The Abbey Theatre's costume department, a fascinating world, works out everything from the best way to do a strip-poker scene to the challenges of a character coming off a horse with torn trousers, writes SARA KEATING.
THE COSTUME department at the Abbey Theatre is a fascinating, mysterious place, full of esoteric secrets unimaginable to the audience who appreciate its work. Acting head of costume Catherine Fay is taking me on a tour through its labyrinthine corridors and nooks and crannies, showing me some of the work being done in preparation for the forthcoming production of The Rivals.
We walk down a corridor lined with cupboards full of shoes, wood panelling revealing a foot fetishist’s dream: buckled leprechaun shoes, wicker sandals and silver stilettos six inches high. Then there’s the boot room: scores of boots in various sizes and states of shine or disrepair. Next, there is the underwear room, a testament to the miracle of the imagination: there are slips, shifts, corsets, suspenders, vests and bodices from the beginnings of time.
I wonder if Niamh Lunney’s sensational Elizabethan and piratical negligee, recently revealed in Selina Cartmell’s production of Only an Apple, is buried amid the layers of lingerie that line the walls, among the tufts of tulle, the reams of silk and satin. I am inspired by the degrees of authenticity that actors go to in claiming their character – Victorian knickers! – but Fay disabuses me of my romantic notion: “If it’s not seen it doesn’t matter. They wear their own underwear.” I try to imagine any play in which this mass of intimate material might actually be revealed on stage. It’s an exciting prospect that Irish writers might take advantage of if they knew what they had at their disposal.
If this description of the costume department suggests infinite amounts of space for the mass of material that the theatre has accumulated over the years, that would be misleading. This is a department that appears to have improvised its own existence. These secrets are tucked away in tiny rooms, in narrow near-window ledges, in leftover bits of corridors. In fact, most of their stock is stored in a warehouse in Santry. The best that can be said of the working facilities on Abbey Street is that they are “cosy”, but at least there is a lot of light.
Upstairs, in the closest thing to a room that the department commandeers, the Abbey's three "makers", Kate Averschoug, Marian Kelly and Donna Geraghty, are hard at work. An extravagant black, green and gold costume, all deceptive pleats and layers, appears to float in the room on a headless mannequin. Designer Joe Vanek's folder of designs, "the bible" as Fay calls it, sits upon the table; a quick flick through and the world of The Rivals starts to come to life. Each pencil sketch has been drawn as delicately as any work of art. They are beautiful, surely collectable things; that there aren't galleries dedicated to displaying this sort of theatrical artefact seems incredible. In London they have a whole museum devoted to theatre design in Covent Garden, part of the Victoria and Albert collections. That's the constant struggle for the stage designer, says Vanek – who is also designing the set for The Rivals– what to do with your box-models and sketches. All you can do is photograph them meticulously. Vanek is currently under commission to write a book about the process for Carysfort Press.
FOR VANEK THE task of designing is an incredibly hands-on process, and he sees his work through from the very first stages of design consultation right up to opening night. Work on a production such as The Rivalsmight take up to three months. Vanek sources all the fabric himself, and he pops in and out of the room to chat with the makers all morning, adjusting a design here, approving an alteration there. Everyone laments the lack of good dressmaking fabric in Ireland.
They buy locally when they can, at Murphy Sheehy, or Hickeys, but someone will often have to go to London or Paris to find what they need.
The makers show me the original toile for Marion O'Dwyer's Mrs Malaprop costume, the calico mock-up stitched together as carefully as if it were silk. A toile is always made before the real costume, they explain, to ensure proper fit and functionality. I'm astonished when they reveal that they have made several copies of the elaborate finished dress as well. The new understudy system introduced at the Abbey last year has brought extra work their way. O'Dwyer's understudy needs a dress too. In fact, multiple copies of clothes are often necessary – in Greek dramas, for example,where a character's clothes get more distressed and often blood-soaked as the play unfolds. Selina Cartmell's production of Charles Mee's play Big Lovelast year, which was based on Aeschylus's The Suppliant Women, needed nine hand-made wedding dresses, each of which would be covered in blood by end of the play.
Another mannequin in the room is only half-dressed, revealing the foundation structure of Lady Lydia Languish’s gown, which will give actress Aoibheann O’Hara a voluptuous Victorian womanly shape. Exposed, the pink padded bottom looks vaguely obscene. Averschoug is putting the finishing touches on the glorious gold and red dress that will clothe it all. Actors are in and out every week for fittings, Averschoug explains, because “what we’re making is not a fashion garment – it’s a working garment, and we need to make sure that the actor can move in it. You have to keep in touch with them during the rehearsal process, because if a director introduces something new, like the character takes a book out of their pocket, well they have to have a pocket that will fit the book.”
That's before taking into account what people do with their clothes while on stage, she says, like in the strip-poker scene in Only an Apple, where characters lost their clothes with one sudden movement. "So we've got to rig the costume, and that's a process of trial and error," she says, with the makers ripping clothes off each other to see what's most effective – poppers or Velcro.
The whole costume department sits in on the read-through on the first day of rehearsals, diligently taking notes; imagining what might be necessary, what might not be thought of except from their perspective, where they so intimately know the potential challenges and difficulties of, say, a character coming off a horse with torn trousers. With Abbey casts getting bigger and bigger (the upcoming Thomas Kilroy play, Christ Deliver Us!is scripted for 29 actors), there's a lot of fitting and fabric to consider.
There is so much work involved, not everything can be made on site by the Abbey’s shoestring staff. A tailor, Denis Darcy, has been working with the Abbey for nearly 30 years, designing and making men’s suits at his own workshop, while Abhann Productions is also regularly commissioned to make costumes.
AS THE ABBEY seeks redundancies across its departments, it is hard to imagine how the costume department could operate with any fewer staff members. Fay says costuming will suffer: “Costume-making is a very personal process, and if we hire out the work, the makers won’t have met the actors and they won’t be on hand to make all those last-minute adjustments that we always need to make.”
Not every show demands as much work as a period show such as The Rivalsdoes. With contemporary shows, the department's work might merely be shopping for requirements, and adjusting to fit and working use.
"From the outside it might seem romantic," Fay says, "but most of the time the work is not at all glamorous." Wardrobe mistress Vicky Miller and her assistant, Síofra Ní Chiardha, ironing dozens of freshly washed shirts for the night's performance of The Last Days of the Reluctant Tyrant, agree. One of them will take a couple of hours off in the afternoon before coming back to finish a split shift before curtain-up: someone needs to be on hand in case an actor pops a button or loses a shoe. Sandra Gibney, "our specialist", as Fay introduces her, who is gloved and elbow deep in grease in a tiny recess up the stairs, concurs. She is in the process of "dirtying down" a waistcoat for Tom Vaughan Lawlor, who plays Lady Lydia's love interest, Bob Acres. The heavy woven jacquard fabric was once immaculate, fit for any old-world engagement, but Gibney has spent the morning grating the material so it looks convincingly distressed. A huge bag of birdseed spills itself on the top shelf above her workplace. I wonder about stray pigeons up here on the third floor. Again Fay is on hand to demystify things – it's used for padding actors' clothing instead of weightless foam. "It gives them body," Fay says, giving them "a real sense of weight", not just a costume.
As if on cue actor Phelim Drew passes by, script in hand, on his way from rehearsals to a quick consultation with one of the makers. He is dressed in his own jeans and shirt and an elaborate frock coat. It’s not part of his costume, he says, but it’s roughly from the same period, and it helps him get “in the mood.” Because when you’re dressed in period costume, he says as he walks away, “you’re not wearing the costume, it’s wearing you.”
The Rivalsis previewing and opens on Thursday