THOSE visiting the Octagon theatre on a regular basis could be forgiven for thinking they had turned up at the wrong place.

For Richard Foxton, who has just designed his 50th set for the theatre, has used every trick in the book to accommodate unusual settings, represent different locations and change the appearance of the Octagon stage over the past 12 years.

Long, short, wide or narrow, stages with two storeys or more, or featuring whole houses, half-buried actresses and melting walls - he has done the lot.

Richard's first design at the Octagon was for Keith Waterhouse's Billy Liar in 1993 and by the end of 2001 he had worked on 47 productions.

Finally, four years later he has reached the half-century mark with the current run of Farnworth-born playwright Jim Cartwright's Eight Miles High. And his set has already attracted a lot of positive attention.

Richard, worked as assistant designer at Contact in Manchester before joining the Octagon as resident designer in 1993. He lists Billy Liar; Blood Wedding (1994); Midsummer Night's Dream (1995); Dancing At Lughnasa (1996); Happy Days and The Resurrectionists (1998); Blythe Spirit (2002) and the current Eight Miles High, which runs until July 2, among his highlights.

The Bolton designer said: "People think it must be boring because I have done 50 shows, but it's not - the Octagon stage is nice because it is a very adaptable space. You can inhabit the whole building and get quite a mix of ideas for other shows when you are working on a particular set.

"I hadn't had much experience of designing my own stages before I came here and suddenly I was doing seven or eight shows a year."

One of Richard's most unusual designs was for Derby Day in 1994 - one of the few times he has used a traverse stage.

"The audience were on the other side of the houses, twitching curtains in the upstairs windows and sitting on cushions on the pavements outside," he said.

He also enjoyed the challenge of designing sets in the town hall when the Octagon closed for refurbishment in 1997.

"We did a couple in there and it was quite exciting because we had to build a stage from scratch."

By the time of the Wizard of Oz in 1998, the Octagon was so poor it had to use puppets instead of children to play the munchkins and by the next year the theatre had closed, its future in serious doubt.

One of the most unusual and difficult challenges Richard has faced was in a production of Terry Johnson's Hysteria. "The play is a fictional account of when Salvador Dali met Sigmund Freud, who was heavily sedated at the time due to having cancer of the jaw.

"It was quite a surreal production as we had to pull out all the tricks that go into portraying melting walls and phones and stretching doors," he said.

Just before what turned out to be its temporary closure, the theatre pulled out all the stops for what it believed to be its final show, 1999's production of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest.

"We got out all our favourite props and clothes. It was nice to go out with something fun, but the next season it transpired that we were going to reopen and everything was all right."

These days Richard works all over the country, rather than solely as the Octagon's resident designer, and says: "The 50th production has been a long time coming. I got up to 40 in 2000 and was up to 47 by 2002, so it has been quite a long wait.

"These days theatres don't really have resident designers and I work all over. I have been doing quite a lot of work with the Hull Truck Company and I'm doing Brassed Off in Oldham, but hopefully there will be more to come at the Octagon.

"Eight Miles High has been a pleasure to work on and people seem to be really enjoying it. I just had to work out a good way of utilising the stage as I knew the musical director Howard Gay would want a big space for the band, but it's worked out really well," he added.