A theatrical line-up with added bite

Greed, passion, terror, revolution, tyranny, ambition, pride – often with a high level of audience participation – should keep drama lovers busy at this year’s Dublin Theatre Festival

IN THE week that Dublin was named a Unesco City of Literature, the programme for this year’s Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival was also announced. The motto of this year’s festival, which runs from September 30th to October 17th, is “Dublin Loves Drama”, and the city’s love of theatre does not go unrequited in the programme announced yesterday by festival director Loughlin Deegan.

Across a range of 31 home and international productions, audiences can look forward to a comprehensive choice of themes: greed, passion, merriment, terror, revolution, intimacy, tyranny, pride, ambition, disgrace, fear, jealousy, desire and lust.

Greed features in the form of one of the biggest financial scandals in history (and precursor to the recent markets turmoil), the Enrondebacle, which has been transformed into a modern morality tale incorporating music and video. This Headlong Theatre production comes to Dublin directly from London's West End. Enron has also been one of the major recent successes on Broadway.

In perhaps Deegan's most ambitious undertaking as festival director, a three-year project comes to fruition with a showcase of contemporary Polish theatre. One of the three productions involved might seem like a monumental test of endurance, but festival-goers have shown in the past that they have the stamina it takes, most recently when Gatz, a six-hour reading of The Great Gatsby, was a festival hit. It'll be a longer stretch this time, though, with the seven-and-a-half-hour epic, Factory 2, written and directed by the man regarded as "the patriarch of Polish theatre", Krystian Lupa. The show focuses on Andy Warhol, his Manhattan loft and the disciples who were part of the artist's bohemian entourage.

A number of new Irish productions look like significant highlights in the programme. The Abbey has already heralded Frank McGuinness's new version of Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkmanand its starry cast of Alan Rickman, Fiona Shaw and Lesley Duncan, while, at the Gaiety, Garry Hynes will direct the O'Casey play that the Abbey rejected in 1928, The Silver Tassie. As well as this Druid show and a Gate Theatre season of Beckett, Pinter and Mamet plays, the other Irish companies to the fore in the 18-day festival will be Rough Magic and Pan Pan. The Rough Magic show is the result of a collaboration between playwright Hilary Fannin and composer-musician Ellen Cranitch, based on the themes in Racine's version of the Greek tragedy Phaedra.

Audience participation will be very much part of this festival, and in Pan Pan’s innovative approach to the “Great Dane”, they even get to audition and vote on the actor who comes up trumps as the best Hamlet.

Audience involvement of a different kind will be seen in three productions by the young Belgian company who last year lifted "interactive" theatre to exhilarating levels with their show Once And For All We're Gonna Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up And Listen.This time around – in three different shows – the Belgian troupe will perform on a more intimate scale with, in one instance, an audience of only five people. Not one for the more introverted among theatre-goers.

One old hand – Alan Stanford – and three first-time Gate directors – Tom Creed, Aoife Spillane-Hinks and Wayne Jordan, currently directing O'Casey's Plough and the Starsat the Abbey – will take on Beckett, Pinter and Mamet in an interlocking season that will explore these writers' engagement with language. In addition to Beckett's Endgame, directed by Stanford, a stage version of Beckett's novel Wattwill receive a world premiere. Pinter's Celebrationand Mamet's Boston Marriagecomplete the quartet.

Director Grzegorz Jarzyna, celebrated in Dublin in 2004 for his version of Festenat the Abbey, brings a show based on Pier Paolo Pasolini's cult film Teoremato the Polish element of the festival, which concludes with The Danton Case, featuring the French revolution set to a punk-rock soundtrack. The Polski Teatr season will extend into film screenings, Chopin-inspired music performance, poetry reading and a symposium on the impact of immigration in Ireland.

The Peacock Theatre will host a new play, B for Baby, by newcomer playwright Carmel Winters, for which Mikel Murfi will make his National Theatre directing debut.

One of the welcome initiatives of the festival in recent years has been the revival of work from the past 12 months, giving audiences a chance to make up for missed opportunities. This year's returning shows include Irish composer Ian Wilson's haunting and meditative Una Santa Oscura, performed by Iona Petcu-Colan on violin, which had a brief run in the Project; Beckett's Act Without Words II, presented at last year's Absolut Fringe Festival (and winning best supporting actor for Bryan Burroughs in The Irish TimesTheatre Awards last February); and The Girl Who Forgot to Sing Badly, a show for young audiences presented at the Ark and directed by Lynne Parker.

But before greed, passion, terror, revolution, intimacy, tyranny, pride, ambition, disgrace and lust are let loose across the city, some merriment is promised too. The festival will kick off on a more buoyant note and in a spirit of fun in the Gaiety on September 30 with Circa – a mixture of acrobatics, dance, circus, light, sound and video. And a thousand tickets will be offered free for that event by the bank that sponsors the festival.

SOME FESTIVAL HIGHLIGHTS:

ENRON, a financial morality tale for our times – Gaiety Theatre

Henrik Ibsen's JOHN GABRIEL BORKMANin a new version by Frank McGuinness – Abbey Theatre

Druid's production of Sean O'Casey's THE SILVER TASSIE– Gaiety Theatre

Polski Teatr season: the Warhol-themed FACTORY 2and Pasolini-based T.E.O.R.E.M.A.T. – O'Reilly Theatre

THE DANTON CASE– the French revolution set to a punk-rock soundtrack – Project Arts Centre

PHAEDRAA new version for Rough Magic by Hilary Fannin and Ellen Cranitch – Project Arts Centre

Beckett, Pinter and Mamet– The Gate

Pan Pan's THE REHEARSAL, PLAYING THE DANE– Samuel Beckett Theatre

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