Old classics and cutting-edge new work: 10 to see at Dublin Theatre Festival
Physical comedy is to the fore with The Maker, likely one of the highlights of Dublin Theatre Festival. Picture: Ste Murray
Tickets for Druid’s 50th-anniversary Shakespeare show were harder to come by than All-Ireland tickets when it played the tiny Mick Lally Theatre in Galway this summer. The appeal of that show was its claustrophobic intensity, with Marty Rea’s eyes burning out at you as his Macbeth descended into madness. What will it be like when it transfers to a bigger theatre, and perhaps a more orthodox staging? An interesting question, but a chance for more people to see an extraordinary piece of work either way.
If Macbeth’s not your bag, you can look to an even more renowned Shakespearean tragic protagonist, as the festival opens with a unique staging of Hamlet. Don’t expect the full five-acts though. This version, freely adapted by director and writer Chela De Ferrari, is performed in Spanish by a group of actors with Down syndrome, in a playful deconstruction.
If it’s a straight-up play you want, look no farther than Adam Rapp’s 2018 one, which was much-nominated in New York, and comes to Dublin in a production that was popular and acclaimed in Edinburgh this summer. The Sound Inside stars the American actress Madeleine Potter as Bella Lee Baird, a creative writing professor at Yale who has just been diagnosed with cancer. The play follows her relationship with another maverick, a freshman student named Christopher, played by Eric Sirakian.
How do they do that? That’s an oft-asked question when we consider actors and their job. Unfortunately for Peter Hanly, one day, he no longer had the answer. With a well-loved role in Ballykissangel, a part in Braveheart, and the lead in the great musical Improbably Frequency behind him, Hanly, in 2012, was suddenly struck by stage fright. Now, he returns to the stage, in an extraordinary effort to understand just what happened.
As a performer, Mikel Murfi can do no wrong, witness his exploits this summer in a fish tank at an aquarium in Galway. The mercurial Murfi is back now with a take on The Quiet Man. He’s played a few in his time, most notably Pat Farnon, the mute cobbler in a series of brilliant one-man shows. This version of the story that inspired the Hollywood movie promises flying cows, wind-blown sheep, a ploughing contest, handball, and a fist fight.
The best thing at the 2022 Dublin Theatre Festival was undoubtedly Dan Colley’s brilliantly conceived take on Shakespeare, aging and mental health, Lost Lear. The director is back again with The Maker, created along with Raymond Keane and Manus Halligan. With such a trio involved, this promises to be a show of creative, clownish invention and physical comedy. The company themselves promise to evoke the three Bs: Borges, Beckett and Buster (Keaton, that is).
The great Sheffield company Forced Entertainment were at it again last year, with the exasperating, hilarious, and anarchic Signal to Noise. The company itself might not be around this year, but director Tim Etchells is, having created L’Addition with the French performance duo Bertrand Lesca and Nasi Voutsas. The clue is very much in the title, as the pair riff on a repetitive, increasingly chaotic scene involving a waiter and restaurant diner.
Ben Kidd and Bush Moukarzel, aka Dead Center, are always worth a watch, whether it was their breakthrough show Lippy, the wild Chekhov’s First Play, the ghostly Beckett’s Room, the playful Good Sex, or the head-spinning virtual reality of To Be a Machine, there’s never a shortage of ideas from this pair. This year’s project is Deaf Republic, a fable of war adapted from the poems of the Ukrainian-American author Ilya Kaminsky, and told through a mix of spoken word, sign language, and silence.
Playwright Ciara Elizabeth Smyth takes on the Chekhov classic of three stifled siblings dreaming of the big city. It’s not confirmed if they’ve swapped Moscow for Dublin as their city of light, but this promises to be a contemporary take, directed by Marc Atkinson Borrull and designed by Molly O’Cathain. The cast includes veteran actor Lorcan Cranich, as well as Megan Cusack, and Saoirse-Monica Jackson from Derry Girls.
Katriona O’Sullivan’s memoir of childhood neglect, abuse, and poverty was a popular and critical success, and now that tale, as harrowing as it is hopeful, is being transferred to the stage by Sonya Kelly. Poor follows O’Sullivan’s story from Coventry and Birmingham to Dublin, where she moved as a teenager and turned her life around.
