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SINEAD MCKENNA The Yew Tree Theatre in Ballina wa
s the early game-changer for Sinead McKenna. Set up by French director Pierre Campus and his wife Yvette, this is where McKenna had her first immersion. “They made this theatre space, they ran it themselves, they brought in weird, bonkers plays. I was a bit lost during secondary school, and this was a completely different experience when I needed something like that.” “Yvette handed me copies of The Little Prince and Antigone which I wolfed down. I applied to do Drama and Theatre studies in my Leaving Cert because I had this dawning realisation that whatever I would do with my life, I couldn’t do a nine-to-five.” It was whilst being back home in the summer, on term leave from studying in the Sam Beckett in Trinity, that Pierre thrust McKenna into the spotlight of figuring things out, something which has remained undimmed ever since. While she is best known for her work in lighting, McKenna has, of late, started flexing her skills within the confines of set design also. “The first time I took anything on was for Mark O’Rowe’s The Approach. It came from a simplicity thing. He really doesn’t want anything getting in the way and that’s not an ego thing. The text, and his style, is so sparse so anything you load into that space is so troublesome because it is saying something. It’s really difficult. He kind of approached it saying could it just be lighting and, having read the piece, I felt it needed a sculptural piece, it needed a three-dimensional space. There was something very small about it, but also huge. It was like planetary seismic shifts but happening over a very small conversation. That’s when I kind of said I’d take on the set element.” McKenna’s most recent foray into set design was with The Bluffer’s Guide to Suburbia which was in the Project Arts Centre as part of the Theatre Festival. It is Ray Scannell’s timely look at the returning son who has to address faded hopes and economic realities. “The character Finn comes back from London, he was big in the ‘90s and noughties on the indie circuit. It’s quite a stark piece and a real commentary on what is happening in Dublin right now and, genuinely, we have friends going through this. He moves back to his parents in suburbia.” “My partner was in bands, our spare room would have cable everywhere and my background was cable-bashing and going on to the stage at Witnness at 2am pulling reams of cable out of the mud and coils so there was all this feeling that the space would be engulfed.” “I didn’t want to get in the way there either. It was a dark space where things can happen within. It’s not a commentary but more like another player: the spewing of cable, a gigantic mess, like a liminal background space. There is a flight case and everything is spewing out of it. There is something genuinely of my past in there, but also the fact that it is just a pile of junk and shite. To look at it, it’s a complete mess but each of those cables connected something at some point in time. Running in the background is this disgusting consumerism which he is also part of. We are What I love about lighting is the moment to moment engagement that doesn’t necessarily come with the space. . all complicit in it. Every time I sat down to make a piece, I was thinking ‘what’s the fucking point in making something where we are just contributing to this clutter?’ Everything we do contributes to this maelstrom and we’re all complicit in it. I was up the ladder wrecking everything.” McKenna ensured that every cable used was recycled. “Our references were No Disco, Donal Dineen era. He had shot Super 8, black and white, footage of water and birds reflected on to a cracked wall. I love Jack Phelan’s use of projections as a light source.” McKenna, like all the other designers interviewed for this article, is adamant about the sense of ‘collaboration’ needed to realise these projects. “It always comes from the script, you’re always responding to somebody moving in space or to colour. You feel the world for what it is and get an overriding sense of what the author is getting across. It’s always a sum of all of its parts and the parts are all the people and where they are at in that particular time in their lives and heads.” And though she has a number of set designs under her belt now, lighting is her first love. “What I love about lighting is the moment to moment engagement that doesn’t necessarily come with the space. You are following every second of every moment and sculpting that. You are responding all the way through. It follows everything and that can change. It’s like designing in time and space. “I can do a big commercial musical, maybe it’s a budget thing and means of scratching an itch, and then I can take on Bluffer’s which is about the writing and a special bunch of people who I love working with. You have to have a reason for doing things. The older I get I have to connect. There is less reason to take something on for just say the technical challenge.” Sinead is pictured on the set of The Bluffer’s Guide to Suburbia in the Project Arts Centre as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival. She is doing lighting design for Drama at Inish which runs in the Abbey Theatre from November 21 until January 24. 24