The Dublin Ulster Bank Theatre Festival rolls into town at the end of the month and runs for just under three weeks. With 31 shows in over 22 venues with productions from ten different countries there is, this year, a heavy emphasis on Polish theatre. Contemporary interpretations are the order of the day with Rough Magic taking on Phaedra, a collaboration between writer Hilary Fannin and composer/musician Ellen Cranitch that features an ensemble of the nation’s finest traditional Irish musicians, a tale for these fiscal times is given the Frank McGuinness treatment and an all star cast including Alan Rickman, Fiona Shaw, Lindsay Duncan and John Kavanagh in Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman, while Factory 2 from acclaimed Polish theatre maker Krystian Lupa meticulously reimagines the exploits of Andy Warhol and his entourage from a period of utopia to a stark present day reality in a 7 hour feast for the eye and the mind. Here Totally Dublin take a closer look at some of the other highlights from the festival.
ENRON
Gaiety Theatre
12 – 16th of October
Financial malpractice is not the most entertaining subject in the world. So what were the challenges facing director Rupert Goold in telling the tale of the rise and fall of the most innovative company in America? “Rather than making corporate finance really dark and evil we wanted to recognise that its actually really sexy and exciting,” he tells me on the phone from London. “What it tries to do is make very comprehensible subjects people might be a bit intimidated about. The show does so by staging it as a circus, with lots of vaudeville, songs, dances, strange creatures.” Much of Enron’s success can be attributed to the timing, coming as it did hot on the heels of the financial meltdown. “People aren’t actively affected by political theatre that is inspired by war . But pretty much everybody was affected by the credit crunch. We all wanted to understand how debt worked and the play goes someway to explaining some of those things.”
Rehearsal, Playing the Dane
Samuel Beckett Centre
1st – 10th of October
Rehearsal, Playing the Dane is the new show from Pan Pan Theatre Company. The structure is straightforward. The audience chooses from three Hamlets and then that Hamlet will preform. I ask director Gavin Quinn what the inspiration for the show was. “What you find with theatre in Ireland is that people don’t really challenge the function of theatre. They don’t really care about form. They just care about putting the same thing on over and over.” This is not the first time Pan Pan has flipped the formula – their interpretations of Macbeth and Oedipus raised the roof as well as the odd eyebrow. “We’re just making theatre from another point of view. People who say you can’t adapt or change the classics are basically Luddites. Afraid of imagination. They want to control everything and are ultraconservative. We could easily put on a classic play with a week’s rehearsal and not bother thinking about it for two years. But theatre is an artistic process. I see it as art, it’s not a craft. It’s about investing all you time and imagination, experience and vigour.”
Floating/The History about a Rabbit/360
12th – 17th of October
Smock Alley Theatre
The wonderful world of Hugh Hughes comes to life via three imaginative shows conceived by Hughes and his real life alter ego Shôn Dale-Jones. “Fl oating is basically about my experience of leaving home; The History about a Rabbit is about my experience of losing my father and what that taught me while my third show, 360, is about friendship. The things you share in a friendship and the things you need to remember inside of a friendship.” Dale-Jones believes comedy is about more than just making people laugh. “Hugh is a comic character and the way that he looks at the world and puts things together is what makes them comic. What I’ve tried to do is to focus on stories that somehow express real feelings and let the comedy come out of the character and the presentation.”
Words Caomhan Keane
