Adelaide Designer Mary Moore talks to Murray Bramwell about her recent work.
Mary Moore has two quite different projects on the go at the moment. At the Gouger Street workshops of the-Australian Dance Theatre she discusses costume construction with the wardrobe staff. The ADT’s now show Acceleration! opens on July 14 at Thebarton Theatre. The work of four choreographers, it has music by Sean Timms. The designs have familiar Mary Moore touches. With poker-faced motifs for the Casino and zippy Grand Prix tyre treads in vertical op-art whites and blacks, her work is direct and engaging but rarely without an ironic double-take. When she decorates bodies she is scrupulous about inscription.
Moore has worked with ADT before but she is characteristically diffident: “I have a lot to learn about working with dance. It’s great because it’s about bodies in space and, because there is no dialogue, things can’t be assumed in the same way as theatre. To make an image work you have to question. You have to be incredibly aware of space and costume in order to see the primary thing which is the body, you are not there to interpret a text.
When there is no written narrative you are inclined to think ‘this isn’t about anything!’ It is about something of course, but it is an interesting process determining exactly what that is. I must say with dance, the more narrative it has the more boring I find it – whereas more abstract work fascinates me. Choreographers think so differently from theatre directors.
It is the possibility of moving from theatre to dance, and even opera, which makes working in Australia attractive. A graduate of the Central School of Art in London, Mary Moore. designed more than a hundred theatre works in the UK. These ranged from Rep pieces with the Victoria Theatre in Stoke-on-Trent, alternative productions with Gay Sweatshop and the Women’s Project to “mainstream mainstream” commissions with the prestigious Mermaid Theatre, The RSC and Royal Court.
When she visited Australia on holiday in 1981 Moore had no intention of staying but an invitation to teach here at the Centre for the Performing Arts and design gigs for Jim Sharman-‘s Lighthouse company gave her a chance to work in new conditions and take stock at the same time.
The comparatively generous budgets and skilled, modern workshops in Adelaide had their appeal for a designer used to working under constraint, even with the RSC, and after more offers came – The Marriage of Figaro for Lighthouse and The ]ourney for ADT – Moore became part of a new push in Adelaide theatre when the Troupe collective, including Jules Holledge, Barry Plews and others, staged Tibetan Inroads for the 1984 Festival and followed with a spate of group devised productions like The Kelly Dance, The Centenary Dance, Atomic A Go Go and Rundle Rita. These shows were inventive and flash and Moore’s bright, crisp designs gave them their unmistakeable signature. Influenced by cartoon, Pop and pantomime-she gave shape, colour and focus to Troupe-inthe- Round as the company fended off the incipient dreariness of the fusty Old Unley Town Hall.
In the past year or so Moore has been in demand for work in Perth and, soon, in Melbourne, for a project with Jean-Pierre Mignon’s Anthill Theatre. Last year her striking set and costumes gave clarity to the State Theatre Company’s fine production of The Winter’s Tale. Now she is back with State designing their current production of King Lear. Once again she is collaborating with directors John Gaden and Gale Edwards and Moore has clearly found the association a creative one.
She describes the process of shaping the set as almost instinctive, certainly a matter of trial and error:
“I started off with a strong sense of sky and sea, all the images were set against that. It made me think of seaside holidays by the cliffs at Margate and Frinton when the sea could be quite terrifying. Now I am in a country where the landscape is immense – the sky is huge and the coast is eight times longer. I even thought about using film of the sky and sea.”
“As a configuration I started with a triangle but when I got to the space in the Playhouse the set didn’t want to know. It sort of said – ‘I don’t want to be a triangle.’ The hard-edged triangular flooring made the play about a central character and I suddenly realised that the play wasn’t about a central character, it was about a society with a lot of people. It’s not about Lear, even though it’s called Lear. It didn’t have to be a linear story about this particular man, there were lots of other stories as tragic and interesting going on and there were options for the audience to relate to those people. So I. began to feel much happier throwing away the triangle. I found a resolution similar to that of The Winter’s Tale but I didn’t say ‘I used a circle once, I’ll use it again’, it actually travelled round the other way.”
After establishing a very abstract sea and sky – “My Japanese ink blob style, Gale calls it!” – Moore began to think about textures: “having decided the world was circular I wanted to have a crusty floor, a black slate, volcanic look. I liked that idea, a broken effect. But I don’t hold with the purist Peter Brook notion that the play has to be done pre-William the Conqueror, that’s a bit nonsense and it assumes all sorts of things about maleness if you do that. Besides, there are influences from the medieval theatre to consider and much of the text is Christian rather than pre-Christian. Most of all there needs to be a sense that when Lear’s kingdom is divided there is something worth taking away. The society was crumbling but there was one.
“Gale and I sat and talked about costume images and practical things like ‘are they wearing swords or guns?’ and if they are fighting a lot, does that make them a militaristic society? And if they wear swords and go around attacking one another does that mean it’s doublet and hose; and if it’s not doublet and hose what is it? If you say it is this idea – does it work for some and make others look odd. I started with a First World War look but also looked at the Napoleonic war – boots and puttees, leather gaiters over boots and so on.”
“More than the colour I wanted the costume to be really textured. Once I’d designed the slate floor then I got an assortment of fabrics from the wardrobe to play with – bits of velvet and whatever. It was texture that worked, that crusted look yet fashionable as well. It is crushed velvet with some fur. There’s a greyness that turns black into blue and black into green. Gale felt it was important to make the narrative easy to follow when the action shifts from this family to that one. With all this factionalism it was important to give Regan and Cornwall an identity and Albany and Goneril also’- so I’ve used blue for one part of the family and green for the other. Lear is in black, gold and grey, it’s rich in colour but sparse. And they are all in long coats and boots. It’s not Crimea or Russia, but you don’t know what it is.”
“I was worried about Cordelia, how she should look? I didn’t want to put her in Cinderella cream and yet it is difficult to offer a solution that is too radical in case it won’t be accepted. But Gale suggested that we do Cordelia in black because Kaarin Fairfax, the actor, would look fantastic and it wouldn’t be a romantic image. For Goneril and Regan I wanted to work against their reputations. On first impression they look like the daughters of a wealthy king. When I was reading the play I could completely understand why they’d be pissed off with Lear, but there is a big leap from being disgruntled and hurt to Regan wanting to pull out Gloucester’s eyes.”
“It’s feasible that these characters could still be OK- they’re caught up in horrific circumstances that mean that everybody’s mad. But Regan has no compassion, it is almost like Shakespeare has taken this ingredient from this character and from then on its no good. It’s like you could have a best friend that you’ve put up with all kinds of behaviour; no matter what they did you liked them basically. But then they do something and that’s the pits. You close the door. That’s what happens, we are tugged away from those two.”
The themes of dispossession and alienation in Lear weigh heavily on Moore. “I thought ‘forget Lear, he’s got so much going for him.’ Then I had a sense of everything being taken away from people. When I thought about people being nothing, I thought- ‘who are rendered nothing in this society?’ You only have to look out the window and it’s all there. It’s not that the play is about the land arguments in this country but when you are working on a play about dividing up the land and Howard is saying that he doesn’t think that the Aboriginals should carry on with this treaty – somehow these things waft into the same category. In fact, the great losers in Lear are the women. The three daughters all die, it is a kind of holocaust.”
In Moore’s reading of the text, much depends on the figure of Edgar:
“I felt that Edgar’s return was the key to answering the question of whether there is a solution in the play. Edgar is a symbol; he’s the gullible son who takes everyone for granted, he is the symbol who is reduced to the level of the creatures, there is also the nurturer who carries his father around and he makes the good decision to come back and kill Edmund. There has to be a symbolic reading of his return. The audience might think ‘okay is Edgar, not too dumb, not too bright, not this not that’, terribly average -and we’d all relate to that in some ways. But to do that journey, to give up your name, to give up everything. . . People have done it, given up their country; there have been wars and people have found themselves with absolutely nothing but the clothes on their back. If we are to go through all that, it would be a disaster for Edgar to come back and then say ‘Everything’s all right now’ and put on the trappings from the beginning of the play. I think it’s important to say ‘I’ve discovered something – I don’t know what it is – but there is something of more value’. And he says that from his nakedness.”
It is central to Mary Moore’s approach to design that the symmetries of the text find their equivalents in staging. She talks of the set for Lear as itself a protagonist. “It’s a living, moving personality with its own quirks. We have to allow these things to happen. Environment dominates the play and it is harsh and cruel with storms and all that. It’s bleak bleak.”
But this production won’t be using what Mary Moore calls “the standard three BBC versions of rain”. She suggested that sound specialist Les Gilbert be employed to provide an aural landscape that would augment the natural elements in her design. She is enthusiastic about the result. “He provides environmental sound for zoos, that sort of thing and he travels everywhere collecting all kinds of material, it’s authentic not tricky synthesiser stuff.”
Moore thrives on the details – getting the right sounds, swords or guns, colours for Cordelia and whether too much stage torchlight will look oldie worldie. It is what makes her work imaginative and above all, lucid. Not that she would put it like that. After reflecting on Lear and its world she concludes with a half smile – “It’s a long time to sit in a theatre, whatever we do, we just hope it tells a bloody good story.”
“Setting out the Stages” The Adelaide Review, No.53, July, 1988, pp. 10-11.