Curtain Up

The buzz has begun. The launch has taken place and bookings can already be made for this year’s Eircom Dublin Theatre Festival. So let’s look at what’s on offer. And, given that it’s hotpress, kick off with music related shows.

In fact, one of the biggest shows in the festival is Woyzeck inspired by George Buchner’s original slice of savage social realism but now directed and designed by Robert Wilson. And featuring music and lyrics by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan. The press release for the show says Waits remains “decidedly outside and perversely inside the orbit of popular music” whatever that means! It also promises “a production of epic proportions, which is both an affirmation of the importance of humanity and an admission of its frailty.” Now, that sounds more like Tom Waits to me! Either way one reviewer has already said “the performance proves that theatre is the mother of all art forms. It has everything.”

It doesn’t have Gavin Friday and Maurice Seezer who return to live performance after a five year gap with a show called Ich Liebe Dich that promises to “bring to life the “twisted, hypnotic, seductive and cold-blooded” world of musical genius Kurt Weil. It’s said that Friday and Seezer will be joined on stage by a “cast of musicians conjured up from around the world” but wouldn’t it be fitting if, even for one night only, those musicians were the other members of The Virgin Prunes. And not any members of U-know-who!

Music of a not-entirely-dissimilar nature, albeit, more quiet, will be found in An Orchestral Evening With Tindersticks, when the band of the same name, in a two part show, revisit some of their finest recordings live. From their debut album, Tindersticks to the infinitely superior Can Our Love, released earlier this year.

But if it’s pure theatre you’re pursuing – with musical and theatrical influences as dark as Waits, Weil and Tindersticks – then the undoubted highlight of the Festival is bound to be the Abbey’s retrospective on Tom Murphy. This includes six of his most important plays staged over a 14 day period in the Abbey and the Peacock. These are A Whistle In The Dark, The Gigli Concert, The Morning After ptimism, The Sactuary Lamp, Ballegangaire and Famine. Now, this is what I call epic theatre which definitely does prove that theatre is one of the mothers of all art forms. And that Tom Murphy, along with Brian Friel, is, without a doubt, one of Ireland’s finest playwrights. Book for them all and, I promise, you’ll still be reeling (maybe even rocking) at Christmas!

So what else is on offer? The first visit to Ireland of Peter Brook with his production of Le Costume, by Can Themba which is a “vivid evocation of South Africa’s Sophiatown in the 1950’s, a place of gossip, music, dreams and drinking.” And the play is said to be “a bitter, beautiful account of lust, jealousy, penitence and a tragic failure of forgiveness” told with “the greatest of simplicity” by four actors.

The Gate Theatre, meanwhile, has brought together three of Ireland’s “most prestigious contemporary writers” the aforementioned Friel, Conor McPherson and Neil Jordan to explore “the timeless themes of passion, love and loss” in The Yalta Game, Come On Over and White Horses, respectively.

And there’s more.

The Mystery of Charles Dickens, a one man show performed by Simon Callow, who penned the best-selling biography of Dickens. No doubt the play will be as definitive as the book.

A movie, on the other hand, was the source of inspiration for Roddy Doyle who bases his play Guess Who’s Coming for the Dinner on the 1960’s “flic” of nearly-the-same-name. Doyle’s work, however, “takes a light-hearted but very telling look at the different reactions within one Irish family to the arrival for dinner of Ben, a Nigerian asylum seeker.”

And last, but far from least – and another I’d recommend – we have Justin Butcher’s Scaramouche Jones, a one-man play performed by Pete Postlethwaite, focusing on the life of the ancient clown Scaramouche and “reflecting on the extraordinary fortunes of his life” only minutes after his final performance.

There you go. I’ve sold the Eircom Theatre Festival with all the delight at my disposal. The rest is up to you.