Audio Description
Isaac O'Brien
Isaac O’Brien is a multidisciplinary designer from Northern Ireland, based in London and Belfast. He trained at the Liverpool Institute for Performing arts with a BA in Theatre and Performance design.
Inquisitive and playful, he is passionate about the power of storytelling through performance to pique an audiences’ curiosity about themselves and the world around them and the possibility for this curiosity to open dialogue and lead to positive societal change, a goal he inherited from the theatre scene he grew up around. It is this same curiosity and sense of play that guides his highly conceptual approach to is work.
Isaac’s broad experience in all facets of performance design, including set, costume, lighting and sound, all collate to inform his adventurous and highly collaborative approach to his varied practice.
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Common
by DC Moore
Paul McCartney Auditorium, Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts
February 2025
• Director: Nickie-Miles Wildin
• Set Designer and Lead Scenic Artist: Isaac O’Brien
• Costumer Designer: Poppy Aindow
• Assistant Set Designer: Daniel Gidden
• Lighting Designer: Sam Bailey
• Sound Design: Patch Middleton
• Photographer: Andrew AB
A darkly comic play about the enclosure of land in England in the early 19th century, and the resulting conflict on a small rural town. The play follows the charming, manipulative character of Mary as she deceives and double crosses her way through historical drama, religion, her own past, future and folk horror.
Aunty
by Kae Tempest
Based on Philoctetes by Sophocles
Speculative design for Everyman Theatre, Liverpool
• Director: Nick Bagnall
• Set and Costume Designer: Isaac O’Brien
A modern retelling of the play Philoctetes by Sophocles. It centres around two soldiers attempting to retrieve the legendary soldier Philoctetes from his exile on an island populated by rubbish, and rejoin the Trojan war. Philoctetes is torn between his desire for revenge, escape and to remain separate from the horrors of war and so called “civilisation”.
Emilia
by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm
Speculative costume design for Unity 2, Unity Theatre Liverpool
2022
• Director: Francesca Goodridge
• Set and Costume Designer: Isaac O’Brien
A fictionalised play chronicling the life of Emilia Lanier, a historical figure who was one of the first women to have their writing published in England, and was rumoured to have been the Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Emilia struggles to have her voice heard as she navigates her life and work in the face of prejudice and opposition.
