Pick of the week: Dublin Theatre Festival
Most of the productions at this year's Dublin Theatre Festival have taken shape during a turbulent and frightening year: of international conflict, continuing crisis, international terrorism, broad political destabilisation, and, in Ireland, much revolutionary pageantry while we had no functioning government. How should theatre respond? One suspects that the festival has responded by offering a suite of comforts.
Few would see yet another Shakespeare or Chekhov production on the programme and detect any great urgency in their inclusion. But with Filter and Lyric Hammersmith’s anarchic festival opener A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Corn Exchange’s cross-gender protagonist for The Seagull (Jane McGrath and Genevieve Hulme-Beaman, above), there are signs artists are again up to something.
Familiar faces ANU and Coiscéim collaborate on These Rooms, the third in a commemorative triptych focused in civilian responses to the Rising; hardworking festival regulars Brokentalkers stage a piece of dance theatre based on WB Yeats fascination with automatic writing; and, perhaps most pointedly, THEATREclub’s riff on The Plough and the Stars, paramilitarism and republicanism comes with the title It’s Not Over.
Not for the first time, the Abbey premiere’s new works at the festival from Frank McGuinness and Carmel Winters, while international productions include provocative Spanish work Guerrilla, a Russian documentary from a Belgian company named with German sympathies in Berlin’s ZVIZDAL (Chernobyl - so far so close) and acclaimed new writing from England’s Paines Plough in Duncan Macmillan’s Every Brilliant Thing.
It may not strike you as a bold programme, but with the world in such a state, perhaps we could do with fewer surprises.
MONDAY
Gig for Robbie
Olympia Theatre Dublin 7pm €20 ticketmaster.ie
An all-star tribute show for much admired Irish musician Robbie Brennan, who passed away earlier this year.
The performer list reads like a who's-who of Irish music talent of a certain vintage, and includes Auto Da Fe (Gay Woods), Mary Coughlan, Paul Brady, Brush Shiels, Philip Donnelly, Scullion, Stepaside, Ed Deane, Honor Heffernan (right) , and many more.
Pyg Sundays
Pygmalion Dublin 9pm €10 beatsinspace.net
Tim Sweeney's WNYU radio show hasn't skipped a beat since it went live in 1999.
Aside from guest appearances from James Murphy, Four Tet, Jamie xx, Carl Craig, DJ Harvey and others, Beats In Space has maintained its appeal thanks to Sweeney's own skill as a selector in joining the dots between vintage and new tracks. For his latest visit to Dublin, he's supported by Colin Perkins and Callum Kennedy.
TUESDAY
Jamie T
Olympia Theatre, Dublin 8pm €31.50 ticketmaster.ie Also Wed, Belfast
Jamie Treays returns to Ireland hot on the heels of the release of his fourth album, Trick. The new album has – as they say – divided the critics, but the fanbase remains loyal and committed to the Londoner's mixed bag of highly charged, politicised pop/rock and hip-hop.
The place where I stand to look out over this world
New paintings by Ann Quinn. Taylor Galleries, 16 Kildare St, Dublin Until Oct 8 taylorgalleries.ie
Ann Quinn's paintings have a hyper-real quality, though they are not at all photorealist. Rather there's an hallucinatory intensity to the way we see things – and mostly the ordinary, everyday world – through her eyes. The clue could well be in her title: she is an engrossed, rapt observer of the strange richness of things.
WEDNESDAY
Hare Squead
Button Factory Dublin 7.30pm €13 buttonfactory.ie
Really good hip-hop is slowly but surely infiltrating its way into the Irish music scene, and alongside the likes of Rusangano Family is this Tallaght trio. Think the right level of swagger and sass fusing with the perfect degree of beats, electro and edge-of-seat throbs.
The Father
Gate Theatre. Ends Oct 22 7.30pm Previews €25, Mon and Mats €27, Tues-Thurs €34, Fri-Sat €37.50 gatetheatre.ie
Why has Owen Roe's gruff Andre lashed out at his nurse, his daughter asks? Because she has stolen his watch, he insists. Where did he leave it? He can't remember, but now it's gone. "There's your proof!" But little is certain in Florian Zeller's play, given a crisp translation by Christopher Hampton, when Andre's mind has begun to misplace events, faces, places, even whole personal histories. The unsettling genius of the play is that as Andre's confusion grows, so too does ours. Director Ethan McSweeny and designer Francis O'Connor help us see things from the distressed perspective of dementia. Here, scenes don't flow, they fracture or repeat, in a tragicomedy of dignity and despair. The title suggests a broader crisis in patriarchy – "He had so much authority," says a disbelieving Fiona Bell as his daughter. But Roe gives a shattering individual performance, charming and trembling, with a mind in revolt. It's hard not to hear tragic echoes of his King Lear asking, finally, "Who exactly am I?"
THURSDAY
Blackbirds in the Garden of Prisms
Mother's tankstation, Dublin Until Oct 29 motherstankstation.com
Mairead O'hEocha is one of the leading figures in the current generation of fine Irish painters, as well as one of the most unlikely. O'hEocha originally studied sculpture, discovered an inclination towards performance art, then completed an MA at the home of Brit-Art neo-conceptualism, London's Goldsmiths College. Against all odds, she emerged from this progression as a painter and, in this new work, as a painter of still life.
David O'Rourke
JJ Smyths, Dublin 9pm €10 jjsmyths.com Also Sat, Limerick Jazz Festival
This New York-based guitarist's journey home will be a somber one, following the passing of his mentor Louis Stewart. But expect the great guitarist's memory to be celebrated in appropriate style by O'Rourke, one of his chief protegees, who has carved out a niche on the New York scene as a player, composer, orchestrator and educator.
