Posts Tagged ‘Dublin International Theatre Festival’

“Ireland mustn’t be such a bad place so if the Yanks want to come to Ireland to do their filming”.

Set in 1934, the arrival of a Hollywood director to a nearby island is special news to the community of small rural Inishmaan. Not only more titillating than the reported news of a cat biting a goose’s tail, the promise of outside contact brings a particular sort of hope for Cripple Billy, an unloved boy whose chief form of amusement is gazing at cows to alleviate his endless boredom.

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There is an overriding literary theme in this year’s Dublin Theatre Festival. One can’t help but wonder if the programmers have only recently discovered their local library. Virignia Woolf, Joan Dideon, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Fyodor Dostevsky. An index of classics and contemporary reefed from the annals and transposed in myriad forms and approaches onto the stage.
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When attempting a run-down of what to see at the Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival, such is the abundance of highlights, it could prove more time productive to write about what not to see.

The programme of what is fast being recognised as one of the leading theatre festivals in Europe, reads like a Michelin-star menu of theatrical titbits and sensory sweetbreads. And, like the exclusivity of a Michelin-starred restaurant the most often-uttered complaint in relation to the festival is not the quality but the price. Tickets can be expensive, but of course costs cover not only high production values, but also the cost of bringing such shows to a sea-locked nation often for their European premiere.
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