It's Greek all week. At the Abbey, Iphigenia at Aulis by Euripedes opens to rapturous applause. At the Gate, Jason Patric is Iphigenia in Orem and Flora Montgomery is Medea Redux in Neil LaBute's bash. A Scottish woman, Ann Malamah-Thomas, who is the newly arrived director of the British Council after six years in Beirut, looks forward to an evening of culture at the Abbey.
Not so her 17-year-old son, John Robert Malamah-Thomas, who stays home to watch the Republic of Ireland play Andorra and then see Holland play Portugal.
What would you choose: Clytemnestra and Agamemnon or Robbie Keane and Roy Keane? Others who forego the football include Dublin designer Lian Bell, with Joel Daminiani, from Avignon in France, who is working on the film Bloody Sunday, and their friends, actor Peter Gaynor and New Zealand artist, Sascha Perfect. Three Dubliners, Katie Ingle, Lee Murphy and Aoife Walsh, are all ready to go in too.
Don Taylor, the British playwright who translated the Greek tragedy, is here with his wife, also a playwright, Ellen Dryden, and their son, Jona- than Dryden Taylor. What attracted Taylor to this particular play? "It cuts politicians to pieces," he says. "They are completely without morality." Ah, now. What?
It's a case of spot the Americans at the Gate opening of bash. Two who've just flown in are Jake Bloom, an LA lawyer in the entertainment business and David Schiff, who is Jason Patric's agent. There's a Hollywood vibe in the air. Michael Colgan, Gate Theatre director, is puffing a cigar nearby. It's a bash, all right.
Eoin McGonigal SC, Charles Haughey's senior counsel at the Moriarty Tribunal, is here, but he's too shy to speak. Perhaps it's the sight of this reporter's notebook that sends him rushing back in to the stalls. Not so Neil LaBute, from Chicago, the playwright and director, easily recognisable in the foyer with his head of black curly hair, who is happy to answer a question or two. He's currently finishing a film in London, based on the A.S. Byatt book, Possession. It'll star Gwyneth Paltrow and Jeremy Northam. Then he'll turn to directing a play he wrote at Christmas, called The Shape of Things to Come, which is to be staged at the Almeida Theatre in London. It's about how "love and art get mixed up and how people use each other in both", he says.
Film-maker John Boorman also stands dutifully to answer a question: he's getting ready for the opening in the US (last night) of his latest film, The Tailor of Panama, based on the John Le Carre novel, with Geoffery Rush and Pierce Brosnan. And Paolo Tullio, the Dublin-based writer from the little Italian village of Gallimaro between Naples and Rome, who has a cameo part in the spy film, reminds us that Captain Correlli's Mandolin is due out in May. Treats galore in store.
Before the performances, many theatre-goers attend the tea-time launch at Project of the Irish Theatre Handbook, including Tony O Dalaigh, who is described by one wag as the book's walking version. The guide to professional drama and dance companies in Ireland, both North and South, is a valued resource to all in the industry. Gerry Barnes, director of the Cork Opera House, is here, keeping a weather eye out for the Muldavian National Opera Company, which performed in Cork this week.
Gerry Browne, general secretary of Irish Actors Equity (which has 1,500 members), and its first woman president, Kathleen Barrington, are here too. The book, edited by Loughlin Deegan, is launched by Rosaleen Linehan. And then it's on with the show.