03:16 PM CDT on Monday, June 7, 2004

By TOM SIME / The Dallas Morning News

Robin Armstrong is both director and costume designer for Theatre Britain's The Day After the Fair. That looks, at first glance, like an unusual combination of talents, especially when you consider that Ms. Armstrong is also a fight choreographer – she recently designed the domestic brawl in WingSpan Theatre Company's Marriage Play – and a writer.

But director-designers are not uncommon, she says. "The most famous one is Julie Taymor, of course," she notes, mentioning the director and designer of The Lion King. Locally, she cites directors Regan Adair (who also acts and designs costumes for some shows) and Bruce Coleman (acting, sets and costumes).

The Day After the Fair is based on Thomas Hardy's story On the Western Circuit, in which an upper-class Englishwoman (Sue Birch) writes love letters for her illiterate maid (Lauren N. Goode) and in the process falls in love with the maid's seducer (Jack Birdwell).

The emotions run high, from elation to tragedy, but Ms. Armstrong says that "the undergarments make the show."

It's set in the Victorian age, and the women in the cast "all spend between 10 and 15 minutes each night just getting into their underclothes. These include period shoes, stockings, shift, corset, petticoat and bustle," says Ms. Armstrong.

"Normally these garments, plus the outer clothes, of course, wouldn't cause problems in the mild spring of Salisbury in the U.K.," she says. But in the rehearsal space, a private hangar in the Addison Airport, "the residual heat from a Texas day can be a little overwhelming. ... So far we've only had two fainting spells – not bad, really. It was tempting to put the men in corsets as well, but they'll get theirs when the wool frock coats go on."

E-mail tsime@dallasnews.com

The Day After the Fair

Opens Thursday at 8 p.m. and continues through June 27 at Trinity River Arts Center, 2600 Stemmons at Motor, Ste. 180. $15. 972-490-4202 or go to www.theatre-britain.com.