Interactions

Acknowledgements

This book had its origins in a conference organized by the Irish Theatrical Diaspora in association with the Dublin Theatre Festival and the Irish Theatre Institute in October 2007. On behalf of the ITD, we would like gratefully to acknowledge our partner institutions in organizing that event. In particular, we need to thank Loughlin Deegan for his encouragement throughout and for the Festival’s substantial support in publicizing the conference and making the Project Arts Centre available to us. We must also thank Madeline Boughton, Ross Keane, and Shauna Lyons. For additional support in funding the conference, we are pleased to acknowledge the Arts and Social Sciences Benefaction Fund in Trinity College, Dublin, and the NUI Galway Millennium Fund. We are also grateful to Karen Fricker, who was an active and immensely knowledgeable member of the steering committee for the conference. In the running of the conference itself, we were extremely well assisted by Lisa Coen and Shelley Troupe, our fellow researchers in a larger related project funded by the Irish Research Council for Humanities and the Social Sciences; to them many thanks. In preparing the list of DTF productions, Aoife Spillane-Hinks, the other member of the research team in the IRCHSS-supported project, carried out valuable research, while Shelley Troupe provided editorial support. We also gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Riana O’Dwyer of NUI Galway. At Carysfort Press, we wish to thank the team of Dan Farrelly, Eamonn Jordan, and particularly Lilian Chambers, who originally commissioned the memoirs from past directors of the Festival.

N.G.
P.L.

Preface

Being custodians of such a significant cultural organization as the Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival in its fiftieth anniversary year was a bracing responsibility. The challenge was to recognize Brendan Smith’s great vision and acknowledge the Festival’s illustrious theatrical history whilst remaining resolutely forward looking. We set ourselves high ambitions which we achieved, for the most part I believe, in fruitful partnership with many cultural and academic institutions.

One of the first meetings I had following my appointment in November 2006 was with Nicholas Grene and Patrick Lonergan of the Irish Theatrical Diaspora Project. They were interested in working with the Festival to organize an academic conference designed to investigate the impact of the Festival on the cultural life of the nation and its artists. We were delighted to work together to make such an important event happen, the results of which are contained in this very impressive published record.

The conference was personally stimulating in many ways: having researched the Festival’s history thoroughly in advance, I was thrilled to have my own reading of its influence challenged by Fintan O’Toole’s brilliant analysis. I, like many others, had continuously emphasized the enormous impact that visiting companies and artists must have had on a doggedly inward looking country still under the control of a conservative ruling party and an all-powerful church. Fintan, on the other hand, rightly concluded that it was the Irish work presented by the Festival that had the greater impact, challenging directly, as it did, the State who had supported the event from the outset and the Church who (initially) endorsed it. It was not, therefore, the corrupting influence of the foreign that was of concern, but the way we were representing ourselves to those foreigners through the powerful prism of our new International Theatre Festival.

In keeping with Fintan’s analysis, this focus on innovation and excellence must also extend to the Irish work. One of my ongoing ambitions is to improve the way the Festival develops and showcases Irish work (to as many foreigners as possible!). To do this, I believe, we must begin to see and appreciate Irish work in an international context. We are all aware that the world is becoming increasingly globalized and that international barriers are being eroded in numerous ways – from Ryanair to Facebook and everything in between. Using theatre as a tool to delineate a clear sense of national identity, therefore, is becoming less urgent and it is simply a fact that the international theatre scene has developed and mutated accordingly. Irish theatre artists are also reflecting this shifting reality in the work that they create and the institutional structures must now change to accommodate this work.

What is most significant about this publication is that it addresses all of these issues. It not only maps the Festival’s influence over the past fifty years, but it also provides signposts for how the Festival could and should develop over its second half century.

Loughlin Deegan
Artistic Director & CEO, Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival

Introduction: the Festival at Fifty

‘Both feast and celebration: a feast of international shows and a celebration of the creative talents of Irish artists.’ This was the summary of the organizers of the 1983 Dublin Theatre Festival, quoted below by John Harrington in his essay on the Beckett Festival. A quarter of a century later, how might the history of the Festival at Fifty be best charted, evaluated, or evoked? It is possible to trace its evolution from the nationwide tourist event An Tóstal, as Christopher Fitz-Simon does in his lively personal reminiscence, and to provide a social and political reading of that evolution as Fintan O’Toole does in his searching retrospect. A complete listing of all the productions mounted by the DTF can be compiled, as this volume does for the first time. Individual landmark events can be picked out: important Irish premieres at the Festival such as Hugh Leonard’s Joyce adaptation Stephen D. (1962), Brian Friel’s Philadelphia Here I Come! in 1964 or Máiréad Ní Ghráda’s An Triail from the same year, Tom Murphy’s The Sanctuary Lamp (1975), Stewart Parker’s Northern Star (1985), Thomas Kilroy’s The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde (1997) or Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats (1998); notable foreign visits like Jean Vilar’s Théâtre Nationale Populaire in the Festival’s inaugural year, the Polish Wroclaw Contemporary Theatre in 1981 and 1982, the Moscow Art Theatre with Chekhov’s The Seagull in 1989, and Footsbarn’s circus Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1990. What this book aims to do is to bring together information and analysis, interpretation and memory, to create a sense of what constitutes the history of the DTF and its meanings.

The complete listing of productions represents a crucially important scholarly resource, but is not readable except as raw data. Particular essays necessarily focus on specific parts of the Festival’s repertoire, drawing out the significance of work in particular media, or individual playwrights, directors, and companies. So Sara Keating shows the importance of Irish language drama, especially in the early stages of the Festival, with the emergence of adventurous and experimental playwrights influenced by European dramaturgy such as Seán Ó Tuama, Máiréad Ní Ghráda, and Séamus Ó Néill, while in more recent years it has devolved first into the Fringe Festival and then into its own separate festival An Borradh Buan. Emilie Pine highlights the importance of Hugh Leonard, the most produced Irish playwright at the Festival, and questions why his popular gifts as acute satirist of contemporary Ireland have been increasingly devalued and not received their due academic attention. Ros Dixon, in focussing on the recurrent Russian presence in the Festival, is able to situate within the history of Russian theatre itself the visits of the Moscow Art Theatre director, Maria Knebel, to direct an Abbey Theatre production of The Cherry Orchard in 1968, the 1989 MAT Seagull, or the more radical post-Soviet productions seen in the 1990s and since. Cathy Leeney concentrates on the work of a single director, Patrick Mason, and his exceptional creative gifts in the shaping of theatrical spaces in collaboration with scenic designers and playwrights as different as Kilroy, Mac Intyre, and Carr. Tanya Dean looks at the emergence of Rough Magic as one of the key contributors to the Festival from the mid-1980s, and reflects on the relationship between their policies as a resolutely independent company and their involvement in the mainstream DTF.

Nicholas Grene
Patrick Lonergan

1 |A Playwright’s Festival

Thomas Kilroy