Corkman Bob Crowley is in demand in London and on Broadway for his award-winning set and costume designs (and up for three Tonys this weekend). He tells Belinda McKeonabout his initial reluctance to work on the adaptation of Joan Didion's memoir
Most theatre artists would jump at it. The chance to work with Vanessa Redgrave, David Hare and Joan Didion on Broadway, on a stage adaptation of a book so acclaimed, and so talked-about, and with so many copies sold that a stage version was bound to be a box-office hit. Approached to be a part of it, there could surely be only one answer: yes, and yes, and yes again. And thank you, and thanks to the relevant lucky stars.
But Bob Crowley was not so sure. The prospect of working with all of these people, that was not the problem, that was a massive attraction. But the prospect, for him, of working on The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion's memoir of the wrenching madness of grief - Crowley, at first, had his doubts. "I said to David, 'God, I don't think you need a designer'," he says. "I said I thought he should just do it on an empty stage."
Hare convinced him otherwise, and Crowley's mesmeric, minimalist designs now share the stage with Redgrave at the Booth Theater; six curtains or kabuki drapes (the term comes from traditional Japanese theatre), painted with scenes inspired by the sea and by the geological formations that surface repeatedly in Didion's memoir, unfurl in sequence as Redgrave's character travels through her landscape of shock and loss. But the story of how they almost did not happen, of how Redgrave almost ended up standing alone on an utterly bare stage, says a lot about the Corkman who is arguably the biggest name in stage design on Broadway today. It says even more about Bob Crowley, perhaps, than does the fact that, right now, five shows bearing his imprimatur are enjoying runs - extremely successful runs - on Broadway; seven shows, in fact, if you bear in mind that Tom Stoppard's marathon The Coast of Utopia is in fact a trilogy. A London import, the Old Vic production of Eugene O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten, starring Kevin Spacey and Colm Meaney, makes up the "straight play" numbers, and then there are two musicals: the opulent Disney/Cameron Mackintosh confection Mary Poppins, and lastly Tarzan, on which Crowley is the director as well as the designer. The huge work rate says that he is ambitious, versatile, and in demand; it says that he is hungry to do the job.
The self-usurping caution about the balance of voice and image in the Didion play, however, says that he is hungry, above all, to get the job exactly right.
"It's a very weird thing, that 'eureka!' moment," Crowley says. "It comes in the strangest of places, and you can't force it. All you can do is create the right kind of atmosphere and have the right kind of conversation. And if a show gets off on the wrong foot, it's hard to recover from it, I've found. It's hard to bring it back. Depending on what the show is, it could be millions of dollars that you're sort of semi-responsible for. So you had better be pretty damn right by the time you're making those decisions."
The critical consensus on Crowley is that he has been getting it "pretty damn right" for a while now. Last year brought a Tony for his design of Alan Bennett's The History Boys, and this year has brought three nominations, for scenic and costume designs on Utopia and Mary Poppins (the award winners will be announced tomorrow). Last week, he won two Drama Desk awards for his designs on the same shows. But he's well used to the awards season; the first of his 13 Tony nominations came in 1987, for his first Broadway designs; the show was a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, which had transferred after a triumphant London run. His next trip from London to Broadway, with the Royal National Theatre's reimagined Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Carousel, won him his first Tony in 1994. Another followed, for Aida, in 2000.
It's a long way from the Douglas Road in Cork. Growing up there in the 1960s, Crowley made trips to the Opera House and to local amateur drama shows with his grandparents. He enjoyed the shows, but the designs barely registered with him, much less how they came about. "I knew there were writers," he says, "and I knew there were actors, and I presumed they sorted it out between them." At school, one of Crowley's teachers was a director at the old Everyman Theatre; he had seen some of Crowley's paintings and asked him to help with the sets on a show after the designer broke a leg. Other voluntary design work followed, as did studies in fine art at the Crawford Art School, and a move soon afterwards to Bristol to take a course in stage design. "It was a transforming thing," he says of being there. "I was surrounded by my contemporaries: stage managers, actors, directors. I knew almost instantly that I was never going back to Ireland. I knew I was destined to stay here."
Or rather, he was destined to stay in theatre, in design, in the vortex of creativity and stimulation in which he found himself so happily contained. Bristol was just the springboard; it led to Leicester, and a job at the Haymarket, and from there to London, to the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre - which happened to be the two institutions for which he most eagerly wanted to work.
"I had no interest in the commercial theatre," he says. "I had no interest in the West End. The National and the RSC were the places where I'd seen the kind of work I'd been enchanted by. And I've spent most of my life working at them both."
IT'S TELLING THAT Crowley sees his career in this way, as having been spent mostly at these theatres. Though he's famous for his work on Broadway, and though he spends the year travelling between the two cities, he considers his roots, both personal and professional, to be firmly in London soil, and apart from one wobble in the 1990s, when Paul Simon's The Capeman, which he designed, was taking Broadway by storm, he has never seriously considered a move to New York. "I love it there, and I spend huge chunks of time there, but I love the versatility of the work that's available here in London," he says.
"It's more diverse, more eclectic; there's no equivalent in the US of either the RSC or the National. New York theatre is Broadway-based, mostly, and I knew that was mostly commercial musicals. And while I'm happy to do them, I don't want to do them all the time." In London, he says, he has more opportunities to design for the kind of work that most appeals to him: Shakespeare, opera, works by contemporary writers such as Stoppard and Hare.
Of course, by the time Crowley made this decision, he was already so much in demand in New York that it made no odds whether or not he lived there. Broadway had beckoned early on in his career - he was in his early 30s when Dangerous Liaisons made the transfer, and Carousel, his second Broadway show, secured his reputation there; it was the "banker" he says, proving that he was not just a one-trick pony. "Oh, he can do this?" he says, imitating the tetchy tones of a New York critic. "Oh, we only thought he could do white draperies. So now he can do this?" He laughs - as well he can afford to. It's a while since a critic has been genuinely tetchy about any of his designs. Other aspects of a show might be soundly panned - the acting derided, the writing dismissed, the score picked at and parodied to within an inch of its life - but, when Crowley's on the job, even the most damning review will be shot through with at least a few words of praise. This is especially the case with the big Broadway musicals, by which critics are so easily irritated, but in which spectacular sets and gorgeous costumes can offset a multitude of theatrical sins.
The current season gives proof, if ever it was needed, of Crowley's versatility and range; the landscape of his imagination stretches from the energy and idealism of pre-revolutionary Russia to the solitude and starkness of an intensely private grief; from the jungle to the nursery, from the chaos of 19th-century Paris to the bleakness of a 1920s Connecticut farm. His designs for The Coast of Utopia are truly epic - romantic and unsettling all at once, with hundreds of serfs in the background and an air of change and anxiety whirling around a set that seems almost the size of a football field - while, for Misbegotten and Magical Thinking, he has gone for the power of suggestion, for the nudge of metaphor, for mirrors of the mind.
BUT IT'S THE presence of the jungle and the nursery in that mix that gives pause. Given his admiration for classic and contemporary work, for strong writing, for plays embroiled in serious and challenging themes, given that he so much prefers this type of theatre to theatre of the commercial variety - that is, to musical theatre - why, still, does he take on so many musicals? Is it opportunism, an easier option, a quick buck? Do musicals offer some light - and well-paid - relief from the headaches of designing more serious shows? Does Crowley, in other words, compromise his aesthetic standards by taking them on? "The same person designs all of the shows," he says. "They're just different aspects of my fevered imagination. And I don't change my working practices - and people don't believe me on this, they think I'm being disingenuous - but working for Disney is not that dissimilar, honestly, to working at the National Theatre. As in, both institutions are run by brilliant people - Nick Hytner at the National, Tom Schumacher, a brilliant young producer, at Disney.
"There's this huge snobbishness about genre, but the bottom line is, my name is on the poster, on the programme, and I'm not going to misrepresent myself. I like working in different mediums, for different people, and I only do it because I like the people I'm working with."
SPEAKING OF PEOPLE he has worked with, what was it like to meet, in the early stages of his work on The Year of Magical Thinking, with Joan Didion? Terrifying, says Crowley; out of all the work he's done in the past couple of years, he was at his most nervous at the prospect of showing her his designs, his six seascapes, his six "interior landscapes", as he calls them. Not just because he has long admired Didion's writing, not just because he loved her memoir even before hearing about the plan to adapt it for the stage. "But showing her her world, you know, through my eyes, on stage. That was what I feared most. Because, I thought, if she rejects this, I have nothing to fall back on." And what happened? "I showed her all six paintings, and when she got to the last one, she said, in front of everyone, 'I could look at it forever'. And she got me there, I tell you. Because she doesn't waste words, you know." It goes without saying, then, that he's glad David Hare convinced him that the play needed a set designer, after all.
IT HAS TO be asked: he's very much an international player now, but could he be convinced to come back and work for an Irish stage? Crowley plays the "open to offers" card; he was, in fact, approached by the Abbey earlier this year, which came as something of a pleasant surprise, he suggests, since "the Abbey hasn't exactly been beating a path down to my door over the years". The Abbey job - designing Sam Shepard's Kicking a Dead Horse - would have meant working with an old friend, Stephen Rea, with whom Crowley has worked before, on Field Day productions, but the rigours of his schedule for this year meant he couldn't accept it. But he would "certainly" have done it, he says, had he been available, and he is interested in working in Ireland in the future. "Absolutely," he says. "It would just want to be the right thing with the right people. Like everything in life."
Fintan O'Toole's Culture Shock returns next week