Dublin Theatre Festival: Cork choreographers to Brazilian battles... 8 highlights to see
Dublin Theatre Festival runs until October 15.
The Lir Academy When Volcano won the best production gong at the Irish theatre awards in 2022, it was not a popular choice. Not because of any lack of quality, but because, at that point, it had one short, COVID-constrained run in Galway under its belt. Now, Cork theatremaker and choreographer Luke Murphy’s show has been getting the exposure it deserves, with five-star reviews following. This newspaper hailed it recently as a “scintillating assault on the senses”, where “Ballyturk meets Black Mirror”. Dublin audiences can now finally see what all the fuss is about.
International work has always been a strong strand at the Dublin Theatre Festival, particularly given the cosmopolitan tastes of artistic director Willie White. This year, two of the most anticipated shows come from that cultural cauldron of a country, Brazil. Zona Franca opens the festival, a show from the acclaimed choreographer Alice Ripoll and the Cia Suave company, which wrestles with ideas of freedom against the country’s uncertain political backdrop, as it moves from the leadership of Jair Bolsonaro to Lula da Silva.
In another show from Brazil, Christiane Jatahy has adapted Itamar Vieira Junior’s novel Torto Arado, or Crooked Plow, a work that’s been likened to John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, transposed to rural Brazil’s subsistence farmers. Jatahy, a recent winner of the Venice Biennale’s lifetime achievement award, mixes documentary, cinema, theatre, and art installation in her exploration of another politically charged Brazilian theme: the fight for land rights among the country’s black and indigenous communities.
Since her play No Romance was staged at the Abbey in 2012, Nancy Harris has been a whip-sharp chronicler of modern life, family intrigue, and love, recently winning wider audiences with her TV series The Dry, starring Roisin Gallager. Harris’s latest sees her back at the Abbey, with the premiere of a new romantic comedy about what happens when a woman hitherto unlucky in love brings home a new boyfriend who seems a little too good to be true.
Gavin Quinn and Aedin Cosgrave have spent 30 years at Pan Pan creating their brand of ambitious, playful, ironic, postmodern theatre. Sometimes, as in 2005’s One: Healing for Theatre, with its 100-strong cast, the scale has been astounding. At others, they’ve crafted memorable work with emerging artists and youth theatre groups, or deconstructed classics like Oedipus Rex and Hamlet in revelatory ways. Whatever the approach, it’s always worthy of attention. For this year’s festival, Pan Pan is drafting in a “Parliament of Historians” including Caitriona Crowe, Diarmaid Ferriter, Roy Foster, and others, to create a performance that interrogates our ideas of history, whether official, personal or oral.
The writer Mark O’Connell and the Dead Centre company always appeared an ideal match. Both, in their different fields, deal in the multiple ironies and uncertainties of our uncanny moment, where what’s real and unreal, natural and unnatural are more and more blurred. They have teamed up again this year to dive deeper into the ideas O’Connell raises in his work about how humans and technology intersect. Audiences are invited to upload photos of themselves, and don VR headsets for a journey into the unexpected.
The Man in the Woman’s Shoes first appeared in 2012 as an unassuming festival one-man show. It had a secret weapon, however: Mikel Murfi’s astoundingly versatile performance. On the back of that, the play has travelled the world, trailing acclaim in its wake, and spawning an equally beguiling sequel, I Hear You and Rejoice. It’s audiences who will be rejoicing to see Murfi return to the smalltown world of cobbler Pat Farnon, with his new play, The Mysterious Case of Kitsy Rainey. For those who’ve not yet seen the first two parts of the trilogy, both of them will be performed during the festival too.
For several years, the Ghent playhouse NTGent has asked a theatremaker one question: “As a creator, what is your story?” In this, the fourth instalment, acclaimed as a “wild, exhilarating study in absurdity” at the Avignon festival last year, Belgian artist Miet Warlop responds in her inimitable way: collecting 12 performers on stage for One Song, the unsurprising name for a show that involves multiple repeated performances of a single song over its duration. Theatre then as a challenge, perhaps as discomfort? Or as a celebration of ritual? That will be for each to decide for themselves.
- For more see dublintheatrefestival.ie
