In the days when the A2 poster was the essential, sometimes the only, tool in the marketing campaign for a new production, its appearance in a shop window, a public house or in triplicate on a street hoarding always gave us that frisson that an opening was imminent, and that our play would surely take the world by storm. And sometimes it did and more often it didn’t. What we asked from a poster – and which gifted graphic artists like Brendan Foreman regularly delivered – was three things: that the image would grab your attention; that it give you a flavour of the story; and that it imparted the practical information you need to attend the event. And, as it represented the first idea or impression an audience would get of our intentions, we agonised endlessly over what was being conveyed. The poster for The Field did everything we asked of it handsomely. The face of the Bull McCabe staring down out of a lowering sky certainly grabbed the attention as a forceful image and the sombre earthen tones of the landscape gave us the intimation of the ultimate crime perpetrated in the ruthless pursuit of land. And those telegraph poles, replicated in the actual stage design, remind us that these dark deeds belong, not to some blood soaked medieval past, but to the middle decades of the century in which this great seminal Irish play was written.
Ben Barnes
