Nicholas Johnson [NJ]: First, thank you so much for speaking with us about your design practice. For our readers, it would be helpful if you would open by talking a little bit about your career, just to position the stages you have gone through to become a working artist in the contemporary Irish and international theatre. What does that trajectory look like so far, at the point you find yourself in your practice?

Aedin Cosgrove [AC]: Well, I actually haven't ever done anything else. Gavin Quinn and I set up Pan Pan as a partnership company straight after college. In order to fund the work, of course, I did lots of other small jobs. But it's essentially my all – all my working has been in the theatre. Occasionally I would get paid for lighting – it was easier to be paid as a lighting designer then, even while you were quite young and not very good! The company was just: ‘find some money, put something on’ for a long time.

NJ: Was your focus, even from education forward, always on design and scenography, mainly the visual elements? How do you see design linked to the other art forms that are involved in making theatre work, and do you accept the role of ‘designer’ as a title in and of itself, or do you have another way of thinking about it?

AC: It was 100 per cent collaborative between Gavin and me, with the ideas for performance influencing and speaking to the scenography. At the time he was more interested in working with the actors, and I was more interested in making the scenography concrete and doing the sort of work that makes that happen. But we didn't have strict lines – the two things were always together, sort of like in an amateur way, when you’re working on student projects, and also because it is 100 per cent collaborative. We were sure about the idea that Pan Pan should be a different theatre experience than what was happening in other companies that we were seeing: we wanted to have our own voice, so we fell into the roles of ‘you work with the actors, because you have the words and skills for that, and I’ll work with the scenography’.