From Page To Stage: Kate Mundy
My last show I worked on as a designer at university was Brian Frail’s Dancing at Lughnasa. On this show I worked as both costume and set designer which was a great experience to be able to be involved in both parts of the design process. It was directed by Catherine McFall and Angie Peña-Arenas and my design assistant was Nyree Williams. In today’s post I’ll be focusing on the design and development process of the costume of the eldest of the Mundy sisters in the play, Kate Mundy, played by the incredibly talented Charlotte McEvoy. The play is set in 1930s Donegal, Ireland in the summer.
The basic vision for the look of the piece was naturalism. The set was essentially a classic Irish cottage living room/dining room/kitchen with a garden. The only things not naturalistic on the set were a few props and pieces of furniture that had been specifically painted white. The play is told from the perspective of the youngest sister’s son, many years later so the idea of the white objects was to suggest gaps in his memory. I did not feel like this would carry over effectively into the costumes so they stayed purely naturalistic. This meant my research was focused on developing the feel of the period among the sisters and the other characters.
Kate is the typical older sister: she is the most responsible and mothers the rest of the sisters. She is the only one of the sisters to have a job, as a school teacher, and is the most religious and conservative of the sisters. I looked into what a school teacher would be wearing in Ireland in the 1930s and used this as the jumping off point. Her skirt would need to be the longest of the sisters, almost touching the floor and I wanted her shirt to cover her neck completely also so that no skin was showing. This would give the sense of her uptight nature and her more conservative view of the world. I also wanted her to have a small cross somewhere on her to highlight her religious inclination and to single her out from her other sisters. To further achieve this, I wanted Kate’s palette to be black and white, while her other sisters could wear some colour within their costumes.
To achieve this on an incredibly tight budget I was lucky enough that Charlotte herself owned a long black rehearsal skirt that worked perfectly for the character, as well as a Victorian style shirt with a high collar that matched my designs for Kate. The only problem from there that we faced was Charlotte’s hair. She had a very short haircut that was not really of the period, especially not for the conservative Kate, but we were lucky to have a helpful cast and the actor playing Agnes, Eleanor Morton-Smith, is not only a great actor but a keen cosplayer and costumier and owned a wonderful black wig that we were able to use to give Charlotte a look more appropriate to the period. The finishing touches were a pair of simple black shoes and a wooden rosary chain that we tucked into Kate’s skirt to have the detail of the cross woven into the costume. As a final touch I made all of the girls a simple white apron each, that I distressed and dirtied a little and Charlotte was able to add this to her costume as she came into the home to protect her work clothes.
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