Humphreys to take director's chair

ArtScape:Gráinne Humphreys, assistant director of the Irish Film Institute, has just been appointed director designate of the Dublin International Film Festival. She will shadow current director - and Irish Timesfilm correspondent - Michael Dwyer for the next DIFF, in February 2007, and will then take over.

Humphreys, who is also head of education at IFI, will be a welcome choice to head up the growing international festival. She has much experience of programming festivals, having put together the Stranger Than Fiction Documentary Film Festival and Market and the annual French Film Festival, as well as many other collaborations at the IFI, where she has responsibility for cultural programming.

IFI director Mark Mulqueen said, "Gráinne has been an exceptionally committed part of the IFI team and was a key contributor to the institute's transformation over recent years. Her creativity and drive will, no doubt, give the Dublin International Film Festival added momentum and the IFI looks forward to supporting the festival's further development as a major international film event."

And also on the Irish film front, the Irish feature film Once, directed and written by John Carney (Bachelors Walk, On the Edge) has been selected for official competition in the the World Cinema Competition category at the US Sundance Film Festival in January. Starring Glen Hansard of The Frames and Marketa Irglova, the film is a modern-day musical about a busker and an immigrant in Dublin.

Good Santa/bad Santa

Santa was out this week, dispensing more than €7 million in largesse over just two days to all good girls and boys. But what's given with one hand might well be taken away with the other.

Theatre Forum Ireland led a very well argued case this week at a media briefing, urging legislative change to the Finance Act 2002 to rescind the requirement that promoters of non-commercial arts events pay 21 per cent VAT on fees paid to performers who don't live in the Republic. It argued that, in effect, a portion of what the Department of Arts gives to non-profit arts organisations in the form of grants will be taken back by the Department of Finance.

David Collopy of Opera Ireland (which could have to pay €70,000-€100,000 more in tax each year), at the briefing said the move has the capacity to bring down an art form. And Irish Taxation Institute president Dermot O'Brien pointed out that the amount involved for the non-profit sector is tiny (well less than €700,000), but that Revenue is afraid of precedents being set, and so is interpreting the legislation cautiously.

Over the past few years this issue has been hanging over any arts organisation that brings people here to work, but the action is finally due to hit the fan in January, and there was a palpable awareness this week that it could impact on the range of work made available to Irish audiences, as raising ticket prices or charging artists VAT is not seen as an option. Festivals that programme international work will be particularly badly hit, as will opera, which can't be produced without some outside involvement.

And those goodies on the funding front this week? On Tuesday, Minister for Arts John O'Donoghue announced an additional €2.5 million to go to the Arts Council specifically for current funding of traditional arts, opera policy, children's initiatives and large festivals. That amount came from savings that were made in the Department, O'Donoghue noted. Hot on the heels of that was Wednesday's €4.6 million for "key strategic national, regional and local arts and culture facilities throughout the country", bringing the week's total to €7.1 million. (Could there be an election in the air, we wonder?)

The €4.5 million is to be widely distributed, for a range of refurbishments and acquisitions, including €600,000 to the Chester Beatty Library, €400,000 to the National Library of Ireland, €75,500 to the National Concert Hall, €150,000 for the Abbey's auditorium works, €15,000 to Poetry Ireland, €115,000 to finish Garter Lane Arts Centre's refurbishment project, €150,000 for the start-up of

Exploration Station national children's museum (which figured in the Estimates for the first time), €50,000 towards materials and the restoration of the portico of the Olympia Theatre and €70,000 towards clearing the deficit of the Dublin Fringe Festival.

It's 'Rock'n'Roll', and they like it

It's no surprise that one of the best pieces of contemporary writing for theatre in recent years took the award for best play at this week's Evening Standard Theatre Awards in London, writes Gerry Smyth. Tom Stoppard's Rock'n'Roll also produced the winner in the best actor category, for Rufus Sewell, who faced tough competition from Kevin Spacey, who is currently giving a powerful performance in the Old Vic production of Eugene O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten.

Irish playwright Conor McPherson's latest work, The Seafarer, running in the National Theatre, lost out to the Stoppard drama in the best play award, but its nomination is another addition to the playwright's list of achievements.

Other Irish interest centred on Sinéad Cusack, nominated for a terrific central performance in Rock'n'Roll. Kathleen Turner was the winner there, however, for her performance in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Concern was expressed at the awards ceremony that plays are an "endangered species" in the West End - and anyone trooping around London these days would get the clear message that the musical remains master in the city's theatreland. The Standard's editor, bemoaning the excessive amount of musicals, said that "never before has the West End faced such a challenge". To drive home the point a special editor's award was delivered to Peter Morgan's acclaimed Frost/Nixon, which, like Rock'n'Roll, shows that there is an audience for serious theatre.

While there is no certainty that Dublin audiences might get to see Stoppard's very political play - it revolves around the family of a Cambridge Marxist academic and intertwines the Czech Soviet invasion of 1968 and the Velvet Revolution of 1989 with a terrific soundtrack from the era and an unseen character in the form of Pink Floyd's Syd Barrett - the strong likelihood is that McPherson's will come to the Abbey in due course - possibly late next year. Whether it will be the current London show or a new Abbey

production is yet to be decided - McPherson was the Abbey's recent writer-in-association.

Colgan's directorial comeback

It must be quite some time since Michael Colgan, Gate Theatre impresario and man about town, got his hands dirty in the rehearsal room. The lucky person to share his return to directing is Ralph Fiennes. Fiennes is the sole performer

in a stage production of Samuel Beckett's novella First Love, which is being produced for Fergus Linehan's Sydney Festival, to open in January. Colgan, who is a successful producer and who directed about 10 shows for the Peacock at the start of his career, when he was working for the Abbey, is taking the artistic reins again.

The Gate is also bringing Eh Joe and I'll Go On to the Sydney Festival. Fiennes was in Dublin last week for a reading, on a day coming down with stars at the Gate - it was the same day that Al Pacino was there for Colgan's charm offensive, discussing Salome.

The Gate production of Waiting for Godot has just finished a US tour of eight venues in Washington DC, New York and Philadelphia, and got some very good reviews. The Los Angeles Timessaid: "Bad Beckett can be excruciating, but when he is interpreted by masters, as he is here, the result can be transcendent. The actors - who have been playing the same roles, on and off, for decades - are the real miracle here. Familiarity, in this case, breeds brilliance. These are not performances, but life works, case studies in what can result when sheer talent fuses with a luminous text.Theirs are definitive performances in a definitive production that will illuminate Beckett's genius for anyone who has ever doubted it."

The New York Timespraised a show that "has itself become something of an entity on a journey without end".

Meantime, life goes on at home, and American Buffalo opens on February 13th, directed by Mark Brokow (who was last here for A View from the Bridge), and starring Aidan Gillen and Domhnall Gleeson.