Features

Dilapidated tenement blocks: Recreating Dublin's high street on stage for The Plough and Stars

As ”The Plough and the Stars” arrives in London, designer Jon Bausor explains how he and Sean Holmes came to the conceptual designs for the play

Kate Stanley Brennan (Nora Clitheroe) in The Plough and the Stars
Kate Stanley Brennan (Nora Clitheroe) in The Plough and the Stars
© Tristram Kenton

Designs for The Plough and the Stars are most often realistic affairs, all beautifully scenically created bricks and old floorboards, perfect romantic realisations of 1900s Dublin. The director Sean [Holmes] and I were keen to explore something more conceptually interesting that avoided nostalgia or beautiful scenery for the sake of it.

Our process was typically interesting and brutally rigorous, beginning with something large that obeyed the architecture described in the play and distilling to a more pared down simplicity that is more our style.

I imagined a ghost of a shell almost like Rachel Whiteread’s House

I began by looking at tenement houses in Dublin, a few which still exist in beautiful states of decay. They were buildings that housed up to 50 people, a family in each of its seven or eight rooms. The black and white photos of the aftermath of the Easter Rising show O’Connell Street, Dublin’s high street, was awash with piles of brick and rubble, the Georgian shell of the General Post Office smoking away. Whilst the building has since been done up in commemoration of the Rising many of the buildings down the street are derelict, one in particular, the old amusement arcade Dr Quirkey’s, having been shrouded in scaffolding and debris net since I first started designing at the Abbey ten years ago. Other large buildings along the street have been abandoned, victims of the recession, none the more pertinent than the department store Cleary’s which was originally the Imperial Hotel and the first building to be set on fire during the Rising, the flag of the Plough and the Stars flown from it.

An original sketch of The Plough and the Stars
An original sketch of The Plough and the Stars

I imagined a set almost wrapped in scaffolding net, preserved in the moment, a ghost of a shell almost like Rachel Whiteread’s House that won her the Turner Prize in 1993.

The first design had a large flown ceiling, flanked by the skeletons of two walls on either side of the stage to create the architecture of a room. This ceiling could be flown out for the exterior scene outside in act three, or slowly descend compressing the action like a pressure cooker. Whilst it gave the sense of existing both then and now, and suggested the geography and architecture of the scenes, it was too cumbersome and large a design for the tour which started at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin before moving to a number of American venues of different shapes and sizes. It was also over budget and, in truth, felt old fashioned!

In a moment of revelation I removed everything from the design

I distilled the design and ended up with a single brick chimney suggesting the different floors of the tenements, inspired by a photograph taken on O’Connell Street the day after the uprising, with a flown piece that could suggest the ceiling of the room in act one, or become the floor of the top floor attic in act four, the furniture attached to its top side. The whole thing was surrounded by three walls of scaffolding green debris netting. It was sparser but still felt old fashioned.

A model box of the designs
A model box of the designs

In a moment of revelation (my favourite part of a process!) I removed everything and placed a construction site scaffolding tower inside the green walls. This single supposedly found, every day familiar item could simultaneously suggest the stairwell of a tenement, a temporary podium for rally speeches, or suggestion of the façade of a tenement. I imagined it toppling over symbolically and moments before our deadline Sean and I discovered this final transformation to be the perfect island on which to set the final scene.

The Plough and the Stars runs at the Lyric Hammersmith until 7 April.

Kate Stanley Brennan (Nora Clitheroe) in The Plough and the Stars
Kate Stanley Brennan (Nora Clitheroe) in The Plough and the Stars
©Tristram Kenton