Performing outside the box

American theatre designer Todd Rosenthal talks about the sets he creates as if they are characters themselves, evolving and adapting like the actors who inhabit them, writes Peter Crawley

A FEW YEARS AGO the American stage designer Todd Rosenthal wandered around the Prague Quadrennial International Exhibition of Scenography and Theatre Architecture, where his work was being honoured, and knew that something was missing.

“I think it’s a model show more than it is about performance,” says Rosenthal, a man as genial as he is gigantic (at 6ft 4in and wide of frame, it isn’t surprising to learn that he once considered a career in basketball). “Sometimes you’ll look at a design which is just a ceiling of light bulbs and it doesn’t look like much. But maybe it was great in performance.”

Rosenthal, like every stage designer, is accustomed to making a plan of action. His work is not complete with a drawing, a model box or even a construction; a design is only finished in performance. His most famous work has been a cheering illustration of this idea, in the vertiginously proportioned, ostensibly realistic cross-section of a three-storey home in Tracy Letts's play, August: Osage County.He tends to speak of this design as a character. An emaciated doll's house inhabited by a family that doesn't so much disintegrate as detonate into emotional smithereens, the set's performance has been a steady evolution.

“We originally designed the whole house,” says Rosenthal. “Then we started pulling it all away. The first idea was to make a house of cards. We wanted it to look like it was falling over, so the initial design was fragile and precarious-looking. But it was unbuildable! So we thought, ‘what about a fragile doll’s house?’.”

In Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre the set was a sturdy structure. It was later stripped down for Broadway’s Imperial Theatre, then finally flayed into something skeletal for the Royal National Theatre in London.

"It got better," says Rosenthal approvingly. Augustearned him the Tony Award for Best Scenic Design in 2008 and, the following year, the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Set Design. A creatively restless spirit, Rosenthal tends to discard or recycle his models quickly. "I don't save a lot of stuff," he says. "I start to hate them after a while."

But he has kept the model box for August, the show that opened doors for him, if not quite the ones he expected. "I had far more offers from people who wanted me to design their home than from theatre people," he says, smiling.

One major difference between set designers and architects is that the theatre creates only an illusion of permanence. Every design, whether naturalistic or conceptual, is essentially a temporary living space, realised quickly, never built to last and dismantled as soon as the show’s run has ended. You get in, you get out. Yet designers interpret while they accommodate. They consider practicalities and possibilities, the dimensions a theatre space provides, the exit points and furnishings that a script or a director may require, the sight lines needed by an audience. They also give the first indication of what kind of production we are going to see, shaping our understanding.

Rosenthal comes to Ireland for Waterford Theatre Royal's new production of The Beauty Queen of Leenane,directed by his long-time collaborator, Ben Barnes. As a model exemplar of US stage design – he graduated from the Yale School of Drama and currently teaches design in Northwestern University in Illinois – Rosenthal belongs to a tradition that, give or take a Robert Wilson or Peter Sellars, doesn't have an international reputation for experimental scenography. But to look at Rosenthal's portfolio is to find any such impression of conformism unfair. From his floating furniture in Brian Friel's adaptation of A Month in the Country(for the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre) to his positively gothic view of Friel's Translationsor his industrial vaudevillian setting for Beckett's Endgame(all directed by Barnes), his work hovers somewhere between naturalism and abstraction. "Regardless of how abstract the space is, there needs to be a sense that people live there," he says.

What then do you do with Martin McDonagh, a writer (like Tracy Letts) who is as fond of grubby realism as he is of violent sensationalism? Initially Rosenthal presented 10 different designs, each of them intent on making a statement. “But the play just kind of resisted it,” he says as we peer into his model box.

The first glance is slightly dispiriting, revealing what looks, simply, like the set for a Martin McDonagh play. There’s the living-room kitchen of a rural cottage, domestic, shabby and naturalistic. But on closer inspection there is encroaching chaos, with pipes sprouting from the top of gnarled walls as though some awful force had recently ripped away the roof.

“We had to make sure it wasn’t quaint,” says Rosenthal. “The trap of doing McDonagh plays in the States is that you open up an Irish coffee-table book and pop that on the stage. There’s something about the juxtaposition of violence against the provincial, mythic Ireland.”

When we meet, Rosenthal still has a couple of months to refine his ideas, which he tends to do. “I always try to leave a little bit of room because the actors know more about the character than anybody ever will,” he says.

For August, he would approach the performers with a prop or a fixture and ask if their characters would have it in the house. "And they'd say: 'No, but what would be in my home is a little shelf of salt-shakers I've collected, or a basket of seashells from our travels.' That's brilliant! Then these people have a history and this is where they live. That's the kind of design that I really like.

“Sometimes it’s so frantic and you fly in and you just get it up to the point you’ve designed, and then you leave. What you want is for it to be finished.”

Who knows when that point comes? Rosenthal assigns a book to his students, 101 Things I Learned From Architecture School, by Matthew Frederick, in which he can trace his credo of "accepting as normal the anxiety that comes from not knowing what to do".

He adds: “As a designer, you need to be comfortable with not knowing ’cause you spend most of your time not knowing. It’s like any kind of artist or any type of creative person: you spend a lot of time in this fog, wondering what it’s going to be.”

The Beauty Queen of Leenaneruns at the Theatre Royal, Waterford, until Oct 30, then tours to the Excel Centre, Tipperary (Nov 1); Watergate Theatre, Kilkenny (Nov 3); Wexford Opera House (Nov 5); and the George Bernard Shaw Theatre, Carlow (Nov 6)