Ground Zero

When the twin towers came down in New York, I was working with The Wooster Group.  I remember the eery silence the day after and the pall of yellowish smoke that hung south of Canal St.  And everything was covered with a fine layer of gritty ash.
The play I'm working on at the moment (Griswold - Loose End, Civic Theatre Tallaght) is a black comedy set 4 months after 9/11, so I'm really enjoying the experience of designing for something I remember myself.  As a starting point, I revisited  some of the images of Ground Zero; they look like stage sets in themselves.
The Focus Theatre has had to leave its venue in Pembroke Place, so the detritus of ages was removed from the attic and found it's way back onto a stage.  I also cannibalised the old set from Hen Night for the structure.  It looks like chaos but it is actually tourable. 
I've had fun with lighting with this set design, and I've enjoyed working with Colm Maher from Bewleys.  He's created a lovely lighting design, unfortunately difficult to capture on camera.  You'll have to see it in real life. 

Set in progress

The show previews on Tuesday 12th June and opens on Wednesday 13th, at the Loose End, Civic Theatre Tallaght.  In July, it will transfer to the New Theatre, Temple Bar.

Going Dark at Young Vic, London

I'm glad to see that Going Dark by Hattie Naylor and Sound & Fury will be returning to The Young Vic in December.  This is a wonderful moving play, and a piece of work truly integrated together- the production is a collaboration between the Hattie Naylor's text and the visual & sound design from Sound & Fury.  It is all brought to life by a beautiful performance by John Mackay. Watch the trailer, or visit http://www.youngvic.org/whats-on/going-dark

Reviewers..

 Why do so few critics ever mention the set of a show?  Is it that they are for the most part trained as literary/drama critics and feel out of their depth when dealing with the visiual elements of a play?   Or do they simply not notice?  Here's the only one, out of all the reviews, that mentions the set of Hen Night.

Irish Theatre Magazine

Sonia Haccius’ set allows the cast use it as a proverbial closet in which to hide their respective skeletons. Dominated by a painted landscape scene that provides a backdrop so idyllic that it conjures up memories of The Quiet Man, the greenery is interrupted by a dingy hallway with greying wallpaper that allows the women to disappear off to make tea and fetch sandwiches at alternate times, allowing for secretive whisperings and interrupted conversations. A single bulb dangles from the ceiling of the hallway, lighting various paraphernalia that have been left behind by the house’s previous owners: a barbeque, a mattress, a child’s tricycle.

by Sheena Madden Reviewed 19 September

The walls

Printed foamex walls

The walls of the house were to be made of printed Foamex on a lightweight wooden frame.  This was going to absorb a major part of the budget , so I needed to get the go-ahead from Joe and Michal, the producers, because it would eat up all our contingency, but I felt it was the most practical solution.  While the producers considered it, and tried to raise more money, we went ahead with the build of the frames.  This, as it turned out, was a mistake.

The framework for flats

It seems that “8x4 sheets” is a variable beast, so while Janneke built the frames at 1220mmx2440mm, the foamex sheets turned out to be slightly wider at about 1230mm, which meant that each fragile sheet protruded beyond its support, with the protrusion incrementally getting larger and larger.  This caused much extra hassle while touring.

McGowans gave us a good deal on the printing of the Foamex, but unfortunately weren’t very efficient.  I had never had a problem with them before, but everything went wrong on this job.  I first got a call that the image wasn’t high enough resolution, and that the print was pixelated, so I reworked the image and tried again.  Still too pixelated.  I substituted another image drawn from a much higher resolution source, and asked to see the test print.  It still hadn’t been printed when I got there, but eventually they ran off a print while I waited.  It’s still too pixelated, they said.  I checked it.  “No” I said “ that’s a paint effect filter. It’s supposed to look like that.  I explained this in the original email that I sent with the original image.”  Two weeks delay and late nights redesigning because someone didn’t read an email properly!

McGowans didn’t deliver the sheets the next two times that they promised, and when they did they had accidently duplicated two of the images and left off two others, so Janneke spent days simply sitting in the Focus theatre waiting for promised sheets of Foamex that never showed up.  And it’s so difficult to shout at someone when they are doing you a cheapie.

When we eventually put the pieces together, though, it looked great and I still think was the most efficient way of creating the  walls. If anyone knows a better/cheaper solution let me know.

The carpet

Patrick spraying the carpet brown.

Its been a while since I made a set to tour around the M50 theatres and things have got a lot fussier fire-proofing wise.  I don’t remember having to use officially stamped wood, or having to provide fire certs for everything before.  (For events in Dublin Castle, yes.)

The following will probably sound as though the build consisted of lurching from one crisis to another, but it wasn’t.   The things we remember about a set production are the difficulties- the things just went exactly to plan don’t stick in the mind quite so readily.  However there were some things that really didn’t go to plan:

I wanted to use lino with a square tile pattern for the flooring outside of the house, but even with very helpful discounts, we couldn’t afford it from the budget, so reflecting that lino was expensive, but labour was cheap (seeing as everyone is on a fixed fee), I decided to use 2^nd hand event carpeting, and draw the lino squares on with a thick marker.  I checked beforehand that the carpet was flame retardant, and was told it was ( obviously- it is used for events).  It was also 5 times cheaper.  Unfortunately, the colour I needed wasn’t available in the second hand stock, so I bought an orange carpet and decided to spray it brown with supersaturated paint.

The paint didn’t go far enough, so we mixed up old paints from under the sink and managed to get enough to paint the carpet, but it turned out that the sprayer had to be used indoors, because the slightest breeze would dissipate the spray.  This meant a lot of to-ing and fro-ing with sodden rolls of carpet, and constant mopping of the Focus stage.  Once all the rolls were dry, they had to be marked out and the squares drawn, a mind-numbing process- literally-, because the person who did the job went into a zombie state and didn’t notice that the lines had wavered off by up to 10cm.  And indelible markers- they’re, well , indelible.

So for next time- if the carpet isn’t available in the right colour, and you can’t afford the alternative- make an alternative design.  In the end, your time is not infinitely available.

The Hen Night Epiphany- design notes

The Hen Night Epiphany (Helix Stage)

The problem with recording the ups and downs of creating a set is that whilst one is in the middle  of said seesaw, you’re too busy, and once it’s all over, its all a blur.  They say childbirth is the same.

The Hen Night Epiphany is a new play by Tom Murphy, and it was being premiered by the Focus Theatre.  The Focus Theatre lost all its Arts Council funding last year, and they decided to put pretty much all they had into a showcase production, that would demonstrate that they were capable of touring a commercially successful show, and expanding the Focus Theatres audience, thereby regaining their funding.  So this show was important for them.

The production was opening in the Focus and then touring around the M50 circuit and the Mermaid, so I had to design a set that would fit onto the Focus stage (5mx4m) and also onto the Helix stage (12m x 11m).  I decided to design the set for the larger spaces and cut it down for the Focus.

The play is set outside a rundown bungalow up a remote hill, surrounded by beautiful views.  Airy distance is a difficult thing to pull off in the cramped confines of the Focus, but I used the same trick that I used for Proof, and painted the walls white, with a blue rising up from the floor.  This is like the sky inverted, and I’ve found it works well.  Moyra D’Arcy, the lighting designer, had grave misgivings because she was unable to avoid shadows, but with tweaking we got it to work.

In the play, the house is the possibility of a new beginning, but it could also be a trap.  I wanted to emphasise how much potential the house had, to underscore why it meant so much, so I put the surrounding countryside onto the walls and roof of the house.  At the same time I also brought the rotting carpet tiles and the discarded lives of the previous owners outside where it was visible, (along with a roll of barbed wire to deepen the warning).