WITH two plays down and 17 to go, the Gate Theatre Company has received nothing but praise so far for its mammoth Beckett Festival, which opened this week.
The festival is part of the larger Lincoln Centre festival 1996, which is presenting more than 200 different performances incorporating international dance, theatre, music and what the glossy programme confidently terms the "cyberarts".
The Gate's "festival within a festival", however, which will deliver every single Beckett work, has captured more newspaper and magazine space than most of the other events put together. It was the Village Voice's "pick of the week", and was recommended by Mirabella, Vogue and the New York Post, among others.
It has been previewed in the New Yorker ("Linehan is the first funny woman to match a comedienne's grief struck capering with Beckett's own") the New York Times, and New York Magazine.
The New York Times review was enthusiastic, saying. "This may be the jewel in the ambitious Lincoln Festival `96... It's unquestionably the event of the new theatrical season. . . Waiting for, Godot mesmerises all over again.
Most of the performances were already completely sold out by the opening of Footfalls, the first play, last Monday.
In conjunction with the Beckett Festival itself, a series of pre-performance talks, round table discussions and readings are being hosted by New York University's Glucksman Ireland House and the Centre for French Civilisation and Culture. Photographs of Samuel Beckett by John Minihan are on view at the university all week.
After Waiting for Godot, the second play, a lavish reception took place at the Kaplan Penthouse, hosted by the Lincoln Centre and Laura Pels, who has been associated with the Gate since the New York run of Molly Sweeney earlier this year. Michael Colgan and Marie Rooney of the Gate were swamped with well wishers, as were the actors, most of whom attended.
Present, too, were the festival directors, Karel Reisz, Pierre Chabert, Antoni Libera, Caroline Fitzgerald and Walter Asmus, as well as John Rockwell, president of the Lincoln Centre.
The Irish Consul General, Mr Donal Hamill, was so impressed with the proceedings that he invited the entire cast and crew (a total of 49 officially flown from Dublin) to a special brunch tomorrow at the Irish Consulate. "We would like to show our appreciation and pride in the venture," he said.
When Walter Asmus, who once worked closely with Beckett, was asked how the playwright himself would have felt about the festival had he been here, the director answered without hesitation, "I think he would have liked it.