Putting the city at the centre

IT WAS only a few short steps for Willie White, but a giant leap in terms of his working life.

When he swapped the Project Arts Centre for the Dublin Theatre Festival, he only had to move a few doors up the street in Temple Bar, but running a festival is a big change from running a year-round venue.

“It’s very different,” says White over coffee around the corner from festival HQ. “A 12-month venue is very iterative, but for a festival there’s an awful lot of preparation, then a very intense delivery period. You don’t have to do it all on your own, of course, you have a whole load of very experienced people who have done it all before, and whom you watch and admire.

“If it doesn’t go well you can’t get back and do another show a few months later to feel good about yourself. You have to get it right. The great thing is that it is a fantastic platform. You can do things in a festival that you can’t do otherwise. People might go see shows they might not go see at other times of year.”

White has spent the last nine years encouraging audiences to be adventurous at the Project, but his first programme for the theatre festival is not one that will frighten the horses. There is an evident continuity with the tenure of his predecessor, Loughlin Deegan. Under White, the festival remains a broad church, with some excellent touring companies, quality new plays, and some shows that will push audiences out of their comfort zone.

But, in a way, White hasn’t had to remake the programme according to his own peculiar vision. Deegan, in his time, had very much steered the event Project-ward, so to speak, giving the festival platform over to young companies who flourished under White in his time at the venue.

“You have a joint responsibility to the audience and the artists,” says White. “You want to be offering new, challenging, exciting experiences and at the same time you want the artists to be adventurous, to take risks — at the right scale.”

What does mark White’s first year in charge is what he calls his eagerness to make a statement about the ‘Dublin’ part of the festival’s title. “As well as being an international festival and welcoming people from all over Ireland and all over the world, I wanted one of the topics for the festival to be the city itself.”

And so the tag line of this year’s festival: ‘Your City, Your Stories’. It’s a slogan that sits very well with the opening show: Corn Exchange’s adaptation of James Joyce’s Dubliners, which the festival is co-producing.

Joyce’s work coming out of copyright provided a “fantastic opportunity,” says White. “There was a window of opportunity to do it this year,” he says. “If we had waited it might not have happened.”

The book was also the choice for the One City, One Book initiative last spring. “So you think, great, people are going to know this book and aren’t going to be daunted by it.”

The strong Dublin seam this year runs on through The Talk of the Town, Emma Donogue’s play on the life of New Yorker writer Maeve Brennan; an Abbey Theatre production of The Picture of Dorian Gray; Shibari, Gary Duggan’s look at the multicultural city; and Declan Hughes’s The Last Summer, set in the very much more monocultural Dublin of 1977. Anu Productions rounds off its Monto Cycle, an impressive social history of the inner city, with The Boys of Foley Street.

Speaking of all these new plays, White reflects on a recent tendency in Irish theatre where the focus wouldn’t have been on new writing. “It’s not that I’m trying to return to anything or correct anything, but it’s notable that there are more new Irish plays that usual this year. It strikes me that there is a lot going on at the moment, there’s a lot to write about.”

White is also keen to hear new voices. Thirty writers were selected as part of the festival’s new Play On strand. Their work will be showcased at readings during the festival.

This abundance of the homegrown (not to mention DruidMurphy and several other Irish shows) might have some wondering if funding issues were a determining factor. The festival lost its title sponsor, Ulster Bank, last year, and its Arts Council grant has taken a hit too. “I wouldn’t have behaved differently,” says White. “The sponsorship relationship we had for the last five years, which ended last October, was very welcome and the festival made great use of it. But the fundamental for what we are able to do is our support from the Arts Council. The Irish public are by far the greatest supporters of the festival.

“The festival has shown itself to be quite elastic. The more resources it has, the more it can expand and be more ambitious in what it represents. We are agile and need to be.”

That budgetary agility has brought 30 shows to this year’s festival, more than last year. The internationalism that marked Loughlin Deegan’s tenure remains, with a standout pair of productions coming from the US: Hamlet, by the renowned Wooster Group; and The Select (The Sun Also Rises), by Elevator Repair Service, whose nine-hour dramatisation of The Great Gatsby was a worldwide smash. Their take on Hemingway comes in at a breezy three and a half hours.

The festival is not quite the survey of European theatre that it has been, but, says White. “You have to take into account it’s a marathon, not a sprint — I don’t have to do it all in one year”.

Discovering what’s on offer in Poland, Hungary and elsewhere will take time, he says. “So this year I was leaning towards work that I knew, and work that I was familiar with from Project, but, yeah, I’ve already seen lots of stuff, thinking for next year.”

White also reports that tickets sales are ahead of where they were this time last year. “It’s encouraging,” he says. “My responsibility is to offer a programme that is high quality, and I’m confident we’ve done that; but it is also to offer a programme that people will be interested in, that they will part with money and time for. There’s a nervousness around about whether people are spending money. I think they are, but they are cautious, understandably, and they want to be sure, they are less likely to take a risk. I am very encouraged, but I would never be complacent.”

* The Dublin Theatre Festival runs from Sept 27-Oct 14. See dublintheatrefestival.com