A Friday late late show to go out for

ArtScape:Dublin's museums, galleries, theatres, libraries, historic houses, cathedrals, artists' studios and cultural centres are hoping you'll stay in town late after work or college next Friday, or come in when your day winds down, to feast on the city's Culture Night, when a huge range of places that normally shut up shop at the end of the day stay open for visitors.

This will be the second time that Dublin's cultural institutions have taken part in this huge collective initiative, with 82 organisations and 100 events running until 10pm. None of it will cost visitors a penny - they can traipse all over the city to free events and venues on free shuttle buses (courtesy of Dublin Bus).

The evening was a big success last year, and one thing it surely highlights is that opening hours are too short and that closing the doors when many people are just starting their leisure time cuts off the possibility of enjoying many of the city's cultural offerings. There's late-night shopping every week, so why not late-night culture too? (And free shuttle buses daily around the city centre?)

Gráinne Millar, head of cultural development at Temple Bar Cultural Trust (TBCT), which has organised Culture Night, says it "begins to address the issue of extended opening hours, which is a major obstacle in preventing people from enjoying and accessing the cultural life of the city".

"The success of culture nights across Europe," adds Millar, "demonstrates how Culture Night Dublin has the potential to also make a significant contribution to cultural tourism and enhance the international image and profile of Dublin and Ireland as a creative place. The challenge of increasing access to the arts, later opening hours and economic benefits of culture are all addressed by the Culture Night initiative."

It's been quite an organisational challenge to co-ordinate late-night opening, tours, talks, exhibitions, concerts, films, workshops and indoor and outdoor performances for next Friday's event, which starts at 5pm.

To help people navigate Dublin's cultural life by night, TBCT has designated a number of "cultural quarters" where there will be street entertainers and volunteers offering assistance.

www.culturenight.ie

Operatic silence

There has been a surprising silence from Wexford Festival Opera in the weeks following the departure of its chief executive, Michael Hunt, writes Michael Dervan. Hunt's forced removal, achieved only after a spat in the High Court, was agreed on undisclosed terms on July 2nd, though Hunt had been put on notice about it some time before the start of the 2007 festival at the end of May. The surprise is that, although the festival board made a decision that entailed hiring a new chief executive some months ago, it has still not advertised the post.

The challenges the festival faces are unprecedented. It needs to complete the building of its new €33 million home, then make sure the venue works as planned, before running a formal opening event in September 2008 and steering a first festival through rehearsals for an opening night on October 16th.

On top of all of that, it needs to prepare its first year-round schedule of events in a theatre that the taxpayer has supported to the tune of €26 million. It is not at all clear what the implications of Hunt's departure are for plans to secure both a theatre company and a dance company in residence at the new venue.

Word in Wexford has always been that the festival's call on Arts Council funding would increase rather than decrease when the new theatre is up and running. Yes, there will be a bigger auditorium, and the 35 per cent increase in seating capacity will guarantee greater box-office takings, but a bigger stage means higher production costs and a bigger orchestra pit means more musicians to be paid.

Just days before agreement was reached with Hunt, the Arts Council revealed that its 2008 revenue grant to the festival would amount to €1,189,100. That's an increase of 3.4 per cent on 2007, when Wexford also received a major capital allocation of €850,000 to help with the mounting of last June's festival at Johnstown Castle.

It's hard to see how Wexford can possibly hope to deliver its first festival in its new theatre on an Arts Council grant that, when inflation is taken into account and the capital allocation is discounted, is lower in real terms than the support it has received this year. And don't forget, there's still the last few million to be raised for the new building, and the money to be found for the costs of Hunt and the High Court.

One of the Arts Council's declared goals is "the establishment of a new pattern of opera provision along the lines recommended by the Opera Working Group in 2005". But the council continues to balk at the multimillion-euro funding increases the group recommended. It was promised that 2008 would be the year when some of the more urgent needs of Ireland's grossly under-funded opera companies would be met. However, the decisions announced in June have postponed this prospect once again. Opera would surely not be suffering like this if former minister for the arts John O'Donoghue had not managed the exceptional PR feat of keeping the arts community sweet while shaving a cool €19 million off the Arts Council funding promised by the Fianna Fáil/Progressive Democrats 2002 programme for government.

Meanwhile, Wexford's delay in appointing a chief executive will obviously save a certain amount of money for a body that's still smarting from its settlement with Hunt. But the absence of a chief executive will surely also have an impact on the management of the building project and the planning of out-of-festival activities which are not covered by the brief of artistic director David Agler. Could it even be possible that the necessary resources simply won't be available to mount the planned opening festival of Rimsky-Korsakov's Snow Maiden, Richard Rodney Bennett's Mines of Sulphur and Pedrotti's Tutti in maschera?

The festival may need to call again on the skills and connections that secured the €26 million from government in the first place.

• One Culture Night event next Friday, a free performance by the world-renowned Tomás Gubitsch Quintet (Powerscourt Town Centre, 8pm), is also part of Dublin's first Argentinian Week of Culture, from September 12th to 18th.

The best of contemporary Argentinian music, literature and film features in a programme curated by poet and arts editor Jorge Fondebrider along with Sinéad Mac Aodha, director of Ireland Literature Exchange. The free talks and lectures on Argentinian literature, history and politics include one by Fondebrider on Argentinian poetry (Instituto Cervantes, September 12th), while author and diplomat Guillermo Gasío talks about 20th-century Argentinian history (Ilac library, September 13th, and UCD School of Languages, Literatures and Film, September 17th). There's also Argentinian film at Filmbase and a bilingual poetry reading (Unitarian Church, September 18th) where Fondebrider and Gerardo Gambolini will be joined by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Gerard Smyth and Peter Sirr. (See also Loose Leaves, W12.)

• A posse of comics descended on the Irish Writers' Centre this week to mark the publication of comedy writer Karl MacDermott's novel, The Creative Lower Being (see W6). Ardal O'Hanlon, fresh from a stand-up show at the Olympia (the first of the Bulmers International Comedy Festival), which was being filmed for a live DVD, launched what he described as a "defiant, dignified and exquisitely written moan, a tale of suffering and a response to a society evolving without him", but which he said was "effortlessly and infuriatingly funny". MacDermott himself described his novel as possibly "needy, nerdy lit".

• CoisCéim's Creative Steps programme, a dance theatre group for 15- to 25-year-olds, will be holding auditions on Sunday, September 16th, at CoisCéim Studio, 14 Sackville Place, Dublin, 2-6pm. The workshop audition includes a dance class, and successful participants will work with choreographer Muirne Bloomer during the autumn to create a new piece for 2008.

• Galway theatre collective Dragonfly is just back on a high from the New York International Fringe Festival, where Siobhan Donnellan picked up the Outstanding Actor Award for her role in its production, Married to the Sea. The show runs from Monday at the T36 venue in Parnell Square) as part of the Dublin Fringe Festival.