“Given recent events in Ireland, we hope our festival can play its part in promoting community, solidarity and resistance,” says Willie White, the head of Dublin Theatre Festival, announcing its line-up of Irish and international theatre this autumn. In this year’s festival, which runs from September 26th to October 13th, “we absolutely aim to engage and entertain – but with a purpose, inviting audiences to think and feel together”.
Officially opening the festival is Teac Damsa’s joyful new show, Nobodaddy, music and dance rooted in Corca Dhuibhne and created by Michael Keegan-Dolan’s team, following successes including Swan Lake/Loch na hEala and Mám.
With more than 30 productions, featuring new and familiar faces, the festival promises stories about family, identity, migration, climate, colonial legacies and conflict and its resolution. Irish work includes premieres of new plays by Ross Dungan, Kate Heffernan, Caitlin Magnall-Kearns, Amy Kidd and Dee Roycroft, making festival writing debuts. Its 10 for 10 scheme continues, with 10 per cent of tickets for €10 for under-30s, the unwaged and freelance arts workers.
- Gare St Lazare Ireland has devised work incorporating a score and visual art, taking Beckett’s character Belacqua on a journey to the source in Dante, discovering how Melville’s character Bartleby travels a similar road.
- Anu Productions presents Starjazzer (inspired by Seán O’Casey’s story), an urgent, personal portrait of Dublin at a crossroads of past and present, exploring grief, sexuality and hope.
- Dream Factory, a modern legend about overconsumption and environmental collapse in the playful comedic style of Lords of Strut, is at the Civic in Tallaght, as is Dermot Bolger’s Home, Boys, Home, completing a trilogy written 15 years apart, concerning three friends, emigrants abroad now returned to Ireland.
- 0800 Cupid from Thisispopbaby is a “nightlife gatecrash, raucous cabaret and musical extravaganza” with Emer Dineen, at Project Arts Centre, where Dee Roycroft’s Amelia is a “solarpunk play” about birds, migration and leaving home, set in an offline future.
- Once Off Productions presents Guest Host Stranger Ghost, a “vagabond” new play by Kate Heffernan about living in someone else’s home, which criss-crosses the city on the sets of other people’s plays.
- Freefalling by Georgina Miller uses aerial flight to capture the joy of living life to the full, and the terror of being trapped in a body that refuses to function, from Rough Magic and Lime Tree Theatre/Belltable. It’s at Draíocht in Blanchardstown, as is Fishamble’s premiere of Breaking by Amy Kidd, questioning how we navigate a world without simple answers.
- The Abbey Theatre is producing Safe House at the Peacock, a song cycle and smashed-up memory play written and directed by Enda Walsh, and composed by Anna Mullarkey. Upstairs on the Abbey main stage, director Caitríona McLaughlin reimagines Lady Gregory’s 1912 play Grania.
- At the Gaiety, Druid presents Tom Murphy’s drama of desire, belonging and possession, The House, directed by Garry Hynes.
- A world premiere, The Jesus Trilogy, adapted from JM Coetzee’s novels, explores memory, passion and dance, from Hatch Theatre Company, director Annabelle Comyn and playwright Eoghan Quinn.
- The personal becomes political in Sandpaper on Sunburn, written and directed by David Horan, with Verdant Productions.
- The theatre festival also offers a chance to catch Lyric Theatre’s Agreement, about hammering out a deal in Northern Ireland in April 1998, at the Gate Theatre; Mark O’Rowe’s new ensemble play Reunion from Landmark Productions, currently sold out at Galway International Arts Festival; and, following premieres at Kilkenny Arts Festival next month, composer Emma O’Halloran’s Trade/Mary Motorhead double bill will be at Dún Laoghaire’s Pavilion.
- International highlights include three productions from England: Forced Entertainment’s experimental Signal to Noise; Javaad Alipoor’s Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, an intriguing political mystery exploring storytelling and truth in the Internet age; and Benji Reid’s Find Your Eyes, a soulful and visually stunning work. A Knock on the Roof, in advance of its Off Broadway run, is by Golan Heights-based Khawla Ibraheem, and about preparing for war.
- The Ark has put together a programme for children, including Julie Sharkey’s An Ant Called Amy, about an ant that learns to slow down (ages five to eight), directed by Raymond Keane; BullyBully, from the Netherlands, a musical for ages three plus; and Murmur, acrobatic sound theatre from Belgium. Barnstorm’s new play, Grace, by Jody O’Neill, at the Pavilion, invites families into a multisensory landscape.
“Dublin Theatre Festival is a place of gathering, where difference is valued, where curiosity is high and generosity is expected,” says White. “The reward is the thrilling connection of artists and audiences in live performance, which radiates outwards and makes our city more tolerant, more welcoming, more liveable. There’s work to do to include many more people in this conversation, and it’s a challenge we embrace.”
