A change of scenery

Although still closer to the world of theatre than art Billy Leahy finds the exhibition of costume and stage design at IMMA worthy of attention

The Abbeyonehundred programme has broken free from the theatre section and found a new and comfortable home in visual arts. This is all thanks to Scene Change: One Hundred Years of Theatre Design at the Abbey Theatre, an exhibition of costume and stage design currently on show at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Kilmainham.

Although it may still seem closer to the world of theatre than art, the exhibition highlights the creative role of the theatre designer throughout the one hundred-year history of Ireland's most famous theatre. The creative nature and role of the designer neatly falls under the term 'contemporary visual culture' – a broad phrase encompassing the work of artists, clothes and stage designers, as well as architects.

Scene Change comprises photographic work, drawings and sketches, miniature set designs, actual costumes and a video documentary, as the viewer is taken through the history of the Abbey and Peacock theatres from a novel perspective. Archivist with the National Theatre Archives, Mairéad Delaney, and leading stage designer Joe Vanêk shaped the exhibition from the National Theatre Archives, with Vanêk co-curating the show with Helen O'Donoghue, the Head of Education and Community Programmes at IMMA.

Unsurprisingly, the early years of the theatre are not strongly represented due to a lack of source material, with photographic documentation mainly covering this period. Artistic representations of costume and stage design come to prominence in the subsequent years, with Norah McGuiness' Art Deco-inspired watercolour on paper work proving an initial highlight. Despite the heavy weighting of the exhibition towards design in recent times, the first room in the exhibition does offer a chance to see designs by Dorothy Travers-Smith, Charles Ricketts and artists engaged by W. B. Yeats, shortly after the foundation of the Abbey. Tomas MacAnna's painting of the set layout for The Less We Are Together by John O'Donovan in 1958 provides a nice transitional lead into the modern era.

The costume design drawings, production notebooks and sketches are an interesting feature of the show, allowing a peek into the actual processes involved in their creation and not just displaying the final product. But this we do get to see in the last room of the compact exhibition, where the actual works of key designers for recent productions are on display. These include costumes by Francis O'Connor, Joan O'Clery, Donatella Barbieri, Monica Frawey and Conor Murphy's standout feather costume for The Rivals by Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

The model boxes from several Abbeyonehundred productions, such as Francis O'Connor's design for The Shaughraun and Guido Tondino's for The Playboy of the Western World add an extra element to the show. Carl Filion's set for The Burial at Thebes, with its below stairs entrance and sections of lowered stage, brings the exhibition to a superb climax, as it displays the ambition, innovative and individual style of the early designs but clearly highlights the development of the medium over the last 100 years.

Scene Change's real success, however, is to explore and reveal the often-overlooked interplay between the fine and applied arts and this is, above all, why it is so deserving of a brief transition from the theatre pages to those of visual art.

?More Scene Change runs at IMMA until 20 February 2005. www.imma.ie. Tel 01 612 9900