A design for life

Bono said it best when he told Joan Bergin “thanks for creating something like this for Dublin”. What was he talking about? The original library in Lillie’s Bordello night-club, of course.
Arguably, the library at Lillie’s contributed more to Ireland’s cultural life during the ‘90s than even the astounding costumes Bergin designed for stage productions such as Riverdance and Brian Friel’s Translations.
Currently, she’s working on the Gate’s Pinter75 season. But, given its significance, it is Lillie’s library which I first ask her about.
“I had an incredible client in Gerry O’ Reilly” she recalls, referring to the original owner of Lillie’s. “He came up with the name Lillie’s Bordello. Judge Roy Bean’s was the restaurant downstairs.”
She designed Lillie’s to resemble “a salon worthy of a king’s mistress”.
“That’s what I created in the library and why I included every erotic book I could find, from Lady Chatterly’s Lover to The Story of O,” she explains.
“I designed that bed-board that was on the wall of the dance floor. Lillie’s was, in a sense, a giant theatrical set.”
Bono, she says, was an early fan. “I will never forget Bono delighting me when he came over one night in Lillie’s and said thanks for creating something like this in Dublin.”
Bergin’s real vocation, however, is working in theatre, film and on television. Recently, she received Emmy nominations for her work on a TV production of David Copperfield.
However, Bergin admits that there isn’t anything that means more to her than when a playwright such as Brian Friel thanks her for her contribution to the realisation of his original theatrical vision.
Working on plays by the likes of Friel and Pinter must be hugely gratifying because they are such talents.
“It is,” Bergin agrees. “And when someone like Brian Friel praises your work it does help, greatly. In fact, it is the ultimate accolade.”
She likes to challenge an audience’s assumptions about stage design. “When it comes to working on Pinter’s play, Betrayal, if I had to define my style I would say I never like to make things too cosy. I don’t want people to look at the stage and say, ‘how interesting’. I want them to say ‘how sexy’ or ‘how foxy’ and that really applies to the work of Harold Pinter, which amazes me every time I read it.”
The playwright offers a penetrating insight into the human condition, she says. “It’s alarming how he bores into your mind so much,” he says. “And with Betrayal it’s almost as if, sexually, you are a voyeur because it is a very sexy play.”
His plays make unique demands of the set designer, adds Bergin.
“An American friend, when he heard I was doing Pinter, said, ‘I hope your costumes are good because the pauses are so long people will have nothing else to look at!’”
Bergin’s friend was, of course, being slightly facetious. Pinter’s legendary pauses give not only the characters in his plays but also the audience, time to, well, pause and reflect.
Bergin suggests, half jokingly perhaps, that couples who turn up in the pages of Hello magazine talking about how “wonderful” their love affair or marriage is, could benefit greatly from seeing Betrayal.
“Usually, not long after they tell everyone great their relationship is, the same people are back on the pages of Hello talking about how everything disintegrated!”
Pinter’s plays remain as relevant today as when he wrote them, she adds.
“He wrote this play in the ‘70s but the director Robin Lefevre is setting it in modern times and when you watch it again you really do see how Pinter got to the nub of things in terms of relationships. Particularly when couples fight. In that sense, and so many ways, Pinter plays such as Betrayal are timeless.”