The 59th year of the Dublin Theatre Festival was announced Tuesday in Dublin, and the world’s oldest theatre festival, shows no signs of slowing down.
This might explain why, in conversation, its artistic director Willie White reached so frequently for rejuvenating and extending metaphors – from the twin desires to commemorate the past while also looking towards the future, or explaining the festival’s increased capacities with reference to dextrous-sounding yoga manoeuvres. (White, a serial enthusiast across multiple disciplines, had just completed something called “a hero course”).
“For me, it’s all about forward momentum,” he said, while discussing a programme of 28 productions, almost half of them world premieres, drawn from Ireland and throughout the world. It represented a diversity of performance styles, as well as the diversity of the artists pursuing them.
This year's festival will open with a riotous take on Shakespeare's comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream, from the UK's Lyric Hammersmith and Filter Theatre, at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre – a 2,000-seat venue whose immensity reflects the festival's ambition to deliver an artistically credible good-night-out to the largest audience possible.
It also builds on White's mission to promote the ambitions of Irish theatre makers, returning Corn Exchange to the Gaiety's stage with Michael West and Annie Ryan's new contemporary version of Chekhov's The Seagull, while celebrating Opera Theatre Company's 30th anniversary with Roddy Doyle's new translation of Mozart's Don Giovanni at the Gaiety.
It also sees the premiere of choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan's first new work in five years, an Irish take on Swan Lake/Loch na hEala, inspired by the story, not the ballet. Elsewhere are hotly anticipated new works from Irish contemporary theatre makers Anu and Coiscéim (These Rooms), Brokentalkers (Circus Animals Desertion) and THEATREclub (IT's Not Over), each responding to ideas of history and nationhood during the centenary of 1916.
Range of forms
"You look at this as a theatre festival with opera, experimental opera, performance art, drama, experimental theatre, documentary theatre - it's all fine by me," said White. That range of forms also appears to be fine with the festival's audiences. Over four years, the DTF programme has widened, despite diminished sponsorship, to include bigger venues and a greater reliance on the work of Irish companies. In that time, the festival has cleared a substantial deficit and last year reported an operating surplus of €100,000.
The work on offer, however, isn’t any cheerier: THEATREclub’s production is a four-and-a-half-hour meditation on the inheritance of Republican paramilitarism (with an onstage bar for the audience). Meanwhile, the “poetic and dystopian” postdramatic theatre of Wishful Beginning, from Norway’s Verk Produksjoner, is one part of a Nordic strand of work at this year’s three-week festival.
The Abbey, criticised late last year for the gender inequality of its programming, contributes a new “musical play” by Frank McGuinness, Donegal, directed by Conall Morrison, with a new non-musical play by Carmel Winters, the Remains of Masie Duggan, in the Peacock, directed by Ellen McDougall.
The festival’s own programming decisions, with more women directors represented than men, on the city’s main stages, helps to correct the balance. The Gate Theatre, less so, where Ethan McSweeney returns to direct The Father, in Christopher Hampton’s translation of French playwright Florian Zeller’s black comedy, while the theatre’s outgoing artistic director Michael Colgan, reignites his directorial career with a stage adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s First Love, with Barry McGovern - a Gate production staged in the O’Reilly Theatre.
“The job of the festival is to make a difference,” said White. Some of this will take the form of artistic responses to global conflicts, other examples will involve introducing artists and audiences to reinvigorated classics or new trends in international contemporary practice, still more of it lies in encouraging Irish artists to dream big for the large international platform the festival provides.
“If you’re doing a twist you can fill your lungs full of air,” White explained to a mystified listener, “and then you can twist a bit more.”
“The theatre festival is bigger now than it was in 1957. You sometimes feel that theatre is on the back foot, but actually it’s pretty hardy. I’m always trying to move the conversation forward: fill the ribs with air, turn around, twist…”.
The festival takes place from Sep 29 - Oct 16. Finding something to suit all possible tastes will not be a stretch.
