We sat down with theatre designer Niall Griffin to talk about his latest work, Moffie, currently running, to critical acclaim and standing ovations, at the Baxter Flipside in Cape Town.
As the designer behind the set, costumes, lighting, and AV (audio visual), Griffin has shaped every frame of the audience’s experience. Taking on that much responsibility is no small feat, but for Griffin, it always starts with emotion.
“Design for theatre is such a layered and complex beast. It’s like juggling porcelain plates in a hurricane while simultaneously etching your name on a grain of rice! It’s a very fine balancing act but often an exquisitely rewarding one,” he says.
“In my personal experience, I’ve found that targeting the heart of the piece is key. Design is an emotive language, and as designers, we have a responsibility to hold an audience’s journey. Finding a visual language that settles an audience into the emotional landscape of the piece is the code to crack.”
Reading Philip Rademeyer’s stage adaptation of André Carl van der Merwe’s semi-autobiographical novel changed his usual process.
“Moffie was a challenge! Reading Phillip Rademeyer’s script for the first time was breathtaking. Very often, as I am reading, my imagination runs away with pictures and colours and textures, but when reading this work of art, I was enrapt in the poetry of it all, the heartbreaking story so beautifully explored through the written word. That truly was the spark for me.
“My feeling was the piece needed a space that held these words with reverence, not a space that dictated anything. It needed to morph and mould just as elegantly as the words on the page. A space of abstraction that allowed the lightning-fast shifts of space and time.”
While the production takes place in a specific historical moment in the apartheid-era military, the emotional landscape was deeply familiar to Griffin.
“I may have no personal experience of this tragic ‘war’ but, as a gay man, much of Nicholas’s emotional journey is a mirror of mine. Nicholas says, ‘…knowing there is someone like me,’ and these words could not be more poignant to our world today. We are all far more similar than we care to accept, and our society is geared towards shame and exclusion.”
That personal connection shaped the design approach across all elements.
“Design is vulnerable. You are asking an audience from many different walks of life with varying life experiences to witness something solely through your ‘lens’. The visual world of set, lighting, costume and AV needed to blend so seamlessly into the storytelling mechanism that no individual element was isolated. As beings, we experience emotion on multifaceted layers. All at once. Sometimes completely overwhelming. Sometimes clear. Sometimes, so heightened we can barely breathe.
“For me, that was the key to the visual language of Moffie. I needed to turn technology, in the form of lighting and projection, into a singular living, breathing emotional being. Sounds like an impossible task, but I’ve never been one to shy away from a challenge.”
One visual image became central from early on.
“The bags or ‘balsakke’. More men than would care to admit kept their ‘balsakke’ for years and years after the ‘war’. For many, a symbol of inescapable trauma. A pile of army bags pulled tightly into the centre of a black, menacing void was an image I could not get out of my head. An emotional being desperately holding onto memory and trauma surrounded by an ever-looming unknown. When I shared this image with director Greg Karvellas, the spark was instantaneous, and I knew we had unlocked something wonderfully exciting together. They are precious, fragile memories, trauma impossible to release, bodies of those lost, and so much more.”
Griffin’s philosophy is simple but demanding.
“For anyone who has worked with me, they’ll know I bang on ad nauseam about one thing: ‘ONE ORGANISM’. Personally, I believe that when design is most powerful, it is because it functions as one being, even though it’s made up of so many moving parts. I believe that successful design is fluid, much like the ocean. There are peaks and valleys. Sometimes things are in the foreground, like high tide, and sometimes deep in the distance, but ALWAYS remaining as one entity, ‘one organism’. Finding the unity of all the design elements to create one storytelling mechanism is vital to me.”
Moffie runs until 27 September at the Baxter Theatre Flipside. Performances are Tuesday to Saturday at 19:30, with matinees on Wednesday and Saturday. Tickets available through Webtickets.
