LIKE a friendly magician busily at work, theatre-set designer Bob Crowley bends over the tiny model of his design for the forthcoming Royal National Theatre production of King Lear in London. In the week which sees the opening of Nicholas Hytner's film version of Arthur Miller's The Crucible, for which he designed the costumes, Crowley's mind is now on Shakespeare, not Miller.
"Lear is all about a family and the need to strip away things in order to see," he says, holding the miniature throne in his hand, "so this set has a metaphorical weight. There is a thin line, a membrane, between civilisation and chaos. I think that's what Shakespeare is investigating in it. He feels there is a lot of similarity between it and Beckett's work: "The set for Lear could almost be a set for a Beckett play."
Crowley is associate designer at the Royal National Theatre. He also works in a freelance capacity. Owlishly serious, his face often falls into a vaguely preoccupied expression, but Crowley at 44 is sharp, very shrewd and exact. He didn't grow up in Cork city for nothing. His is a tough, precise intelligence in which practicality keeps a firm, continual grip on his extraordinary imagination. Crowley believes the less one puts on stage the more effective the set. A minimalist design, however, not only tests itself and its designer, it also puts the greatest test on the production and the audience's perception of it.
Pointing to the model of the 50-foot stage, he says: "The idea being the house, as the metaphor for Lear's family, as well as for the world, collapses. This room of state, the set, in which Lear abdicates and, by abdicating, creates a vacuum where chaos can thrive, is going to turn into the blasted heath, with rain and mud and a sense of nature in upheaval."
A series of water sprinklers will create the effect of rain falling on the back wall of the theatre. "The actors, by walking into the mud and the water, will desecrate the stage which was Lear's home. The actors, by walking through the mud, will make the stage."
Everything is explained calmly with a surgeon's attention to detail. Yet he is relaxed and neither defensive nor protective of his work. An animated talker, he draws his references from the visual arts, cinema, poetry and history "I'm a day-dreamer with a deadline if I didn't have deadlines to meet I'd spend my time looking out the window at pictures." Crowley sounds like a craftsman and avoids the airs of a visionary: his natural enthusiasm means his descriptions are vivid but deliberate.
Working in a three-dimensional form, he sees himself as a sculptor: "Stage design has more to do with sculpting in space and using the human figure as a movable object in space. And you use space - for instance, it can suggest the state of mind. This sounds like pseuds corner? Or you can liberate the situation that the character finds himself in by liberating the space."
He is, despite his habit of wrapping his raincoat around him as if it were a pair of wings, unusually natural for a person who has now spent more than half his life in the theatre world. In photographs, he can look extremely watchful, almost suspicious - "I don't know why that is. I think I'm friendly, I like people. But I saw a picture of myself and my brother John recently and I don't know how it happened but we looked like the Kray twins."
Another model stands on the same table, Crowley's design for Martin McDonagh's The Cripple Of Inishmaan, which is currently playing in repertory at the National's Cottesloe theatre. It is the first time Crowley has designed a set for an Irish play. His 20-year career to date, has been almost exclusively with Britain's major theatres. The glowering cliff backdrop immediately evokes the landscape of Aran. Four slightly topsy-turvy block pieces add up to seven different scenes of village life, opening out "like Nativity calendars" to reveal door, windows, fireplace, cupboards, the village shop which sells only peas.
The central idea is the image of the island itself as a self-contained world - literally and metaphorically. They fit together like the parts in a Rubik's Cube," he says.
"I wanted to create the sense of everything being slightly off-centre as if blown by the winds of the Atlantic." For Crowley, this reflects the tone of McDonagh's play, itself taking a deliberate tilt at what he describes as "the Irish kitchen sink" genre and bat life in a closed community where everyday gossip becomes the essence of existence. "It's a combination of J.B. Keane and Synge," he says.
There is a third model on the work-room table, potentially the most naturalistic of his recent works. It is the interior of a smart middle-class drawing room, complete with tiny oriental rugs, a doll's house surrounded by a frame of leafy trees. It is Crowley's design for Amy's View, the new David Hare play which opens on the Littleton stage at the National in June. Set in Britain between 1979 and the present, the play is semi-Chekhovian in tone and is the story of a working actress mother and her grown daughter's marriage. "It is a debate about trendy arts journalism, its virtues and its failing. The play, Crowley adds with convincing mock innocence, centres on the fact that most arts journalism appears to be written "by people who don't like the arts".
ALTHOUGH he says he loves the theatre, Crowley's career was not planned. "I'm a theatre animal - I love the world. It is the one I feel the most comfortable with, it is that immediacy of moment." The eldest of four children, he soon discovered he was good at painting and drawing. "I was good at English - I was very good at Irish," he says with some surprise at the memory, and adds. I was hopeless at sport. His family life has two distinct phases: before John and after John. Crowley and his two sisters grew up in a strict, tidy household. The arrival of his belated younger brother, John, born when Crowley was 17, wrought a revolution.
"My mother was 45 when he was born, and he certainly was not expected. It changed our family, it changed my parents. There they were in their fifties with a small child. It was great. The anarchy of this small child liberated them.
Aware that some observers have decided Bob Crowley sees his brother, now a professional theatre director, as a surrogate son, he says: "That is not so. I didn't raise him. I left home when he was about five and I never came back except for visits. Every year he spent summer holidays with me and that was great. I dragged him everywhere. I was based at Stratford with the Royal Shakespeare Company for much of that time and he would literally follow me around. I have always had a good relationship with him. There's a great understanding between us.
He tells the story of when John was about 10, and Crowley was working on Macbeth with Jonathan Pryce in the lead. After the show Crowley and Pryce went to go through notes over supper, taking John with them. Pryce asked the child what he thought of the show and his performance in particular. John said he "didn't think much of it". Pryce, with a murderous Macbeth-like stare, retorted: "I think it's way past your bedtime."
On leaving Colaiste Chriost Ri Crowley studied art at the Crawford Muncipal School of Art. Even there, his approach lacked direction. "I had no idea what I wanted to do. I was completely unfocused. My father was a fireman - neither he nor my mother had the remotest involvement with the theatre. But when I told them what I wanted to do they didn't object. Their attitude was very accommodating; bemused but positive."
Art college proved disappointing, and he soon lost interest. "I don't really know even now what I was doing there. At the time it was still pretty much a 19th-century institution, still influenced by the English style of teaching with an emphasis on antique drawing." He says he did not spend much time there: "I was busy editing magazines and I suppose art college was more of a springboard for other things." His first job, at the Bristol Old Vic, was effectively the start of his career and his training on the job.
Some years earlier, while still at school, Crowley had read Tynan On Theatre the collected theatre criticism of the late Kenneth Tynan. "Can you imagine anything more boring than reading reviews of productions you will never see? But Tynan wrote with such passion and described theatre as being of the moment, as something which happens and then disappears but stays in the mind. I'll never forget his phrase, that something so transient can be so powerful.'" Theatre, Crowley agrees, can't be held like a picture or a book, it lives and then seems to stay on in the air.
The classical repertoire has dominated his work, "I spent my 1980s doing Shakespeare in England, and I love him. He is the source of so much theatre.
"Now I find myself wanting to do Synge.
I love the scope and the landscape Synge offers.
For him there has been a sliding between cultures. He remembers reading Wim Wenders's comment about America having colonised our subconscious. "A big anti-American sentiment lingers in Europe. But when I was young, I was perfectly happy to have my subconscious colonialised by America. I listened to American radio, American music. I read American writers, saw American movies. When I was growing up in Ireland in the 1960s, America was everything. You know, it is only recently that Irish culture has reinvented itself. When I was growing up the nearest you came to Irish culture was the now late and still undercelebrated Sean O Riada. Musically speaking we had a showband culture. Showbands and the Eurovison Song Contest. And that's not that long ago. There was no such thing as a youth culture in Ireland when I was there."
He still feels strongly about the US and regards Robert Hughes's American Vision as one of the most important series ever on television - "it has helped to open our eyes to the depth of American culture.
One of his forthcoming projects is Capeman with Paul Simon. "I've been working with him for 18 months. He picked me as his designer for this show on Broadway before he had selected his director." The show is based on an incident which - happened in New York in the 1950s. A 16-year-old street kid, Salvador Agron, was involved in inter-gang warfare and ended up killing two of the other gang members. "It is sort of West Side Story," says Crowley,
"The kid got sentenced to death in the electric chair and spent three years on Death Row before the combined efforts of people like Nelson Rockerfeller and Eleanor Roosevelt reduced the sentence to life imprisonment. "Agron, who died of pneumonia soon after his release, put his time in prison to good use, educated himself and became a campaigner for the rights of prisoners. Crowley explains that Paul Simon is using his story as a kaleidoscope through which to explore American culture from the 1950s through to the 1980s.
It is not Crowley's first musical. He won a Tony and other awards for his work on Carousel. Having designed several operas he says: "I love the music, but I find opera very top-heavy, exaggerated and unsubtle. I far prefer ballet. I love the beauty, lightness, the grace of ballet dancers. There is also their vulnerability. They have such a short time to shine. They really are like moths before the flame." Having designed Royal Opera House productions of Anastasia and Pa vane Pour Une Enfante Defunte, he hopes to do more.
His work draws on a variety of sources, particularly artists such as Braque. "I love the autobiographical element in his work and his idea that out of the specific comes the universal. I love Patrick Kavanagh for the same reason. He could see the world from his bedroom window.
"I find Hodgkin's use of colour completely exhilarating, the element of memory and that intense feeling of sunshine, lust - all completely unheard of in English painting." Not surprisingly, he made more than one visit to the recent Hodgkin exhibition at the Hayward Gallery.
He believes his own strongest visual images tend to come from black and white photography. "I'm always buying photography books. I love 20th-century American abstract photography, especially the work of the Magnum photographers such as Ernst Haas and Robert Frank.
How does he approach design? "I try to find the essence of a set design in a metaphor inspired by the text, otherwise things don't have meaning. And I'm obsessed with trying to find meaning in things because there is so little of it about.
He believes in finding a balance between his ruling metaphor and the reality a player needs in order to play a specific scene. "An actor won't be interested in just performing in one of my high-falutin' abstract concepts. They will want to know which door they're coming through and where they're going to sit. And rightly so." He refers to the need for an overall vision, "which I call the arc of whatever piece I'm working on. Whereas an actor lives in his or her moment, my responsibility starts the minute the curtain, should there be one, rises. It's the journey that the audience faces which interests me."
As for the role of the designer, "I'm the first person to get something going, the first thing everybody asks about a project is what's it going to look like. A play exists on the page, you can read it. But a production doesn't exist until you realise it visually and the actors inhabit it. The design is the beginning the production."
WHILE certainly open-eyed rather than nostalgic about the country he left at 22, he says: "I love Ireland, it is the society I find tricky sliding back into. After all, I've lived in Britain for more than 20 years. Most of my friends live here. Slipping into a society, any society, is a very difficult thing to do. People have their own social apparatus. In Ireland, I am now a visitor. But it doesn't mean that I don't think about it all the time. I do. Particularly at the moment because my father is not well and we've just sold the family home." His mother died 10 years ago. "So I now find myself thinking about childhood and growing. Yes, I'm going through my Proust."
His nephews and nieces are also making him think-about himself at their age. "Small children like that are a kind of door into your past. And because they are not mine and I don't see them everyday, they come in and out of my life, so the images are more poetic, selective."
For all his years away and all the travel, he retains what he describes as "an Irish mindset - a horrible phrase I know. But I'm Irish, I am still an outsider in Britain although I feel perfectly at home here."
