Time to get up from the sitting position that theatre aficionados will have spent a lot of time in for the last few weeks, with the ending of both the main Dublin Theatre Festival and the Fringe. Although all the figures aren't back yet, Fergus Linehan, the incoming director of the main festival, reckons that attendances for this year were roughly the same as for last year.
Cloudstreet, the five-hour odyssey from Australia's Company B Belvoir/Black Swan Theatre, was the predicted hit of the main festival, selling out early on and receiving standing ovations every night. Director Neil Armfield, who accepted the award for Best International Production at the Evening Herald Theatre Awards on Tuesday, described Dublin as "the happiest venue of our tour".
The ill-judged Boomtown, however, received the sort of reviews everyone in theatre has nightmares about: definitely more Black Magic than the Rough Magic we've become used to. By general consensus, the sleeper hit was Howard Barker's Scenes from an Execution, from Britain's Wrestling School, which will have further consolidated Tallaght's Civic Theatre's growing reputation.
Overall, it was the visiting companies, including the Young Vic's Arabian Nights, and Shared Experiences's Jane Eyre, rather than the home productions, which ended up wowing the crowds. However, Bickerstaffe's Comedians took both Best Irish Production, and Best Actor (Karl Shiels) at Tuesday's awards.
There was an impromptu celebration and presentation on Saturday night at the Gaiety for Tony O Dalaigh, the festival's outgoing director, with the party moving to the Peacock and continuing late into the night. Although it wasn't quite as late as the party which actress Brenda Fricker hosted in the Trocadero for the entire cast and crew of Cloudstreet on the last night of its two-year international tour, which went on until dawn.
On the Fringe, director Ali Curran reports that attendances "really stepped up" this year. The Fringe is increasingly integrating disciplines other than pure theatre into its programme, such as dance, film and comedy.
"We hoped that we might cross-reference our audiences by experimenting with this development," Curran explains. "It worked. People went to dance or comedy one night, and theatre the next. Diversifying didn't affect our theatre audiences."
She also credits the Fringe's new and much-hit website with improving public accessibility to, and interest in, events this year. As to public opinion, it seemed to be cleanly divided on the merits of the Fringe this year, with some regular pundits praising the programme as very strong, and others declaring themselves very disappointed.
Fringe hits this year were the interactive tour If The Dead Could Go Shopping What Would They Buy? from the Dialogues Project, European Players; Xaviers, from the Calipo Theatre Company, in an inspired association with the City Arts Centre; and Travellin' Light and Dehydrated, from comedians Sean Hughes and Owen O'Neill. However, there was disappointment when last year's Fringe winners, Kabosh Productions, pulled out of this year's Fringe at the last minute and cancelled its advertised show, R&J. Why? "It was an outdoor production and the company felt there would be too many risks involved in staging it," says Curran. And she manages not to mention Boomtown once.
Good news this week for Irish language writer Micheal O Conghaile, who has just been appointed writer-in-residence in Irish at Queen's University, Belfast, and the University of Ulster at Coleraine. It's a three-year post, which he will split between the universities. O Conghaile received Arts Council awards in 1987 and 1994, and won the overall Hennessy Award in 1997. His translation of Martin McDonagh's The Beauty Queen of Leenane is currently playing as part of Feile 2000 in Galway. It's all happening for O Conghaile right now - also this week his first novel, Sna Fir, was published.
Inside: Outside is the name of a touring exhibition that international picture agency, Reuters, is bringing to Collins Barracks in December. Reuters Foundation, the organisers, is the education and humanitarian arm of the picture agency. The exhibition is of 140 pictures, 60 of which were taken by Reuters photographers in Kosovo and the rest by children living in conflict zones.
The genesis of the exhibition came from former photographer Martin Klejinowski Kennedy, who held a workshop for children in Chechnya, encouraging them to capture their surroundings from their own perspective. It was so successful that he began distributing disposable cameras to other young children living in war zones across the world. It's from these pictures that the selection has been made for the exhibition, and they're bound to offer the viewer an uncomfortably intimate perspective of life under siege.
Inside: Outside runs December 2nd - 12th at Collins Barracks.
The Douglas Hyde Gallery has announced details of a new series of lectures on Contemporary Art and Art Theory, which started last night with radio and sound artist, Garret Phelan. This year, the gallery has asked a selection of the younger generation of artists to talk about their work, which is bound to interest art students working across a range of disciplines, as well as the general public. There will be a question and answer session afterwards to further demystify the creative act.
Grace Weir, the video and installation artist, is next up, on November 3rd. Other dates in the series include painter Blaise Drummond on December 1st; Maurice O'Connell, who is intriguingly described as an "audience behavioural theorist and cultural activist", on February 9th; and Martin McCabe, talking about electronic art and practice in Ireland, on February 23rd.
The venue for all the lectures is Room 3074 in the Arts Block in Trinity, 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. Entrance is £3 per lecture. For further details, contact Isolda Sweeney at 01-6081116.
Michael Poynor (57) has just been appointed as chief executive for Derry's Millennium Theatre, which is due to open at a site inside the old walls at Easter 2001. This will be a companion arts centre to Belfast's Waterfront. Poynor, who was born and brought up in the Falklands, now lives in Co Down.
Previously he has worked at the Lyric, the Grand Opera House, Opera Northern Ireland, and the Guildhall, in addition to being artistic director at the Harrogate Theatre, Yorkshire. He is the founding director and chief executive of the Ulster Theatre Company, and a member of the Arts Council performing arts panel and the arts training panel. Poynor takes up his new job on January 31st.
There is a new photography competition in town: the Black Bush Free Spirit Photography Awards. Presumably, you would be better off submitting entries that you'd taken sans said spirits in your system, otherwise camera wobble would add an interestingly creative dimension to the pictures.
The competition is open to amateurs and professionals, with the open-ended theme of "Free Spirit". Entries can be black and white or colour, and the closing date is October 29th. First prize is £1,200, and the two runners-up each receive £400. Entry forms and further information from Photography Awards, 70 Upper Leeson Street, Dublin 4.
