A MAJOR production based on interviews with former soldiers who served in Iraq, and Vanessa Redgrave's award-winning performance in Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, are two of the highlights of this year's Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival.
The festival programme, announced yesterday by artistic director Loughlin Deegan, includes 27 productions in 16 venues between September 25th and October 12th.
A strong literary strand runs through this year's line-up, with plays and performances based on the work of Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Joseph Conrad and Samuel Beckett, and a marathon seven-hour "verbatim staging" of F Scott Fitzgerald's entire The Great Gatsby.
There are home productions aplenty, with the Gate Theatre putting on a new version of Hedda Gablerby Brian Friel, Druid's Irish premiere of Martin McDonagh's The Cripple of Inishmaan, and Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Rooffrom Corn Exchange. Fishamble, meanwhile, is doing a new Irish play: Robert Massey's Rank, which "charts the transformation of Dublin in the past decade". As previously announced, the Abbey Theatre reunites Cork-born actor Fiona Shaw with acclaimed British director Deborah Warner for the National Theatre of Great Britain's production of Beckett's Happy Days.
Already regarded as a landmark of contemporary theatre and much sought after by festivals around the world, the National Theatre of Scotland's production of Black Watch, based on the war experiences of soldiers from the regiment of the same name, will be staged at the RDS.
Nick Cave and a fellow musician from the Bad Seeds and Grinderman, Warren Ellis, will provide the music for a theatrical version of Kafka's Metamorphosis.
Some of the other literary adaptations are: Waves, based on Woolf's novel, The Waves; Delirium, written by Enda Walsh but described as "a free and outrageous adaptation" of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov; and the theatrical marathon Gatz, in which an office worker finds an old copy of The Great Gatsby, starts to read it . . . and doesn't stop, in a staging that involves an ensemble of 13 actors.
One of the first sell-out shows is expected to be The Year of Magical Thinking, starring Redgrave and adapted by Didion from her own memoir.
Opera and dance enthusiasts are catered for in a reworking of Mozart's The Magic Flutethat relocates the opera to a township setting in South Africa, and a new CoisCéim Dance Theatre show, Dodgems, which will transform the O'Reilly Theatre into a fairground atmosphere.
Dublin City Gallery the Hugh Lane will be an appropriate venue for Tim Crouch's England, a provocative-sounding show that has one of its characters say "good art is art that sells", while 16 children take to the stage for a visiting Belgian production, That Night Follows Day.
For full programme details, see www.dublintheatrefestival.com