Strong literary strand runs through Dublin Theatre Festival line-up

Tag : Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

The festival programme, announced yesterday by artistic directorLoughlin Deegan, includes 27 productions in 16 venues betweenSeptember 25th and October 12th.
A strong literary strand runs through this year's line-up, withplays and performances based on the work of Virginia Woolf, FranzKafka, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Joseph Conrad and Samuel Beckett, and amarathon seven-hour "verbatim staging" of F Scott Fitzgerald'sentire The Great Gatsby.
There are home productions aplenty, with the Gate Theatre puttingon a new version of Hedda Gabler by Brian Friel, Druid's Irishpremiere of Martin McDonagh's The Cripple of Inishmaan, andTennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof from Corn Exchange.Fishamble, meanwhile, is doing a new Irish play: Robert Massey'sRank, which "charts the transformation of Dublin in the pastdecade". As previously announced, the Abbey Theatre reunitesCork-born actor Fiona Shaw with acclaimed British director DeborahWarner for the National Theatre of Great Britain's production ofBeckett's Happy Days.
Already regarded as a landmark of contemporary theatre and muchsought after by festivals around the world, the National Theatre ofScotland's production of Black Watch, based on the war experiencesof soldiers from the regiment of the same name, will be staged atthe RDS.
Nick Cave and a fellow musician from the Bad Seeds and Grinderman,Warren Ellis, will provide the music for a theatrical version ofKafka's Metamorphosis.
Some of the other literary adaptations are: Waves, based on Woolf'snovel, The Waves; Delirium, written by Enda Walsh but described as"a free and outrageous adaptation" of Dostoevsky's The BrothersKaramazov; and the theatrical marathon Gatz, in which an officeworker finds an old copy of The Great Gatsby, starts to read it . .. and doesn't stop, in a staging that involves an ensemble of 13actors.
One of the first sell-out shows is expected to be The Year ofMagical Thinking, starring Redgrave and adapted by Didion from herown memoir.
Opera and dance enthusiasts are catered for in a reworking ofMozart's The Magic Flute that relocates the opera to a townshipsetting in South Africa, and a new CoisCéim Dance Theatreshow, Dodgems, which will transform the O'Reilly Theatre into afairground atmosphere.
Dublin City Gallery the Hugh Lane will be an appropriate venue forTim Crouch's England, a provocative-sounding show that has one ofits characters say "good art is art that sells", while 16 childrentake to the stage for a visiting Belgian production, That NightFollows Day.
For full programme details, see www.dublintheatrefestival.com