From Page to Stage: Gerry and Michael
This week I’m coming back to the last show I designed at the University of East Anglia, Dancing at Lughnasa by Brian Frail, directed by Angie Peña-Arenas and Catherine McFall. This week I’ll be looking at two of the three male characters, father and son: Gerry and Michael. These two characters are quite different from one another and never directly meet in the forms in which the audience see them. Gerry is Michael’s estranged father who decides to pop in for fleeting visits to the mother of his child, Chris, always bringing false hope and empty promises that this time he will be back. The audience never directly see Michael as a child the production leaves him as an absent figure, easily forgotten in the busy lives of his aunts and mother, we only witness him as a grown adult, years later, much wiser and having been through a lot.
First of all from a design perspective, it was important for me to separate Michael from all of the rest of the characters, the play a reflection of his memory and therefore his presence physically should be distanced from the action but furthermore he is talking from a different decade, so his costume should reflect the 1950s rather than when the rest of the characters are interacting in the 1930s. Between the 30s and 50s there was a movement toward a slightly more casual look in men’s fashion while still maintaining a formal essence. The suits became slightly more relaxed but began to include sweater vests, jumpers and cardigans instead of waistcoats and hats became less of a necessity and more of a chosen accessory. Furthermore, the colours of suits in the 30s tended towards paler colours, such as cream, light tan, browns while colours moved into greys, blacks or bold colours or fun patterns in the 50s. This already began to give some distance, particularly between Michael and Gerry but between Michael and the other characters as well.
My main difference that I made with Michael was dressing him in greys and blacks, only Kate out of the other characters really ventured into wearing black, but it was important to make her look different as well while the cut and silhouette of her costume kept her firmly in the past, and it was broken up by her cream top, white apron and brown cross; Gerry, on the other, blended more easily into the world of the sisters, wearing paler colours and browns. I initially wanted to put an element of light yellow into both Gerry and Agnes’ costumes in order to give them a subtle link to further allude to their potential affair, however, this seemed of less importance as the costumes developed, although an element of cream and light yellow did still come into Gerry’s costume in his tie.
So, decades aside, the general feeling for Gerry’s costume was that of an ill-fitting mismatched suit. Gerry is a man who is wonderful at putting up a façade and covering up the truth of his life. We learn from Michael’s retrospection that Gerry is not the man he says he is, covering up a secret other family and embellishing his job success, so in his costume I wanted to give the audience subtle hints to suggest these things. His suit is ill-fitting, highlighting his inability to afford a tailor, and mismatched, suggesting he also can only afford to get whatever is available, not to buy an exactly matching suit. His hat is described as a straw hat in the script so this was something I could not really veer from in his design, however I feel it gave me a good base to work from to match, or indeed not match, the outfit to the hat. I needed him to look as if he was playing the part of a businessman, but doing so badly and not quite hitting the mark.
Michael, on the other hand, could be much more fashion forward and much more together. Michael does not give much indication towards his profession or how much of his own life is going except that he has moved to England. This suggests that he is probably not doing badly for himself. I did not want to give an indication that he was vastly well-off, but I imagined that he was getting by comfortably. Maintaining the colour palette of greys and black I wanted to give him a nice mixture of more casual and more formal, which seemed, from my research, typical of the era. This came in the form of standard suit trousers and a grey jacket, paired with a white shirt but a dark grey knitted jumper. It was a simple look that allowed Michael to stand out as different from the other characters on stage, while still blending into the background as it did not draw too much attention. We also added a pair of period glasses that I found in the UEA costume store to add to the suggestion that Michael was wise beyond his years, which seems to be how he comes across when retelling the story of his aunts and mother.
I think the looks worked really well onstage, both looks brought a distance between them and the other characters where necessary but a similarity where necessary as well. Gerry has to look like an outsider in comparison to the sisters, but fit into the era, while Michael needed to look like he could fit in with the sisters but was too removed due to being in the wrong era.
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