The Spirit of Annie Ross
Gate Theatre
October 5th-9th and 11th-16th, 8 p.m.
`I think I am attracted to the idea of taking disparate people and putting them in one place so that the outward veneer has to crack. There is this ongoing theme in my work that everyone presents a mask behind which they hide." Bernard Farrell's new play for the Gate, The Spirit of Annie Ross, seems to revisit The Last Apache Reunion and even I Do Not Like Thee, Dr Fell, in that a group is locked up in a room and lets loose its demons: "Some things I touched on in previous plays are coming together now," says Farrell.
In Annie Ross, the group agrees to lock itself up in what many think is a haunted house as a charity challenge. Will Annie Ross appear, or won't she? It seems she'd be a welcome guest by comparison with some of the other ghosts around: "They are all themselves haunted by their past". The play is directed by Ben Barnes, who has a long association with Farrell's work.
Dolly West's Kitchen
Abbey Theatre
October 6th-9th and October 11th - November 20th, 8 p.m.; festival matinees, October 9th and October 16th, 2.30 p.m.
An American GI stumbles into Dolly West's kitchen in Buncrana, Co Donegal during the second World War. The GI brings with him America, and with that, says the director of Frank Mc Guinness's new play, "sexuality, modernity". With his war-time role, he throws into relief the question of the recent partition of Ireland, which has summarily shorn Buncrana from her Derry hinterland. The sudden clash with modernity and the raw wounds of Partition are themes for our times, of course, and Mason stresses: "It's not a history play. It's about us, now."
Most of all, it seems it's a play about relationships. "The subtitle is Tough Love," says Mason. "The war is also metaphorical." He goes on: "There are relationships of a great many types. Straight, gay, married, men, women. It's about trying to have a life which has any fulfilment in it and finally coming through to some kind of uneasy truce."
Boomtown: A City Comedy
Meeting House Square, Temple Bar
October 9th-16th, 8 p.m.
`It's hard," says Declan Hughes, "to satirise a society where there's a magazine called Spend which tells us what Ronan Keating spends his money on." Struggling with the challenge of the surrealism that is now has been, says Hughes, "a lot of fun", but he and his co-writers Pom Boyd and Arthur Riordan haven't tried to write the ultimate satire of our times. What Boomtown is not, says Hughes, is "a survey of what we are and where we are". It's somewhere between a city comedy, on the lines of Bartholomew Fair, and a farce, and it is set in 1979 in the grunge-y Temple Bar at the time of the Pope's visit, and in 1999, in the same place which is now entirely taken over by one, huge pub. The play will be set in a temporary venue, "with the atmosphere of an Elizabethan theatre". Hughes asks me to mention that there is heating.
The Map-Maker's Sorrow
Peacock Theatre
October 4th-9th and October 11th - November 6th, 8.15 p.m.; festival matinees: October 9th and 16th, 2.45 p.m.
Chris Lee, who burst on the scene with The Electrocution of Children last year, describes The Map-Maker's Sorrow, his new play, as being about "map-making and death". An estranged couple, grieving the suicide of their son, are desperately trying to make new maps for themselves in a world in which, says Lee, "the politics of space are changing. Borders are changing - in particular that line on the map in Northern Ireland - and there's a sense in which identities are invented, imagined". On one level, the play is about "the nature of space in the late 20th century". On another, it's about a woman who can't marry her "politically progressive" professional life with her hopeless personal life: "She is struggling to marry into a unity what she does with her head and with her heart." Yes, it's ambitious, he agrees, cutting across time "and space itself". And informed by his work in London as a psychiatric social worker? "It does have an impact that I'm surrounded by mad people."
The Plains of Enna
Tivoli Theatre
October 12th-16th, 8 p.m.; matinee, October 16th, 3 p.m.
Pat Kinevane, the most famous person from Cobh in this department of the newspaper, is best known as an actor with twin talents for menace and surreal comedy. It looks like he has brought these qualities to The Plains of Enna, which Fishamble, the company which produced his play The Nun's Wood last year, is presenting for the festival. It has grown out of Kinevane's fascination with Greek myth, out of his experience of his home town, and out of the stories his parents have relayed to him about life before he was conscious: "It seems to me that 1967 was still quite an innocent time in the country in Ireland," he says.
"Innocent?" He has peopled his rural town with two small families who hate each other's guts, and events soon plunge from love to betrayal and revenge. Yes, says Kinevane, he loves John B. Keane and sees him as an influence - he loves Friel, Murphy, McGuinness too - but Milton and Tennyson were more potent influences on this work.
The Three Legged Fool
Andrews Lane Studio
September 27th-October 2nd, 8.15 p.m.
They wowed us at the Fringe a couple of years ago with their clever translation of Beckett's Molloy for the stage. Now Gare St Lazare, possibly the only Irish theatre company based in France, has turned itself to a new play by Anthony Ryan, about three winos in a squat "weaving a web of words" as they compete for a girl. Not Beckett, perhaps, but surely Beckettian.
Xaviers(Fringe)
City Arts Centre
September 29th-October 9th, 8 p.m.
This young Drogheda company's show for last year's festival, Love is the Drug, presented a genuinely fresh look at girl/boy relationships in Ireland today. Xaviers, devised in association with the City Arts Centre, looks at community art, and there should be some home truths in the play as it traces the experience of two community artists, one in flight from her disadvantaged past, the other in flight from his advantaged one.
