WHILE studying drama at Billingham Technical College Francis O’Connor realised that he’d never be an actor. “I didn’t do badly, I was okay, but I was the one person who really liked doing set designs, so I designed all the student shows there,”

he says.

He remembers designing productions of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, a couple of (Noel) Cowards and a panto. “There was a theatre, facilities to build scenery and even a carpenter. I could design scenery and was the only one doing that.

It was great for me because my portfolio at the end of two years had six productions in it – and probably two of them weren’t bad,” says O’Connor, who grew up in Redcar.

He looks back fondly on those years of study.

“The course at Billingham Tech was absolutely fantastic and there’s loads of professionals who came through that course and went on to drama school. The demise of that course is really sad because it was absolutely brilliant in its heyday.”

After two years there, he knew he didn’t want to act, but design for the theatre. He’d always been interested in design and was involved with the amateur operatic company attached to the Little Theatre, in Middlesbrough (now known as Middlesbrough Theatre).

“The standard of productions, although maybe it’s seen with a romantic eye, was pretty high for an amateur company. So it was a great grounding in how the profession works.

I learnt lots through the Little Theatre and Billingham Tech,” he says.

He went on to study for a stage design degree at Wimbledon School of Art and now works as a freelance stage designer. “When I started I used to do a lot of things, bread and butter stuff. I did assistant design work, as a model maker because my model-making was quite good. Then I designed shows in pub theatre with directors who were contemporaries of mine. I started to build relationships like that.

“The director-designer relationship is the one that’s critical. Certainly most of the work I get is through directors I’ve worked with on a regular basis.”

He’s reunited with director Sarah Esdaile for a revival of Tennessee Williams’ steamy Southern drama Cat On A Hot Tin Roof at West Yorkshire Playhouse, in Leeds. His setting is a magnificent Mississippi mansion – complete with water lapping at the walls and greenery hanging from the roof – that fills the vast Quarry stage.

At the same time, another show he designed for the Playhouse earlier this year has transferred to London’s Garrick Theatre. The musical Loserville is in stark contrast to Cat as it’s set in a modern high-tech world of computers and college geeks.

His Cat set has been getting as good reviews as the cast. “The great thing about the Quarry is it’s a fantastic space but does present not problems but challenges, especially in a play,”

he says. “It’s an epic space. You could argue that the play is epic but a lot of the scenes are two-handers. So the challenge is to create something intimate on that epic stage. It can work really well, but it’s challenging because it’s such a big space.”

Loserville presents different challenges.

“That’s a musical and is really spectacular in terms of the staging. It’s moved into the West End and there aren’t even many theatres in the West End that can match the volume of space of the Quarry.

“I designed it with an eye to a transfer although I didn’t know the theatre it would go to.

It had a sort of in-built flexibility that we could jiggle things around and make it fit any space.”

Next year, he’s designing a tour of the musical High Society, which means creating a set to fit in a variety of theatre spaces. “It’s got to look good in all the venues because everyone is paying the same price to see the show,” he says.

THE set has also to create the right atmosphere, the heat and humidity of the Deep South in the case of the Tennessee Williams play. “It’s a big part of my job to create the world in which the play can happen and that’s the part of the job that I really enjoy doing,” he adds.

He splits his work between plays, operas and musicals. It takes him all over the world, from the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratfordon- Avon to New York and Singapore. He works a lot in Ireland too, notably on the DruidMurphy cycle of plays by Tom Murphy and Martin McDonagh’s plays, including The Beauty Queen Of Leeane.

NOT all plays need a designer’s imagination.

“There are some where you’re not sure what you can do as a designer, pieces that are very definitely set in a specific place,” he says.

“Sometimes it’s a bit upsetting for a designer.

You get it with new writers where it’s almost like a film or TV script it’s so multi-locational and they’re such specific locations. That can be depressing or vice versa where it’s set in a living room and there’s no capacity or scope to allow you to deliver something or free the play and stop it being bound by three walls.

“I always like to be truthful to the writer but push the design and the world the actors are going to inhabit a little bit further so it doesn’t become inert visually.”

Actors have to be considered when he’s designing costumes. “They are going to have quite a strong opinion about their character, so it’s a collaboration and I would listen to what they have to say.

“With plays I tend to develop the design a little bit with the actors because it has to be informed by how they see their characters grow. Whereas in opera and musicals it’s much less about that and much more about the director’s vision.

“In opera, singers are interested in what they wear so they don’t look silly and can sing properly.

They’re more interested in how tight the collar is that what it looks like. In opera they’re more used to a bolder approach so it’s much easier to create something.”