DUBLIN'S OLYMPIA is one of the city's great venues for late night rock gigs that roll the music right back to its base on the streets, and among the community. Maybe it's the booze, the craic, the audience involvement or the fact that the events take place at the weekend. Whatever, the line that most often comes to mind in relation to those late night gigs is Janis Joplin's quip from her live album "we sure turned a trainload of freaks into a party, man."

Yet rarely have I seen the Olympia put to such good use as when it was home, for an hour or two, to Ennio Marchetto, during this year's Dublin Theatre Festival. To watch a packed house give standing ovations to a mime artist and desert the bar to witness his act was proof positive that Irish audiences can take, and want, far more than just late night rock, blues and disco gigs.

Okay, Ennio was masterfully recreating rock icons from Madonna to Elvis to Freddie Mercury but it was theatre more than rock 'n' roll and I wish someone out there would get off their asses and ensure that we don't have to wait until the next Dublin Theatre Festival to have such alternative entertainment on offer in the country's capital. John Reynolds told me he tried to get Ennio to do a post-gig spot in the POD. Now, that would have been something else again!

Marchetto was a definite highlight of a festival which got off to a bad start but eventually proved to be richly rewarding. Likewise, Stephen Berkoff's one-man show which scaled the rafters in the Gaiety in terms of performance art, even if the man can't help but be almost gleefully self-indullgent. The same cannot be said for the other Gaiety production, The Taffettas, a female quartet who must win a prize for being able to reduce some classic '50's pop songs to pap and presenting a show so devoid of any form of dynamic that it propelled me to leave the theatre halfway through their performance - for the first time in my life.

In contrast, I had to be forcibly ejected from the same theatre after The RSC's, The Winter's Tale and told to shut up screaming for "more." Maybe part of the particular magic of the performance I saw, was fired by the fact that Cyril Cusack had died that morning and the show was dedicated to his memory, in a most moving manner. No schmaltz, no playing to the gallery, just a quiet dedication after the performance and an entire production of one of Shakespeare's lesser-known works made to breathe again.

The same must surely apply to his daughter Niamh's performance in A Doll's House at the Gate, which, though intermittently ill-focused on the night I saw the show, nonetheless captured much of the power of one of Ibsen's most prophetic creations, Nora. My only problem with this production is that the play itself is so damn familiar, and there has been no attempt to provide a revisionist perspective.

For all its unremitting gloom and some essential element that is missing from the overall production I still must recommend The Famine, at the Abbey, but that may be because I adore the music, rhythms and poetry in Tom Murphy's work. This may, indeed, be one of Murphy's best plays and even if it wasn't exactly a highlight of this year's theatre festival it offers a sharp reminded of a part of this country's history which still lurks in the Irish psyche, and which has many parallels in contemporary life.

A still unshaken belief in Gary Hynes and her commitment to the Peacock New Plays Series '93, coupled with a similar belief in the directorial skills of David Byrne - particularly as evidenced in The Lament For Arthur Cleary - made me skip the glitterati-festooned opening of Rough Magic's The Way of the World, in favour of Brother Of The Brush, at the Peacock. I made the right choice and happily, even accidentally, discovered the surprise hit of the festival, as far as I'm concerned.

Written by newcomer Jimmy Murphy, and nearer Dermot Bolger than Roddy Doyle, the play perfectly captures the rhythms, language, desires, desperation and humour of three painters and decorators caught in the twilight world of signing on the dole and taking any nixer that comes their way.

Jimmy Murphy is the perfect embodiment of the moral dilemmas that beset a gaffer. Likewise, Eanna MacLiam, as Lar, delivers a magnificently moving monologue which turns the pain of poverty into a force as tangible as the sledgehammer being hoisted as a weapon as the play begins.

For those who are unfamiliar with the language of working life, particularly in the trade of painting and decorating, there is a glossary in the programme. My greatest wish for the play would be that those people who don't need such a glossary would attend the production and see their lives so accurately represented so close to the Abbey stage. I'm sure I heard Sean O'Casey cheer.

The Way of the World and Keely & Du I'll have to catch at another time, and report on in the next issue of Hot Press.