`An awful lot of film directors hate the theatre, and never go to a play, unless it's to see a particular actor they're interested in. There's also a lot of snobbery in the theatre about film, which is regarded as some kind of secondary, degraded art, which I think is a pity."
For Tom Conroy, who won Best Set Design at the Irish Times/ESB Irish Theatre Awards for his imaginative setting for Joe O'Byrne's adaptation of Patrick McCabe's The Dead School, film and theatre are equally fascinating, and he continues to divide his time between the two very different disciplines.
The Dead School, which premiered last summer as a Macnas/Galway Arts Festival production, opens for a two-week run in the Olympia Theatre, Dublin, next week. It's just the latest in a long line of Macnas shows designed by Conroy. Along with Ollie Jennings, Padraic Breathnach and Pete Salmond, he was a co-founder of the groundbreaking drama group, which began with a series of loosely organised "events" in the early 1980s.
"We were doing what would now be called community arts, although we didn't have a word for it at the time," he recalls. "At the time, there was absolutely nothing happening, but it was a case of meeting all these unemployed graduates who had this wide range of talents and getting them involved.
"Galway at that time felt very isolated. But, through the arts festival, we were seeing Els Comediants and Robert LePage. I remember going to see all five shows of LePage's Dragons Trilogy and being absolutely fascinated. So, in a funny kind of a way we weren't looking to Dublin or London, we were looking much further afield to Europe and Canada."
He's still involved with Macnas, and is working on this year's festival parade - on the theme of Night. "But I was most heavily involved for the first seven years or so. It was always a very collaborative process. I would have been the main visual person, but Padraic Breathnach would have been very much the catalyst. He has a wonderful visual imagination."
Looking back now at the cultural and economic wasteland of the early '80s, the importance of Macnas as one of the first green shoots of revitalisation can hardly be overstated. The idea of bringing carnival to the streets, of celebrating the urban spaces of Ireland, now seems a commonplace, even a cliche, but in the dismal 80s,it was an act of splendid defiance.
"It's a mini-art form, not a major, earth-shattering thing," says Conroy. "But, for the time that it happened, it was important. In our relatively short lives, we've seen incredible changes in this country, and all the mini-Macnases are an expression of that change from depression to optimism, which is great."
He doesn't agree that the phrase "community arts" should detract in any way from a commitment to excellence. "From the very beginning of Macnas, we wanted to do things that would be well finished, that wouldn't be throwaway. I think it's demeaning to the community if you think any other way, whether it's to do with the content or the quality of the finished product.
"It's kind of odd, more than 10 years on, to look around and see how that influence has spread around the country, which is great. For years and years, for whatever reason, the Irish were not thought to be particularly visual. Whether it's a symptom or a cause, Macnas has been an important part of that greater interest in colours and textures, and the idea of taking visual sensibility out of the galleries and onto the streets."
He does wonder, though, about where street theatre will go now. "The art form, if you can call it that, is in danger of going into its decaying mannerist phase. If I see another snake or dragon coming down the road . . ."
While working with Macnas in the '80s Conroy was approached by film-maker Bob Quinn. "Bob had seen some of my work, and he was planning to make his film, Budawanny, on Clare Island, so I became a one-man art department. I'd always been interested in films, but I'd never really considered how they were made, and that experience hooked me - although it was rather misleading, because I've never done another film like it since!"
His growing interest in the medium led him to Britain's National Film and Television School, where he studied production design. One of a surprisingly small number of Irish graduates of the NFTS, he regards himself as being fortunate to have been there during what he thinks was its golden era. "There wasn't really any such thing as a curriculum, but you got the opportunity to work on a lot of films, with really good people."
On finishing the course, he found himself facing a situation familiar to many film school graduates. "I didn't come out with a false confidence, but I had done a lot of films, including two feature-length films. I didn't have experience of the real world of film-making, though - the schedules, the budgets, the structures, even knowing what people's jobs actually are. There are subtle differences between the way different crews from different countries work, and the only way to learn it is by doing it. It took me about five years to work it out."
Conroy has designed many film and TV dramas since, including Moondance, Soft Sand Blue Sea, The Boy From Mercury and Crushproof, the crime drama set in Dublin which is released here next week. The new film's harsh, almost nihilistic portrait of Irish urban space, he says, doesn't look anything like other Dublin-set films.
"We wanted to be in that real world of Dublin, but we also wanted to create this world which would work for the playing out of the drama (the film takes place over the space of 36 hours in the lives of its young, despairing characters). We wanted to control the colour, so that it was almost monochromatic, with splashes of red."
Of the films he has designed, his favourite is The Boy from Mercury, Martin Duffy's gentle, amusing comedy about a young boy's obsession with his science-fiction-inspired fantasy world. "I think that doing a film with integrity about childhood is probably the hardest thing, in a culture which is treating children more and more as consumers, and Martin really achieved that."
At the Cannes Film Festival, starting next week, another film he designed, East is East, is showing in the Director's Fortnight section. This feature debut of one of Ireland's most promising young directors, Damien O'Donnell, tells the story of a mixed-race family growing up in Salford in the 1970s. "It's a very apt film, because it reflects a lot about the beginnings of the multi-cultural society you have in Britain today. Damien is a designer's dream. He's very visual, very witty, and one of the calmest people I've ever worked with. This was his first feature film and he just remained completely unflappable."
Despite all his film work, Conroy will continue working in the theatre. "They're two very different things," he says. "What I enjoy about doing both is that I'm using two very different parts of my brain. The film work doesn't seem to influence the theatre or vice versa."
Film, he says, can work on a very emotional level with which people can identify. "Making a film, even if it's some kind of a fantasy story, is about creating a believable parallel world. Ideally, in most cases, the audiences shouldn't even notice my work on film."
For The Dead School, he deliberately avoided reading Pat McCabe's novel before designing O'Byrne's play. "Which I think was a good idea, because it probably would have distracted me. I had a very good collaboration with Joe, who is a very visual director, and is willing to take lots of risks. They may not always work, but it makes it very stimulating to work with him."
The production stars Mick Lally as Raphael Bell, the old-fashioned national school teacher who finds himself being overwhelmed by the new, liberal consumer culture of a changing Ireland. "You get the tragedy of this person whose entire belief system is collapsing around him," says Conroy. "But the play doesn't poke fun at him. I think it's part of a generosity in Pat McCabe's spirit. It's too easy to demonise the past and not understand these people, who were not monsters, even though some of them did behave monstrously."
In the hands of O'Byrne and Conroy, Bell's collapsing world is conveyed with an ambitious theatricality which includes the use of puppetry. "At the end of the day, the set may look very simple, but you don't see what's been taken away," says Conroy. "You have to be capable of editing your work. It's too easy to fall in love with your own visual ideas or symbolic motifs, and you have to keep checking yourself, which is where you need a good relationship with your director. It's also where a good producer can be important, someone who's a little further away from the process and can step in."
From his earliest days with Macnas, his theatre work seems to have been very anti-naturalistic, I suggest, the antithesis perhaps of the production designer's role in film. "Well, film language, despite all the experimentation that has taken place, is still stuck very much in a kind of naturalism, and it's hard to see, commercially, how it can break out of that. The kind of theatre I enjoy doing has been moving away from that - I can't see myself ever doing a classic box set, for example. What I like about theatre is that opportunity of using that other side of my brain, and doing something that the audience just aren't expecting."
The Dead School runs at the Olympia Theatre, Dublin, from May 11th to May 22nd. Crushproof opens at selected cinemas nation-wide next Friday, May 14th.
