Festival haunted by ghosts of Irish exiles

Theatre critic

Thursday 11 October 2012

There are many Irelands in this year's Dublin Theatre Festival.

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neil cooper

Yet in a two-week programme that mixes up the international and the experimental with bold approaches to Ireland's literary and dramatic canon, there are hints of Scotland too. This isn't just to do with the appearance of hit Catherine Wheels show White and puppeteer Shona Reppe's Potato Needs A Bath in the festival's family programme. Nor is it solely about the presence of New York's Elevator Repair Service with their impressionistic Ernest Hemingway adaptation, The Select (The Sun Also Rises), which was a wow at Edinburgh International Festival in 2010.

It isn't even to do with the forthcoming non-festival appearance in Dublin of Glasgow's Tron Theatre – a co-production of Dermot Bolger's stage version of James Joyce's novel, Ulysses, with the Project Arts Centre. Rather, there's a sense of ambition and confidence in new artistic director Willie White's first – and very good – Dublin programme that suggests a two-way traffic between the two nations may be ongoing in even more interesting ways.The trio of Tom Murphy plays presented by the Galway-based Druid company is a case in point. Works by both Murphy and Druid have been seen in EIF, and Garry Hynes' big, stately productions of Murphy's 1961 breakthrough piece A Whistle in the Dark, 1985's Conversations on a Homecoming, and 1977 historical epic Famine could be tailor-made for Edinburgh. All in different ways are about exile, with roots in the Irish potato famine, colonial rule and the history-changing sense of emotional displacement it fostered.Even more displaced is a take on Hamlet by American avant-garde icons The Wooster Group, which takes its cue from a rarely seen film of Richard Burton's performance as the haunted Dane in John Gielgud's 1964 Broadway production and becomes a bravura post-modern meditation on identity, reality and artifice.There are more intimations of identity in Bird With Boy, a lovely piece of dance-theatre performed in a grand tenement townhouse by Junk Ensemble. It melds professional and child performers to make something that takes flight almost as brilliantly as Dublin-born New Yorker Maeve Brennan does in The Talk of the Town, Emma Donoghue's impressionistic biography of a woman who lived physically in New York, but whose roots, as displayed by an emotional whirlwind of a performance from Catherine Walker as Maeve, could never escape her.Also in search of escape in Dublin was Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde's doomed narcissist as reimagined by Neil Bartlett at the Abbey Theatre in a sumptuous portrait of decadence worthy of the Citizens Theatre of old. Most thrilling of all at Dublin Theatre Festival this year, however, was The Boys of Foley Street, a thrillingly scary promenade through 1980s street-culture, which thrust its audience of four down back-alleys, into cars and housing estate shooting galleries in a site-specific performance that cut to the corrupted heart of Dublin.While there's no obvious theme running through all of these shows, the historical and umbilical links are plain to see. If the characters in Famine begat those in Murphy's other two plays, their descendants are even more evident, not just in Dubliners, but also in Maeve Brennan's flight from her home town and her burning ambition to make it in New York. Famine's descendants are there too in the London drug dens frequented by Bartlett and Wilde's Dorian Gray, whose habitues pre-date the feral waifs of Bird With Boy and the 1980s housing estate smack-heads in The Boys of Foley Street.Without the drive of Maeve Brennan, and disenfranchised economically and socially, the strung-out teens in the Boys of Foley Street can only escape internally. Theirs is an ultimately self-destructive exile. Like Maeve, Dorian and Murphy's battling brothers, they are the ghosts in the machine of The Wooster Group's Hamlet. They are what keep Dublin's theatrical soul alive.Dublin Theatre Festival runs until October 14www.dublintheatrefestival.com

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Festival haunted by ghosts of Irish exiles

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