Conor McPherson Collaborations with

Sometimes auto-biographical, painfully realistic, hilariously funny and supernaturally unsettling, it is a real pleasure to collaborate with Conor on his work. These six productions, directed with incisive clarity by Conor or with the gentle accuracy of Ian Rickson, are all completely different. The characters in a starkly lit life are teetering on the edge of an ever present darkness; often down stage centre if Jim Norton’s got anything to do with it! The humour and theatricality of Conor’s stories demand an actor’s self knowing relationship with an audience that creates a warmth and a feeling of what its like to be alive in the world. A sort of dream.



Reviews:

Shining City:
“Rae Smith’s evocation of Ian’s spartan office and Mark Henderson’s lighting add, in McPherson’s own production, to the magnetic eeriness of a play that suggests there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our modern materialist philosophy.”

Michael Billington, The Guardian

The Seafarer:
“Every aspect of this production glows with verisimilitude, starting with Rae Smith’s perfectly shabby costumes and set, which happily features one of the saddest Christmas trees ever seen.”
Ben Brantley, The New York Times

The Weir:
“Rae Smith’s set is inspired, a scuffed brown bar surrounded by darkness, at once thoroughly lived-in and mournfully bleak.”
Kate Bassett, The Daily Telegraph

The Veil:
“Rae Smith’s fine design, often spookily lit with flickering candles, brilliantly evokes the decayed country house”
Charles Spencer, The Daily Telegraph

“Rae Smith’s design, gorgeously mildewed and crumbling, smartly keeps you on edge with periphery shadows. A moonlit pot plant and a flickering candle, so far stage right they’re actually in the wings, repeatedly catch your eye to harvest goosebumps aplenty.”
Matt Trueman

The Birds
“Beautifully designed by Rae Smith”
Colin Murphy, Irish Independent

“McPherson keeps us on the edge of our seat too, with piecemeal visual revelations. Even Rae Smith’s declining grand set is revealed to us inch by inch with the curtains’ slow withdrawal in the opening scene.”
Sara Keating, The Irish Times