A director's production plan should integrate all elements of theatre so to "put across" the themes of the play through visual, technical and artistic methods. It is important the design concept fits fully with the production concept; one cannot exist without the other.

Sean O'Casey's play "Juno and the Paycock" is set in the height of the civil war between the newly independent Irish Free State and the "Republican Irregulars". The Boyle family is depicted as being very poor, living within "a two- room tenancy...tenement house."

My overall production plan would aim to show the failure of family life in an already dysfunctional family, the struggle of poverty and the political disillusionment felt through the failure of the nationalist independence movements and the partition of Ireland. O'Casey follows the same "li

Fortier, Mark Theory/Theatre: an introduction Routledge, 1997

Whitmore, Jon Directing Post-modern Theatre Michigan, 1994

ne" of writing as writers such as Ibsen; he writes about political and social, even controversial matters of the time, turns them into a play and performs them to a, then shocked, audience. By presenting the unspoken in society, I see a link between #Ibsen and O'Casey. Ibsens "A Dolls House" tackled controversial themes of its time and was very political, just as O'Caseys play I write about is. With this in mind, I am sure the mode of writing is naturalistic. Having decided this makes the design plan come together.

As I have chosen a naturalistic setting so far, it would only fit to choose a stage that would reflect this naturalism. A Proscenium arch theatre would be my first choice, as it would seem as if all the action was framed and the audience were to watch and learn. The play demands a curtain to show the passing of time (as the curtain drops at the end of the third act only to rise again, showing a different scene within the same room) and a proscenium arch has a curtain as one of its specifications. Another advantage of choosing a proscenium arch theatre is that the play demands a fourth wall technique used and developed by Stanislavski (amongst others) in his book "An Actor Prepares". This is an indirect form of communication and is achieved when performers act as though the world of the stage is a private is closed environment, as if there is no audience present. The fictitious "fourth wall" exists between the performers and the spectators and Stanislavski believed this helped the actors believe the roles they were playing and helped them focus their attention on each other rather than on the world outside. The walls of the room in "Juno.." would join with the audience wall and create a room for the actors that the audience could look through.

Some common words found in the essay are:
Dolls House, Virgin Mary's, Actor Prepares, Prepares P53, Stanislavskis System, Irish Civil, Sean O'Casey, Life Art, Irregulars Boyle, Ireland O'Casey, production plan, actor prepares, civil war, action takes, proscenium arch, psychological depth, stanislavski actor, stanislavski actor prepares, play demands, affected war, reflect depression, proscenium arch theatre, stanislavski life art,
Approximate Word count = 1937
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)