Design for the Theatre.

In a design career extending over 40 years I have designed productions for the Royal Ballet, Scottish Ballet, South Australian Opera, Australian Ballet, The Teatro Colon Buenos Aires, The New National Theatre Tokyo, The Abbey Theatre Dublin, Channel Four Television and United Artists Films. As well as designing for International Companies I have worked on small scale projects with exciting modern dance companies including CandoCo and Union Dance and on ‘interesting’ productions with Ken Campbell for the Science Fiction theatre of Liverpool, amongst others.

My approach and thinking about theatre was influenced early on by Stephen Joseph, the pioneer of Theatre in the Round and I have often subverted traditional theatre spaces to create forms of staging where the audience and actor relationship is transformed in new and more dynamic ways. 

For several years I was the design assistant to Nicholas Georgiadis, known for his ballet and opera designs. Nico also had a profound influence on me, imbuing in me a love of painting and architecture and an architectonic approach to designing within the confines of the proscenium arch. One aspect of design that has always fascinated and been of paramount importance to me, is the use and quality of lighting in the theatre. As a result I have often been responsible for lighting my own productions as well as designing scenery and costumes.

In 2019 The Market Place Arts Centre and Gallery hosted a major retrospective of my designs for the theatre. The exhibition showed a wide range of work created in over 40 yearsof working as a professionl designer of settings, costumes and lighting for plays, ballets and operas as well as in alternative forms of staging for dance and theatre. The process of working from the initial ideas and concept to fully realised staging was shown through scale models, plans and drawings as well as photographs, background information and a slide show and portfolio of work.

The exhibition was opened by the sculptor Jasper McKinney MBE and featured limited edition Giclee prints of some 18 costume and set designs on archival quality art paper. The prints were made designs Creative Spark in Dundalk, where I was the an Artist-in-Residence from December 2018 until the end of February 2019. These are now available to purchase.