1 O’Gorman, Siobhán. ‘Stage design since 1950.’ Irish Drama and Theatre since 1950. Ed. Patrick Lonergan. London: Bloomsbury Methuen, 2019 Stage design in Ireland has long been over-shadowed by the cultural and academic prominence of Irish theatre’s literary traditions. The value of those literary traditions had been enshrined in the 1899 founding of The Irish Literary Theatre, leading to the opening of the Abbey in 1904; both events were key to the cultural nationalism bolstering Ireland’s drive towards liberation from British rule. However, recent studies suggest that scenography also has contributed significantly to Ireland’s postcolonial nation-building. Joan Fitzpatrick Dean, for example, in her ground-breaking book All Dressed Up: Modern Irish Historical Pageantry (2014) examines how public spectacles – complete with live music, costumes and fireworks – presented Irish identities as large-scale performances. Stage sets were central to the Irish Literary Theatre’s efforts to conjure a distinctively Irish authenticity, for example with the placing of Douglas Hyde’s Casadh an tSúgáin (1901) entirely within the one-room, domestic space of the rural peasant class. Following this, similar box sets portraying cottage interiors regularly were reused at the Abbey, both to depict the peasant settings prevalent in Irish drama and ‘with a minimum of adaptation to make up the one room on view in O’Casey’s first two tenement plays’ (Grene 1999: 132). Set builder Seaghan Barlow oversaw ‘the customary rearrangement of “basic” scenic elements’ at the Abbey from 1911 until 1949 (Vaněk and O’Donoghue 2005: 19). By the mid-twentieth century the cottage kitchen set was ‘embarrassingly ubiquitous’ (Morash 2002: 121). Nevertheless, as I have argued elsewhere, such stage images were made iconic to a large extent through processes of repetition and recycling (O’Gorman 2019a). Yet, despite scenography’s role in the construction of Ireland as lived on the stage, its documentation is relatively fragmented and the country has participated only twice (in 2007 and 2015) in the world’s largest exhibition of scenography: the Prague Quadrennial, or PQ. The core of PQ, since its founding in 1967, has consisted of displays showcasing representative scenographies from a growing number of countries and regions around the world, presenting recent trends in the field within largely national exhibition formats.As John Bury wrote in the catalogue description accompanying the UK’s exhibition at the PQ in 1983, ‘theatre design is not just an academie subject but reflects the cultural and artistic heritage of a nation’ (PQ archive).John Comiskey, curator of Ireland’s 2007 entry, admitted that it was ‘ridiculous’ that Ireland had not participated till then, but he was hopeful that participation would improve future documentation of Irish stage design: ‘It is hard for people to keep that model box if they have no reason to keep it. PQ will give their documentation a purpose, a reason to keep their material’ (qtd. in Keating 2007). Key archival collections such as the ‘Pike Theatre Papers’ at Trinity College Dublin, ‘The Dublin Gate Theatre Papers 1928-1979’ at the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University, and the Abbey Theatre Digital Archive at the National University of Ireland, Galway, all help to resource the composition of stage design histories, even though scenographic remains are scattered across a range of collections. In spite of the fact that many Irish productions have not left ‘a publically documented legacy’ (McMullan