FOLLOWING the Gate's storming success with the Beckett Festival at the Lincoln Centre in New York last year, the company was invited to bring four plays of its own choosing to the Melbourne Arts Festival in October. It is going Down Under with Beckett's Waiting For Godot, Krapp's Last Tape, I'll Go On and Endgame, and Catalpa by Donal O'Kelly.hijacking by Fenian convicts in Australia of a whaling expedition from the US. O'Kelly's other magnificent one-man show, Bat The Father, Rabbit The Son, was hugely successful there some years ago, so this visit will be eagerly awaited by theatre buffs.

But that's all after our own theatre festival, which looks like being the best one in years - despite the fact that the Celtic Tiger can't even cough up a named sponsor with Robert Lepage's first visit, two new productions by Romania's Silviu Purcarete (he of Les Dana ides), a new Thomas Kilroy work about Constance Wilde at the Abbey and, at the Gate, a new Joe O'Connor play on the last nuns in Ireland, which is already provoking unexpected bursts of laughter from that theatre's PR staff.