Bailegangaire

By Tom Murphy

Production & Costume Designer.

A Nomad Theatre Production. Irish Tour. Directed by Padraic McIntyre.

Bailegangaire is set in 1984, Northwest Ireland in a small thatched cottage.  The story is based around a bedbound grandmother and her two granddaughters. She is stuck in a continuous loop of telling the same story every night for many years without ever finishing it until this particular night. The story she tells is a fairytale based on grim happenings in the family’s past.  I wanted to create a set that represented these two worlds. That of the modern day world the characters live in and the story of the past, which the grandmother speaks of continuously. My idea was to keep the interior home area of the characters realistic and true to life whilst having the surrounding area of the mountains and pylon quiet conceptual and almost Grimm Fairytale like. I kept the furniture, fireplace and kitchen area in the home real to life but they were all set atop a mountain rock. Although the play is based in 1984 it is set in an older house and only up the road there is talk of a large state of the art factory so I used the pylon to represent the moden aspects of the play.  The wires coming from the pylon were more conceptual and they turned into iced caped mountains with silver linings, silver linings that this story tries desperately to have.