The unexpected pleasure of making impossible stage directions work

Set designer Bob Cousins had a problem. Eamon Flack, Belvoir St Theatre’s artistic director, wanted to do Tracy Lett’s great 2007 play, August: Osage County, and Letts specifies a set with a three-storey house, including a three-room ground floor – hardly possible on Belvoir’s modest stage. The ultimate solution was simply to abandon Letts’ stage directions.

He and Flack did not have the answer before the latter programmed it. “But,” says Cousins, “we do have an understanding that one of the great qualities of theatre is its elasticity when it comes to time and place. So we went into the project not knowing how to resolve it necessarily, but with the confidence that this great quality of theatre would get us through.”

Bob Cousins devised several different iterations of the set.Credit: Brett Boardman

Cousins devised several different iterations of the set before arriving at the final version. “All the while we’re doing that we’re testing particular ideas from the text within the space, and starting to imagine the production in that space,” he says. “That’s done obviously from a staging point of view, but also from a lighting and costume point of view.

“The model [of the set] becomes the main tool for us to be able to start to imagine that. We are literally in there moving figures around and furniture around, and starting to get a sense of not necessarily how to solve every scene moment by moment, but how we might lay all these scenes over the top of each other … We’re drilling down into what is the essence of each scene and working out what’s required for that.”

Having abandoned Letts’ house, Cousins found the options became more exciting. “I’ve never been particularly bound by the notion of naturalism in the theatre,” he says. “I do use it, but it feels to me like everything is real and nothing is real in the theatre. That’s a contract understood by the theatre-makers and the audience.

“And the exciting part of it is actually the way that theatre is made in the space between those two entities. The theatre-makers and the audience are all theatre-makers in that sense. So that dissonance between what the world is and what we see on the stage at any given moment is the great game of theatre, and where the moment of theatre happens.”

Flack’s stellar cast includes Pamela Rabe, Helen Thompson and Tamsin Carroll, and Cousins describes Osage as “a great ensemble piece”.

“In the forefront of our conversations was foregrounding the performances and the actors,” he says. “That’s the essence of the game.”

Cousins’ formidable CV includes designing operas in Europe and the massive Ring Cycle for Opera Australia. His many Sydney theatre credits include The War of the Roses, King Lear and The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui for STC, and Cloudstreet and Waiting for Godot for Belvoir.

Alongside the creativity and problem-solving, a key pleasure is collaboration. “It can be a tussle at times,” he says, “but it’s certainly one of the rewards. It’s like a dialogue when it’s working well, and mostly it works well.

“But I’ve worked with Eamon a bit in the past and that certainly helps you start to build that kind of understanding. I’ve seen a lot of his theatre, and he’s seen a lot of my theatre, so we go into it with an understanding of what we both bring to it.”

Even once the actors are on it, the set may still be tampered with. “It evolves in response to discovery, and even to audience response through the previews,” says Cousins. “You gain more understanding … That’s one of the great beauties of it as well. It begins with unknowns: you’re given a text, and then you have to imagine a production, which is something completely different. It’s one of the reasons I’ve never felt beholden to stage directions. You have to make it work in the space with that cast of people. That’s always done with great respect to the playwrights, but it’s also done with great respect to the production.”

Osage: August County: Belvoir St Theatre, until December 15. Black Swan State Theatre Company, Perth, February 27 to March 16.

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