Abbey Theatre - Amharclann na Mainistreach

The seventh workshop took place on Mon 16th August. Lynne Parker and John Comiskey spoke for three hours about their work as director and designer respectively and discussed how they collaborate on projects.

This session was designed to give the NPP participants an insight into the director’s work process, the designer’s work process, how the two work together on productions and, as much as possible, to explore to what extent a knowledge of their respective disciplines might feed into the participants’ consciousness as playwrights and add to their craftsmanship.

Lynne Parker spoke for the first hour or so about her work as Artistic Director of Rough Magic Theatre Company, the new plays Rough Magic have produced and her work as a director on particular shows, especially in the context of new writing. She described her working methods as a director and gave us a wonderful insight into how she goes about shaping the action of a play, sculpting the tensions, drawing performances out of the actors etc.

Lynne also discussed the specific qualities that attract her to a piece of writing in the first place. Chief among these is dialogue; it is the first thing we experience when reading a play and Lynne stressed the importance of quality dialogue in her first impression of any work. She also discussed the rhythmic qualities inherent in a good play – how a play should breathe, how moments of tension, for example, must be relieved by quieter moments to allow the audience to relax and to keep the rhythm of the piece dynamic and varied. She also spoke of the need for the audience to be seduced into the world of the play by the playwright and how the writer must make it easy for the audience to absorb every piece of information in the play. The playwright should always remember the audience and make sure that the play is not too confusing or hermetic or difficult to access; everything we need to know to make sense of the play should be there in the text.

Lynne also mentioned one of the key questions every director must ask before directing a play: ‘What’s the world of this play? The world of the play must be credible as itself, according to its own rules; the behaviour of the characters must also feel real within this created world – not necessarily naturalistic, but simply truthful to the world that the play has established for itself. It was a genuinely fascinating insight into Lynne’s working methods as a director and her approach to text.

John Comiskey then spoke about his work as a lighting and set designer. He described how he always asks himself three very basic questions before designing any show – 1. What’s it about? 2. Where are we? 3. What are we doing here? John follows these basic questions with several detailed readings of the play to follow the clues in the text that might inspire the design. It was fascinating to listen to him describe his process and to see how instinct and intuition around certain key details in the script provoke images and textures that can lead to design ideas. He described how he would then begin trawling through images from all kinds of sources to gather clues to the design. Little by little these details would coalesce to inspire design ideas, with John always asking ‘why’ for every choice made. The attention to detail in the whole process was very interesting to observe; every single prop or design decision was entirely rooted in the themes, textures, and atmosphere of the play so that all elements of the design cohered to provide a strong aesthetic and thematic underpinning of the script.

John had several slides of designs he had done for various shows. He went through these, explaining the reasons behind the various design concepts. He focused on two productions in particular – Copenhagen and Sodome ma Douce, both of which were directed by Lynne for Rough Magic. John explained the thinking behind each element of the design in both shows and in the case of Sodome ma Douce, he showed us a series of slides of salt and other crystals, desert ruins, mummified figures and all kinds of other images and objects that had a direct or oblique relationship with his experience of the text. It was a revelation to see how many of these inspiring shapes, colours and textures found their way in to the final set design. It was also remarkable to see how analogous the designer’s process is to that of the playwright – an initial period of imagination, intuition and exploration followed by a gradual narrowing down of options and the application of a hard critical faculty to ask ‘why’ for every choice made and to put pressure on every element to really earn its keep in the final design.

John was particularly interesting on the subject of lighting and how light can follow a narrative/storytelling arc over the course of a play. He mentioned a particular show he designed and described how the lighting design echoed the themes and concerns of the play. As the subject matter of the play became darker and darker, the lighting shifted ever so subtly so that it went from a clean, straightforward light at the top of the play to a sinister, almost grotesque, film noir lighting at the end of the play, with several of the actors lit from beneath to cast disturbing shadows on their faces. All of this happened very gradually and imperceptibly over the course of the play, but had a genuine impact on the texture of the piece. The audience were probably not at all aware of the change on a conscious level, but it most likely had a strong very unconscious impact on them; it was a great example of the importance of lighting design and its unconscious effect on an audience.