Period pieces

INTERVIEW:Irish costume designer Joan Bergin doesn't just make costumes for characters – she uses fabric and materials to create backstories and subplots that bring productions to life. SARA KEATINGspends a day with the Emmy-award winning artist

DRESSED FROM head-to-toe in black, with an embellished Stetson sitting jauntily on her head, costume designer Joan Bergin makes a dramatic impact when she enters a room. Black is a blank canvas, she explains to people who ask why she never wears more colourful clothes: “I don’t want to intrude upon people’s visual interpretations.”

But Bergin, who is fascinated by what she calls the “psychology of clothes; they are the primary way in which we represent ourselves to the world”, must know that the colour black has its own signifying power.

Black presents itself as both a shield – a defence against the world – and an enigma. In psychology, it represents the colour of authority and strength, while in fashion terms it is the colour of timeless good taste. All of these definitions seem to have some resonance with the permanently black-clad Bergin, who, despite being Ireland’s best known costume designer for theatre, TV and film, is happy to let her work speak for itself.

Bergin came to costume by chance rather than design. She trained as an actor with Deirdre O’Connell at the Focus Theatre in Dublin and her ambition was always to be on the stage. However, the pinnacle of her success as an actor was also the beginning of her move away from performance.

“I was playing the lead role opposite Gabriel Byrne in A Month in the Country, one of the most successful shows that the Focus ever put on. And I remember watching one of the other actors who was in the show one day – a young Olwen Fouéré – and she had this look about her: so determined, so single-minded – and I just had this moment of recognition. I thought ‘I am never going to be – not good enough – but I am never going to be great’. Great actors have this narrow focus, this single-mindedness, and I had a butterfly brain.”

A Month in the Country was also the first show for which she designed. “I sourced all 26 costumes, on top of my part,” she exclaims. “And I suppose you could say that it was out of vanity. If I’m going to work this hard as an actor,” she thought at the time, “then I want to appear in something better than my mother’s cardigan.” Following her epiphany, she began to wonder “was there a way of bringing the same energy and dedication we had in the actors and directors at the Focus to the production values of our shows, a way of improving them. I had always been interested in vintage clothing, and so, in the way most of our decisions never seem to be choices, I became a costume designer.”

In those first few years working on the costumes for the Focus Theatre, Bergin begged and borrowed what she could. Before she knew it, her mother – who was used to her "best china sneaking out the door" from the young Joan's school-day plays at the Dominican Convent in Cabra – saw her old cotton dress on Ruth McCabe in Neil Jordan's multi-Oscar nominated My Left Foot.

Bergin went to the Oscars along with rest of the cast and crew. Sitting between Jon Bon Jovi and Kevin Costner – who leaned over and asked who she was – it was Bergin's first brush with LA, where she would later work on films such as Christopher Nolan's The Prestige. For the most part, however, she remains based in Dublin, working out of Ardmore Studios on projects as prestigious as the Showtime series The Tudors, for which she has won several Emmys. She is humble enough to admit that, despite all her success so far she "would really love an Oscar nomination before I finish. I mean, it is the highest accolade you can get in this business. It is the premiership, the Olympic medal." However, she is not sure if she is willing to make the sacrifices needed to even be in contention. "You have to be – not calculating necessarily – but strategic, because only certain types of films will give you the opportunity and most of them will be made in LA and that's a lonely place."

Bergin’s training as an actor has been vital to her approach to costume design, which, like the Stanislavski method in which she was trained, sees psychology as the root of all performance. She does an enormous amount of research for all of her jobs, both to get the time period right, if it is an historic piece, but mostly because it is how she finds her way to the root of the characters she dresses. “Often it is finding the thing that is not generally known about the character, which becomes the most crucial part of what you know about them, where you can add some complexity somewhere visually to a moment in the script. For example, with the character of Smeaton in The Tudors, I discovered when I was reading the letters of the ambassador to Spain for Henry and Elizabeth that it was reputed at the time that he was a dancing master and that he might be from gypsy stock, and that was a great way to develop his individual style.”

Sometimes it involves making her own decisions or assumptions about characters, such as in her recent design for the Abbey Theatre's production of John Gabriel Borkman. Trying to work out a costume for Gunhild, Borkman's long-suffering wife, played by Fiona Shaw, Bergin "invented this whole backstory for the character in my own head, and I decided that her father was an admiral. That personal detail from her history was what enabled her to act the way she does in the play."

I suggest that this approach must help the actors enormously. “Yes, I suppose,” she says modestly. “To have a backstory as an actor can be crucial. But then again that is what an actor does for themselves anyway, and most of the audience probably won’t even notice whatever little subtle detail I have thrilled myself about.”

That is especially the case with contemporary costume design, she says, using the film Veronica Guerin, as an example. “That was set in contemporary Ireland among Dublin’s criminal class,” she explains, “and you could just put them in hoodies and jeans; that would be the most obvious, maybe the most faithful thing to do. But I was interested in what these characters aspired to, not just what they were, and that allowed me to bring more texture, more depth to what you might think is a pretty straight-forward design.”

Bergin has just finished up another long stint at Ardmore, where she was designing costumes for the first series of the forthcoming BBC/Showtime Camelot, and on the second occasion that we meet – at the Costume Mill, where she keeps a formal office and an impressive store of costumes for rental – she has just started to pull together costumes for a new production of John B Keane’s The Field, which will open at the Olympia Theatre next Thursday with Brian Dennehy as the fearsome Bull McCabe. Bergin worked with Dennehy previously on Translations on Broadway, and as she outlines her approach to the costumes for Joe Dowling’s new production, she talks with excitement about the first read-through with the cast, which had taken place the day before.

As she walks me through rails of dresses, nightwear, coats and hats – arranged meticulously by historical period – she pulls out items that prompt particular memories. Here is Helen Mirren's stunning aubergine tube dress from Some Mother's Sonand Brenda Fricker's gown from the Oscars, which she donated to the Costume Mill after the ceremony. There is a rail of vintage children's pinafores hanging eerily empty without bodies to fill them.

Bergin eventually brings me to the most recent addition to the store, samples which she has kept from The Tudors and Camelot; elaborate dresses and leather armoured coats. Some of the dresses are made from vintage fabrics, which Bergin bought at an auction of the belongings of a Dublin society lady called Mrs Biddell. She often sources fabric internationally, but Mrs Biddell’s collection was one of the best finds she has ever made, she says. “Old fabric just behaves different in the light,” she explains, “and sometimes modern brocades just don’t work.”

She is known among her team at The Tudorsand Camelotfor strange quirks she employs to achieve particular period effects, such as using the reverse of the fabric – "because the depth of the weave on the reverse side is more authentic" – and also for some unorthodox design practice. "I drape and pin for shape and fit," she says, "and the rest of the team will always joke about how we should send it out like that if we run out of time." She once made a turban for Twink for the annual Gaiety pantomime. After the run was finished, she realised the hat had never been sewn; she took out the pins, unravelled the fabric, and reused it later for something else.

Salvage is an important part of the costume designer’s practice and Bergin always tries to find ways to reuse and recycle costumes and scrap materials. On one of Henry VIII’s leather jacket affairs, she shows me how left-over swatches of tweed were used to create a decorative weave. It is a stunning and incredibly elaborate piece, as are all the period dresses. Bergin mentions the incredible team she works with again – the illustrators, cutters, embroiders, tailors, makers – who make her designs possible; as much as any other element of the theatrical or filmmaking process, costume design is a collaborative act.

Amid the dizzying array of gilded fabric that surrounds us in the Costume Mill, Bergin's black outfit relieves the eye as she walks me to the door and returns to work. "You could get visual indigestion sometimes," Bergin says, "but it is in the detail that you find the arch and character. That's not to say that my various shades of black do not tell their own story," she says, smilingly knowingly. But she holds the secrets of her own interpretation close to her chest as she heads back inside to contemplate 1950s rural Ireland and the compelling secrets of the characters in The Field.

The Fieldopens at the Olympia Theatre, Dublin next Thursday

HIGHLIGHTS OF BERGIN’S FILM AND THEATRE CREDITS

FILM

The Tudors(2006-2009) with Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Sam Neil and Joely Richardson

The Prestige(2006) directed by Christopher Nolan with Hugh Jackman, David Bowie and Scarlett Johansson

Dancing at Lughnasa(1998) directed by Pat O'Connor with Meryl Streep and Michael Gambon

My Left Foot(1989) with Daniel Day-Lewis and Brenda Fricker

THEATRE

John Gabriel Borkman(2010) directed by James Macdonald, Abbey Theatre

Long Day's Journey into Night(1998) directed by Karel Reisz, Gate Theatre, Dublin

Translations(1995) directed by Howard Davies, Plymouth Theatre

Riverdance (1994) directed by John McColgan, international tour

Susan Scott

Joan Bergin pays constant tribute to her collaborators in costume design, particularly Susan Scott, who has illustrated the costumes for The Tudors and Camelot. Bergin pulls out Scotts uncannily lifelike drawings several times during the interview to demonstrate a detail or emphasise something important.

Scott’s drawings are unusual, Bergin says, because she doesn’t just sketch the clothes but she renders the character on the page as well, complete with the recognisable image of the actor’s face upon the body too. “The actors are always surprised by that at first, to see themselves there on the page, but the fact that there is so much detail – that you can see exactly the vision for the character – is helpful not just for me but for the actors and the directors and the producers, too.”