Last year, in this very Ticket panel, Fergus Linehan deplored the fact that when Irish people talk about "Irish theatre", they refer to the institutions rather than the art. This year he told The Irish Times that the Irish productions represented "institutions firing on all four cylinders".
So, has the Dublin Theatre Festival director learned to love institutions? "No," laughs Linehan. "They're driven by whoever's involved with them. Institutions are always essentially individuals by any other name."
Hence Linehan's description of this year's two-week nexus of national and international performances representing "individual artists who we want to work with": from Garry Hynes, who continues Druid's compelling and lyrical Synge Cycle with The Well of the Saints and The Tinker's Wedding, to Joe Dowling, the ex-pat who returns as director of Minneapolis's Guthrie Theater with Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.
But don't the individual members of the cream of the world's theatre make odd requests? Why, isn't the festival currently looking for a Real Live Baby to appear in Romeo Castellucci's challenging and disturbing production of Tragedia Endogonidia?
"To be honest that's a relatively easy demand," says Linehan, perhaps the only arts executive on earth who will refer to an infant, gloriously, as a "little knick-knacky thing like that" when compared to the challenge of moving Rough Magic's new musical to a large-scale venue.
So keen to work with particular individuals is Linehan that he features Declan Donnellan twice, with the London-Irish director's all-male Russian production of Twelfth Night nestling beside his recent production of Othello with Cheek By Jowl (which has already sold out).
"One wanted to be very careful that we had a very strong year with the changeover," says Linehan, referring to his imminent departure for the Sydney Festival while Don Shipley takes the reins in Dublin from November - and also to the fact that the festival needs to take in over a million euro at the box-office.
Linehan speaks of the collective public experience of going to four or five shows, where Miller and Castellucci, or Portia Coughlan in the Abbey and Ireland season and Conor McPherson's Shining City at the Gate, present theatrical bingers with a balanced diet.
"At the moment there isn't a bum note," he says, "which is very rare in something like the theatre." In personal terms, then, after a decade of involvement with the festival, is it the note he's happy to end on? "Yeah," he says. "It'll do."
The Dublin Theatre Festival runs from September 27th to October 9th (01-6778899, www.dublintheatrefestival.com)
