Set design revolves around the pub

ONE of the world’s most acclaimed set and costume designers, Corkman Bob Crowley was a mere five-time Tony Award winner before he signed up to design Once.

The hit musical would see him pick up a sixth. The show’s dreamy, versatile pub set came together very intuitively, he recalls.

“The space that we initially booked to perform the show already had a bar in it, because the venue was also used as a nightclub,” he says. “So I thought ‘well, why don’t we hold on to that idea?’ It was a good way into the show. And the bar seemed like a natural place for people to fall in and out of love, to tell stories, sing songs, laugh and cry.”

Crowley says a communal spirit marked the show’s initial rehearsals in “a mice-infested church basement in Cambridge.” Days of song onstage would morph into post-dinner sing-songs at night, and that “improvisatory quality” made its way into the final production.

“The whole thing is like a session in a pub,” he says.

Crowley would normally design his costumes by drawing them on a page but for Once he took to the vintage shops around Boston to rack up rails of clothes for ‘dressing-up sessions’ with the actors. A certain “folk element” resulted, he says.

Crowley has been a fixture of British theatre design for over three decades, having moved from Cork to Bristol in the early 1970s to train. He has created award-winning sets at prestigious playhouses like the Royal National Theatre, as well as for opera, ballet, and popular musicals. It was the success with a production of Dangerous Liaisons in 1987 that really put his name on the map, earning Crowley his first of 14 Tony nominations. Since then he’s won acclaim for his designs on Aida, The History Boys and Mary Poppins.

Working on Once was a special thrill, however.

“Oh God, I loved it,” he says. “Because I haven’t done that much Irish stuff. I could probably count on one hand the number of Irish pieces that I’ve worked on. So it was great. Enda is just hilarious and as mad as a meat axe. But everyone was there to support the music because it’s so bloody marvellous. Glen and Markéta’s score is just beautiful and heartfelt, and it was our job to communicate that to the audience.”

Like his younger brother John, a renowned theatre and film director, Bob Crowley’s love of theatre has its roots in his parents’ love of musical theatre and opera when he was a child. Later, during his schooldays at Coláiste Chríost Rí, his English teacher John O’Shea got him involved with Everyman theatre company, eventually offering him his first gig — designing the scenery for a production of Flann O’Brien’s The Poor Mouth.

“John asked me to design some posters for the shows, which I did,” recalls Crowley. “And then a lovely man called Frank Fitzgerald, who did the sets for them, fell off a ladder and broke his leg, and John said to me: ‘I know you’ve never designed scenery before but how would you fancy doing it?’. And I said, ‘I thought you’d never ask’.”

Though his working life has kept him in England, Crowley gets back to Ireland as much as possible. “I love West Cork and I like to spend as much time there as I can,” he says. “About ten years ago I began to feel, ‘Gosh, I’d like to spend a little more time back there.’ And that’s happening now. But I love being in Ireland and in my head I go to West Cork for at least ten minutes every day.”