`So you're moving towards breaking with the Dublin Theatre Festival, then?" "Absolutely." Ali Curran, director of the Dublin Fringe Festival spoke unambiguously this week about her vision for the event. No longer will it just be a theatre festival; it will be an arts festival with theatre at its core. "We will never be Edinburgh, but I think we have the opportunity in Dublin to create a showpiece of independent work in every discipline," she said. This is appropriate, she believes, in the context of the "cross-fertilisation" of theatre with other art forms.
This year the festival, which runs from September 27th until October 16th, will open with a dance programme. The Tivoli Theatre will host Dame de Pic by Karine Ponties (Belgium); Sol Pico's Love is Fastic (Spain); Juan Benitez and Carmelo Fernandez's Do Hens Think? (Spain); and Interrupted Light by Ireland's Liz Roche. The work has been selected by Aerowaves, a panel of European dance experts who meet every year to select a programme of 10 works. Dance Theatre of Ireland will perform its Soul Survivor, and Fabulous Beast will present a new work commissioned by the festival to be shown at Tallaght Civic Theatre.
There will be a Dublin Film Fringe at the IFC, which will celebrate "alternative" US film-making from the 1950s to the 1990s, including work by Andy Warhol, Jonas Mekas and Kenneth Anger. A series of Irish features includes John Carney and Tom Hall's Park, and there is a programme of previously unseen Irish shorts. Workshops on various aspects of film production will be free and open to all. Curran points out that the Dublin Film Festival and the Fleadh act as shop windows for film programmers; this festival will have a different focus.
The Carrolls Comedy Club will run again, featuring comedians such as Owen O'Neill and Jason Byrne. But there will be some theatre too. Mainstream by red-hot new Scottish playwright David Grieg will be presented by Suspect Culture; Shibboleth (Belfast) will join forces with Sinequanon (Italy) to present a version of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment; Kaos Theatre (UK) will present its anarchic version of The Importance of Being Earnest (with leopard-print trousers and cocaine-snorting grandes dames). Irish companies Bedrock and Meridian will premiere new work, The Night Before the Forest by Bernard Marie Koltes and Johnny Hanrahan's version of The Mistress of Silence, respectively. This year should mark an interesting departure for the Fringe, then. But the fascination with what's "alternative", "underground", and "independent" could become limiting and redundant in itself, if not handled carefully.
John Hurt is already rehearsing at the Gate for the title role in Krapp's Last Tape at the Beckett Festival in the Barbican, London. The festival, which was a huge success at the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1991, will run at the Barbican from September 1st to 18th. The President, Mrs McAleese, will officially open the festival, and a gala production of Waiting for Godot will follow.
Many original cast members will play in London, but Hurt is among the distinguished newcomers. Others include Niall Buggy, Stephen Brennan, Gerard McSorley, Phelim Drew, Ali White, Ingrid Craigie, Pat Kinevane and John Olohan. An interesting series of talks will run in tandem with the festival, including Beckett the Playwright, (Mel Gussow as chair, Tom Stoppard, Edward Albee, Jim Sheridan); Beckett - a Great Man to Have a Guinness With (John Peter as chair, Sir Peter Hall); Beckett and Joyce (Anthony Cronin); Beckett and Irish Theatre (Michael Billington as chair, Gerry Dukes, Barry McGovern, Anna McMullan); Beckett and Women (Michael Billington as chair, Mary Bryden, Lynda Ben-Zvi, Katharine Worth); Beckett and the Irish Voice (John Banville).
The handsome 18th-century Gate facade is currently being cleaned and a little iron peacock's tail has been discovered and is now to be granted a new head. The rickety 20th-century canopy is being replaced by a new one designed by Scott Tallon Walker, and a redesign of the entrance stairway will make it wider and more inviting.
For further information, phone 01-8729016
Although the leaflet detailing programme highlights of the Belfast Festival contains an item headed: "A message from the Festival Director - Robert Agnew", Agnew assures me that he is still executive director and has not got a new title. The post of programme director, vacant since last September, has still not been filled, and so Agnew and the festival staff have programmed this year's event. Why has the post not been advertised? "It is a university position," says Agnew. "I'm afraid universities don't always move as fast as you and I would want them to."
`Murphy's play teeters on the tightrope between comedy and tragedy, and like a drunk telling tales in a bar, spins off on all sorts of tangents. But for all its irritations, it has a cumulative power that is underlined by Patrick Mason's exquisitely acted, spare production and a bigness of vision that is sometimes thrilling."
This is how the Guardian's Lyn Gardner describes the Abbey production of Tom Murphy's The Wake which opened on Monday at the King's Theatre, Edinburgh, as part of the Edinburgh Festival. The show has nearly sold out, and the reviews which appeared yesterday will surely sell off the stragglers.
Joyce McMillan of the Scotsman argues that Irish drama is lent power by the fact that its development has been so fast - three centuries of industrialisation and post-industrialisation concertinaed into the space of one life-time. She sees Murphy's story of a woman, Vera, who comes home to Ireland when she inherits a hotel and has to ward off the pack of hounds which is her family, as an example of this.
"Patrick Mason's production will be a shade slow and muted for some," she writes. "In the big space of the King's Theatre it could perhaps use a little more speed and dynamism. But it's almost impossible to fault for the intelligence and deep feeling with which it grasps the play's big themes, for its effortless shifts between easy naturalism and Gogol-like satire and for its infinite shades of language . . ." Jane Brennan's performance as Vera is described as "unforgettable", Olwen Fouere is "superb" as her sister, but it is for ensemble acting that McMillan really applauds the production.
Other responses are more mixed. The Express's Robert Gore-Langton writes that the play is "top-drawer stuff" even if it "never quite convinces you", and the Herald's Keith Bruce writes: "There is much in it that is difficult to like, but equally much that is hard to fault".
Email: frontrow@irish-times.ie
