SIVE: SET DESIGN

Directed by Conall Morrison, written by John B Keane, Abbey Theatre and Irish Tour. 2014. Photos Ros Kavanagh.

I discovered Sive when starting to work on the project with Conall Morrison. I was stroke by the power of the writting, it felt both very irish and extrememly universal. Grecque tragedy came to mind straight away. A timeless story.
I started to draw, and, instinctively, i kept representating the outside. Just to remind us: the action described in the text is a huit-clos. It is all played in one room, the kitchen of a cottage in south west of Ireland, at the end of the fifties.
In the text there is a tension between two worlds: the everyday one, in the kitchen, and the wild one, outside, where travellers, music, and freedom come from. The play is about the meeting of those two words, those two orders, and the drama provoked by their collusion. The text is extremely precise about the actors movements, therefore it was logical to follow the exact description of the author regard ing positions of doors, furnitures, and props. Those are anchoring the story into reality.
But i felt the need to show the “other world”, and also to express the lyrism of the story. So I gave the illusion of a huge height in some parts of the wall, like a tentative of elevation, of nature taking over, invading those human lifes. Into the height of the walls starts to carve some volumes. Those walls seems to become wild, to grow into power, wildness, freedom. They are an abstract representation of stones, of clouds, a metaphore of nature, of love, an interpretation of the tragic destinee of the little Sive.