “Strays from the Ether.” Eds. Bernadette Sweeney and Marie Kelly (Dublin: Carysfort, 2010), Kindle edition. n.p.

  30. 30.

    Fintan O’Toole, “Rise Up Lovely Sweeney, by Tom Mac Intyre”, in Critical Moments, ed. Julai Furay and Redmond O’Hanlon (Dublin: Carysfort, 2003).

  31. 31.

    Bernadette Sweeney, “A Vibrant Presence: A Biography of Tom Mac Intyre’s Work”, in The Theatre of Tom Mac Intyre: “Strays from the Ether.” Eds. Bernadette Sweeney and Marie Kelly (Dublin: Carysfort, 2010), Kindle edition. n.p.

  32. 32.

    Ibid.

  33. 33.

    Chantal Hurault, “Gisèle Vienne: The Stage of Desire”, trans. Michael West, in No More Drama, eds. by Peter Crawley and Willie White (Dublin: Carysfort / Project Arts Centre, 2011), 167.

  34. 34.

    Ibid., 164.

  35. 35.

    Sweeney, “A Vibrant Presence”, n.p.

  36. 36.

    Monica Frawley, Interview by Derek West, Theatre Ireland 22 (1989): 36.

  37. 37.

    Ibid., 32.

  38. 38.

    Monica Frawley, Personal interview with Siobhán O’Gorman, September 25, 2014.

  39. 39.

    There is evidence to suggest that the powers of Beckett’s Estate are waning, however, for example in relation to gender and casting as discussed in my essay “Beckett out of Focus” (2016), pp. 83–84.

  40. 40.

    Charles Hunter, “Making Theatre and Music Work in Tandem”, The Irish Times, March 1, 1984, 12.

  41. 41.

    David Nowlan, “Forbidden Fruit in Temple Bar Studio”, Review, The Irish Times, December 14, 1983, 10.

  42. 42.

    David Nowlan, “Curtain Down on a Year of Struggle and Achievement”, The Irish Times, January 5, 1984, 10.

  43. 43.

    Druid Theatre Company. Special Collections at the James Hardiman Library, National University of Ireland Galway, T2 132–134.

  44. 44.

    Ibid.

  45. 45.

    Frawley, Interview by Derek West, 36.

  46. 46.

    Ibid.

  47. 47.

    Baugh, Interview by Siobhán O’Gorman.

  48. 48.

    Cerquoni explores different scenographies of By the Bog of Cats…, comparing the Abbey’s original production, the San José Repertory Theatre’s 2001 production, and the Irish Repertory production in Chicago (also 2001) directed by Kay Martinovich and designed by Michelle Habeck. The latter was characterised by “an utterly empty expanse of monochrome greyish flatness” in which shafts of “light partially infused the stage surface with the snowy and frozen appearance of a winter landscape” (194).

  49. 49.

    Bernadette Sweeney, Performing the Body in Irish Theatre (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 50.

  50. 50.

    Nowlan, “Curtain Down”, 10.

  51. 51.

    Ibid.

  52. 52.

    Ibid.

  53. 53.

    Ibid.

  54. 54.

    Dan Rebellato, 1956 and All That: The Making of Modern British Theatre (London: Routledge, 1999), 13.

  55. 55.

    For further information on Casson’s innovative engagements with materiality and space at the Project prior to the premiere of The Great Hunger, see John Barrett’s “Environmental Design in the Dublin Theatre.”

  56. 56.

    Conway, “The Sound of One Hand Clapping”, 22.

  57. 57.

    Charlotte McIvor and Siobhán O’Gorman. “Devising Ireland: Genealogies and Contestations.” in Devised Performance in Irish Theatre: Histories and Contemporary Practice, eds. Siobhán O’Gorman and Charlotte McIvor (Dublin: Carysfort: 2015), 25.

  58. 58.

    Christopher Morash and Carolyn Swift, “Ireland”, in The World Encyclopaedia of Contemporary Theatre: Volume 1, Europe, eds. Don Rubin (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 489.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK

    Siobhán O’Gorman

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of English, Drama and Film, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

    Eamonn Jordan

  2. School of Creative Arts, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

    Eric Weitz

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O’Gorman, S. (2018). Irish Theatre: A Designer’s Theatre. In: Jordan, E., Weitz, E. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58588-2_24

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