On October 12th, the 68th annual Dublin Theatre Festival (DTF) finished its run. This year saw it stretch over two and a half weeks, featuring 29 shows and a range of 12 accompanying events, including talks given by artists, activists and critics; interactive audience discussions; walking tours and networking opportunities. The plays could be seen on a grand total of 16 stages, from Dublin’s most famous venues like Abbey, Gate and Gaiety, to lesser known ones like Axis Ballymun or Pavilion Theatre in Dún Laoghaire. Four of the shows were performed within the belly button of the world, Trinity College: Caligula, Deaf Republic and The Making of Pinocchio in the Samuel Beckett Theatre and the participatory feminist comedy I Fall Down in several locations around campus. Along with some familiar Irish contributors, such as Once Off Productions and Druid, a substantial number of international companies were featured, arriving from Poland, Ukraine, Scotland, England, Spain, India, France, Peru and Belgium.
Now with this halfway impressive, halfway disorienting barrage of statistics over, what is the Dublin Theatre Festival altogether? What role has it played in the Irish arts scene? And why is it undoubtedly worth visiting next fall provided you did not have a chance to catch it this year?
Dublin Theatre Festival is an annual multiple week phenomenon that brings a host of unique theatre performances by Irish and overseas theatre companies to Dublin every fall. Founded in 1957 by playwright, actor and educator Brendan John Smith, it is Europe’s earliest and one of the most respected theatre festivals. The festival was explicitly conceived as a platform where subversive and impactful drama could break through the hefty block of uninspired conservatism that pressed, with varying degrees of vigour, on the arts scene in Ireland at the time. The reciprocal international aspect of the festival, far from being a modern addition, is an enduring feature from the point of its inception, a multilateral effort to connect newer domestic writers and playwrights with Ireland’s established émigrés in an attempt at exploring what Irish theatre meant and, by way of foreign invitees, at situating it within a wider international context. The particularly conservative and religious contemporary backdrop coupled with the highstrung landscape of incessantly negotiated directions and possibilities for ‘national’ theatre, onto which the festival team brought their vision, generated its early and, to this day, most famous scandals. Notably, the festival’s first year featured as its headliner the arrest of the Pike Theatre’s director Alan Simpson after the complaint of “indecency” regarding his production of Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo (the heinous trial worthy indecency in question was the inclusion of a mimed condom in the play). The outrage was impactful, though it did not help either Simpson’s gigantic monetary loss resulting from the litigation process or his theatre’s subsequent financial ruin and untimely demise. The following year saw the festival cancelled after the public and impassioned withdrawal of Sean O’Casey and Samuel Beckett in response to the Archbishop’s refusal to celebrate the votive mass for the festival. Afterwards, to the historian’s dismay, it was pretty smooth sailing, remarkable for its distinct lack of controversy.
This year marked an important turn in the development of the festival with it having its first run without the longstanding Artistic Director and Chief Executive Willie White since 2012. White has managed 13 consecutive festivals. He is responsible, most notably, for the urgently reimagined program of 2020 that accommodated theatre closures and allowed the festival to avoid cancellation, as well as for the successful management of DTF in the difficult years shadowed by the aftermath of Covid. White’s place was taken by Róise Goan, a graduate of the Drama and Theatre Studies program in Trinity College Dublin with a long and successful career in the arts sphere within Ireland, UK and Belgium. Goan worked as an artistic coordinator, wrote for television, sat on the Arts Council and, crucially, from 2008 until 2013 served as the head of the Dublin Fringe Festival, an equally famous multidisciplinary festival featuring new artists who work with provocative and, you will excuse me, fringe themes. I spoke to Sasha Strelova, festival and event manager and independent cultural reporter for her channel “Nothing to do in Dublin,” who has been involved with Ireland’s art scene for 8 years. She connects this year’s centering and well-structured exploration of marginal and under-platformed experiences to Goan’s perspective informed by her time with the Fringe. She is optimistic that the density and diversity of the program, as well as the increasing proportion of international performers featured, are evidence to the substantial and accelerating strides Dublin’s theatres have made on the path of recovery from nigh full immobilisation during the Pandemic.
The Arts Council’s principled aversion to the very concept of a repertory theatre makes every Dublin play both within and without DTF a fleeting event that rarely survives for long enough in the whirlwind of current breakneck news cycle to generate substantial discourse. In this light, reports on the active plays too often resemble extended ads, and those appearing after the plays’ almost always unfairly short run seem to exist solely either to assuage the author’s intense FOMO or to impart it on the reader. The latter might well be the result of the following discussion of some specific plays but my hopes are to outline general thematic directions that would allow, in time, for situating the contributions of this year’s season within the festival’s history.
This year’s DTF put particular emphasis on foregrounding art and experiences of D/deaf people, neurodivergent people and people with disabilities. Accessibility was approached through special calls for ISL interpreters and volunteers, although at the end far from all the shows ran ISL accompanied performances. Ilya Kaminsky’s The Deaf Republic was the one play performed primarily in ISL and one of the most remarkable on the technical side, combining puppetry, film, poetry and aerial performances. The interplay of speech, sign language and captioning was used to depict the deteriorating conditions of a town under military occupation where, after a murder of a boy, all citizens are rendered deaf and configure resistance and solidarity through a separate space of communication, inaccessible to the occupants. My Right Foot, a solo performance by Michael Patrick, invited the audience to look at his life with motor neuron disease and ponder his prospective life expectancy of a couple years in a comedy format. Teatro la Plaza’s Hamlet was performed by a group of actors with Down syndrome, who employed Shakespeare’s classic to contemplate how the current environment of cult-like boundless efficiency and accelerated consumption affects their lives.
Another central theme was the diversified experiences and perspectives of women. Be Careful, a solo performance by Mallika Taneja, within its 50 minute run vividly depicted the rotations of dashed hope, anger and futility felt by women navigating the societal delusion that they could somehow take responsibility and claim more agency in situations of violence through changes to their clothes and appearance. The play hearkened back to projects like Jen Brockman and Dr. Mary Wyandt-Hiebert’s 2013 What Were You Wearing? Deeper, a play by Polish director Gosia Wdowik, dealt with experiences of newer accelerating types of violence against women, bred and and brought to maturity through online hypersexualisation, deepfakes and reproducible images of gender-based violence and the weighty possibility of always being watched, familiar to all who grew up with the internet. Much expected adaptation of Katriona O’Sullivan’s Poor was one of the most anticipated shows of the season.
This year’s classics all received modern reimaginings. Marina Carr’s The Boy presented a reframing of Sophocles’ trilogy of Theban Plays, centering within it Jocasta’s narrative. In addition to the aforementioned Hamlet, Ivan Uryvskyi’s Caligula is another notable adaptation of a classic. Developed by Ivan Franko National Academic Drama Theatre after the start of the full-scale invasion and performed entirely in Ukrainian, the adaptation presents a double-sided exploration of the nature of dictatorship – the limitless agency of the dictator is only rendered in sharp enough contrast through the shadows of relinquished agency of the dictator’s many confederates.
Through a range of conversations I had with attendees during the festival where I asked them to think of the play they found most impactful, it quickly became clear that there were no consistent enough answers to detect a few definitive favourites. The fact that everyone’s experience of this year’s festival is so heterogeneous speaks to the diversity of both the themes and the public. Diversity that is not a vapid promotional bullet point targeted at the archetype of the self serious moneyed theatergoer but a multilaterally enriching approach to creating a program that is both timely and intentional. It is much too early to speak of any signature style of Goan’s as the Artistic Director of DTF but this year’s festival inspires confidence. In spite of its lackluster media coverage, it was widely attended and enthusiastically engaged with, while the program kept its balance on the delicate edge of the unapologetically individual and hauntingly universal with aplomb.
Those interested in working with the festival should look out for their usual volunteer call during the coming summer.
