NIALL MCKEEVER

TOSCA  - Northern Ireland Opera at Grand Opera House, Belfast 2023

"When you get the right team of creative artists and performers, what can be achieved in a tough environment is something that just blows one away. What Menzies has done here is remarkable for its ambition, staging, production and casting. One of the greatest successes was Niall McKeever's set..."

Leighton Jones - Bachtrack ★★★★☆

"Atmospherically lit by Ciarán Bagnall, Niall McKeever's imposing set accommodated intimacy and grandeur, the cusp of a church cupola, on the interior of which Cavaradossi is painting a portrait of Jesus, transforming to a cloud-shrouded vortex into which Tosca hurls herself from a receding scaffold bridge".

Michael Lee - Goldenplec ★★★★★

INTO THE WOODS - His Majesty's Theatre, Perth 2023

"This WA Opera production of Northern Ireland Opera’s 2022 staging, with original director Cameron Menzies on board, is a total triumph. The ingenious work of set and costume designer Niall McKeever, lighting designer Kevin Treacy and sound effects designer Russell Goldsmith is key to its success, creating a world that is as psychologically nuanced as it is magical"

Will Yeoman - Limelight ★★★★1/2

"The mind-boggling rich symbolism of Sondheim and Lapine’s creation is beautifully enhanced by Northern Ireland Opera’s justly celebrated production of Into the Woods, which has been imported intact, right down to Niall McKeever’s breathtaking abstracted primitivist set, a huge crown of felled trees with a hole in the middle for the moon to poke through."

Mark Naglazas - Sydney Morning Heard ★★★★1/2

"Niall McKeever’s set is a work of art itself. As we wait for the show to start, the curtain is open, revealing a large and spiky circular spiral encasing a long staircase, which is frequently used to represent the ominous woods, the castle throne room, and various characters’ houses...McKeever is also behind the design of the jaw-dropping costumes"

Emma Jayakumar - Seesaw 

THE DRY HOUSE - Marylebone Theatre, 2023

"There is excellent work from designer Niall McKeever, who sets the action in a meticulously bleak living room "

Julia Rank - WhatsOnStage ★★★★☆

"The first thing that stands out of Eugene O’Hare’s powerful play, The Dry House, is the set...the environs are a Samuel Beckett-like capsule that contains a multitude of emotions and entanglements a visible interior/exterior prison"

Kevin Quinn - TheatreNews ★★★★★

YELLOWMAN - Orange Tree Theatre, 2022

"As sex enters the relationship in both happy and unsettling ways, the cracks between the wooden floorboards in Niall McKeever’s set glow beneath them with pink or a sick green. Just below that floor, a mess of debris is visible, which is, thematically, where the play heads. Yellowman is painful and pessimistic, but two decades after it first appeared, it’s much more than just compelling in Page’s production: it’s undeniable"

Frey Kwa Hawking - The Stage ★★★★★

LA TRAVIATA - Northern Ireland Opera at Grand Opera House, Belfast 2022

"Under a traditional guise, the designs had sharp modern detail, with couture gowns by Linda Britten for Violetta and Flora (Margaret Bridge) and an elegant salon set by Niall McKeever. Suspended overhead were ominous, Rodinesque sculptures, apocalyptic and winged"

Fiona Maddocks - The Observer ★★★★★

"Two powerful visual images sum up Northern Ireland Opera’s sumptuous new version of Verdi’s La Traviata. The first is the publicity image: a delicate, perfectly formed white camellia, its tender heart pierced and bleeding. The second comprises the towering, contorted formations dominating Niall McKeever’s spectacular black-and-white set. They are reminiscent of Maggi Hambling’s controversial sculpture of the 18th-century feminist and writer Mary Wollstonecraft, whose plinth is inscribed with her famous words: “I do not wish women to have power over men but over themselves"

Jane Coyle - The Stage ★★★★☆

INTO THE WOODS - Northern Ireland Opera at Lyric Theatre, Belfast 2022

"It’s staged in and around a stunning set by Niall McKeever: logs and ladders criss-crossing high above two staircases to form receding rings, as if leading deep into the subconscious. It suggests that the “woods” of the title aren’t only a place where dangerous urges come to the fore, but also a moral maze where (unlike in the original fairytales) the characters are confronted with the often disastrous consequences of what they wish for"

Richard Morrison - The Times ★★★★

"Capturing that sense of movement is scenographer Niall McKeever’s fabulous set. Dominating the stage of the Lyric is the enormous fractal vortex that pulls you into the show – like you’re being compelled through a dark forest path or swallowed down the belly of a wolf. It also mirrors the turbulent thoughts circling the minds of these ever-troubled characters. Kudos too to McKeever for the costume design, which somehow manages to encompass everything from greasy denim and kitchen-sink realism to Highland dress and Arthur"

Craig Glenday - Musical Theatre Review ★★★★★ 

STATEMENTS AFTER AN ARREST UNDER THE IMMORALITY ACT - Orange Tree Theatre, 2021

"This is not an idealised full-bloom romance but one beginning to spiral. Page, directing as the winner of the JMK Award, intelligently utilises McKeever’s striking set which becomes like a borehole, with the characters on opposite sides, emphasising the distance between their communities and Philander’s disquiet at taking her water while his district suffers from drought"

Chris Weigand - The Guardian ★★★★☆

"Niall McKeever’s set is a concave, black hole-esque vortex leaving a precarious outer playing space for the actors to navigate. Page uses the set’s outer and inner spaces to illustrate moments of distance or intimacy between Frieda and Errol. The circular formation creates a sense of the magnetic force between the lovers"

Nikita Karia - The Stage ★★★★☆

"It’s a staging of suede-like softness and shadow, glinting with mineral light over that circular pit the lovers leap in and out of, circle slowly, confront each other across its chasm. No it’s not a pit they’ve dug for themselves, you think, till you wonder. That pit as just described is startlingly simple, designed by Niall McKeever, whose set for This Beautiful Future at Jermyn Street – still running – shows his power with condensed symbolism. It’s beautifully sculpted too in those mostly shadowy glints in Rajiv Pattani’s lighting which takes on a terrible agency"

Simon Jenner - Fringe Review 

 "The play begins with sensuous intimacy and ends by confronting the Heavens; that’s its trajectory, from the small and particular and local to an anger that is literally cosmic. And then in a glorious final moment there was a beautiful moving projection turning it into a kind of vortex, like a mathematical model of a black hole. This came at the moment of the most raging despair and I swear I felt like we were all being sucked into it. The play ended as it began, with a warning not to fall into the darkness"

Dan Rebellato