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Tue 06 Jun 2007All the world's a set designIreland's first entry to the Prague Quadrennial, the international showcase for theatre design, should launch Irish set and lighting designers onto the world stage, writes Sara KeatingA series of striking images line the temporary walls of the Pier A prefab at Dublin airport. These are photographs of Arabic women dancing and ululating in a primal tribal ritual, of men and women trapped in telephone boxes, of a young girl with a gun in her hand, eye-balling the camera quizzically. On the rush to and from the runway, scanned by the harried hurrying eye, these photographs might be social documents, anthropological records, or advertisements, but one of the most arresting photographs contains a key clue. Five painted faces, with grimaces shadowed around their smiles, are frozen between the heavy velvet drapes of a theatre's curtain: they are players on the painted Irish stage.