ARIA upon aria, gesture upon gesture, movement upon stage: out of such things are operas constructed with painstaking thoroughness. But the phrase "building an opera" took on a whole new significance for Dublin architect Denis Looby when he was invited to design Opera Theatre Company's spring production of Haydn's comedy Life on the Moon - as, indeed, did the phrase "leap in the dark". "I knew what the music would sound like and I knew it was going to be something frothy and funny as opposed to something very serious," he confesses, with the smile of a man who knows - for better or for worse - an awful lot more now.
So how did Denis Looby go about designing his first opera? Well, first he listened to a recording, then he spent a weekend reading through the text with the show's director, Hilary Westlake, and hammering out an agreement on what kind of set design would be durable enough to stand up to the rigours of an extended tour around Ireland as well as be aesthetically in tune with her interpretation of the piece.
And then, somewhere in the middle of all that, he found the "look" he wanted. "I was leafing through lots of reference books and I found the shot that was taken of the Apollo moon landing - a very well-known, clear, almost graphic image of the blue-and-white earth hanging in the black sky and the cheese-coloured moon at an angle to it - and I thought, `hey, that's it'. Once I had that image for the opening of act two, which takes place on the moon, I worked backwards to the first act, which takes place in a garden."
Some explanation of the plot of Life on the Moon is perhaps necessary at this juncture, lest readers get carried away by the notion of frock-coated 18th-century astronauts muttering "Esterhaza Eleven to ground control, we have lift-off" into their digital display panels. The story concerns a confidence trick played on a miserly merchant who, looking through a telescope at what he is told is life on the moon, is delighted by what appear to be scenes of aggressive behaviour towards lunar women. Offered a chance to travel to this haven of rough pleasures, he accepts with alacrity - only to find himsell, as is the way of things in comic opera, divested of his daughter, his maid, his dignity and a considerable portion of his fortune.
"The thing about the plot," says Denis Looby, "is that while the characters are supposed to be `on the moon' in act two, it can't be a very high-tech moon because the story demands that it looks like a moon that they could create themselves." So the slice-of-cheese moon starts out as a sloping garden staircase which is covered by a tarpaulin to suggest the moon's surface; "and that's it - the set is that simple, really". Except that, as he was to discover, nothing in opera is quite that simple.
"What I wasn't prepared for was the extent to which people in theatre defer to the designer. As an architect you decide things and run the project, but in general people don't consult you about every detail - what about my shoes, what about the edge of the cushion on the set, and so on.
"At the start," adds Looby, who has carried on his "day job" as a partner in the architectural firm of Sheehan & Barry as well as working on the OTC project, "people would ring up to ask me about this or that - and I'd almost want to say `well, do it whatever way you like, you know, whatever you think yourself'. But you realise that you're expected to have a view on these things because they all matter.
In a way, he says, designing an opera is no different to designing a building. The conventions may differ - the scale used in theatrical costume design, for instance, is one to 25, which is rarely used in architecture - but the process is essentially the same.
"You do a drawing, you assess the materials, you talk to whoever is going to make it and then you try not to change your mind too much as you go along." The difference, obviously, is that a building lasts for considerably longer. "I like the whole provisional aspect of theatre," says Denis Looby. "The fact that you're making something that's ultimately impermanent but which has to be really permanent for two hours. I like that a lot."
DESIGNING the costumes gave him the greatest pause. As an architect he obviously isn't used to having his designs stride purposefully up to him - as happened during this interview - and ask, "what do you want done with my hair?"
"The idea behind the costumes for the moon scenes was a bit like The Sound of Music, where they take the curtains down and make the costumes." Like the set design the costumes for the earth and moon scenes are linked, in this case in a humorous way: "the basic shape for the women's frocks in act one is thin on top and wide at the bottom, so we thought, `let's reverse that for the moon scenes and have them wide at the top and thin on the bottom'."
Which explains why the Emperor of the Moon, who has been posing patiently for at least half an hour while photographers busy themselves clicking and whirring around him, looks like an isosceles triangle stood on its point, or a still-life entitled "Shoulder-pads Gone Mad".
But two acts? Didn't the original II Mondo de la Luna have three?
Yes, says OTC's artistic director, James Conway, who has translated the libretto and made what he admits are a number of radical changes in the process. "We've tried to keep the shape of the piece very much the same while putting it into two acts - the original Goldoni play is very long, and the short third act doesn't really add very much, and those aspects are exaggerated in the version that Haydn used for his libretto.
"I wanted to have a script that you'd want to listen to, and characters with motivation - I think that's a problem in some Haydn operas, that there's not enough reason given in the text for what people do. I also introduced some plot complications, twisted things around - and I've cut two characters. And of course everyone will lament their passing in the same way that everyone in the history of opera has lamented their presence ... but I've kept some of their best music and given it to other people."
The resulting production will, he hopes, offer "charm with bite". "Charm's easy, and it's usually lies - and I don't think you should get a subsidy for doing it. I do want charm, and I want elegance, and I want bums on seats. But I also want it to be a bit disturbing - and to serve the music well, because I think it's great music."
Denis Looby, meanwhile, says he has thoroughly enjoyed his foray into the world of theatre design. But will he do it again? "I don't think I'll comment on that until after opening night," he says, with another of those wise smiles. But he professes himself happy with the way things have gone so far. "The design for Life on the Moon is the way I like my architectural designs to be anyway," he says. "I like things to be clean and materials to read as they are and shapes to be interesting, but simple. When you design something like this, what you do isn't submerged under all kinds of other things. Often in architecture you hand a building over to somebody and you come back six months later and they - well, obviously they have to live in it, but they've got filing and books and it's a mess. Maybe I sound a bit like a control freak saying this, but you don't often get that in design - where things are exactly as you want them.
