This year’s Dublin Theatre Festival was a lot like a fringe affair trotting out experimental new work rather than a traditional theater festival showcasing major productions and marquee names. The only big name to appear in the three weeks was Vanessa Redgrave. She was center stage in The Year of Magical Thinking, an adaptation by Joan Didion of her memoir of the same name. In it, Didion described coping with grief in the aftermath of the sudden death of her husband. Redgrave portrayed it well.

Apart from that strong piece, there were productions that left a lot to be desired. Plays I had never heard about before and frankly, do not expect to hear much about again. And actors with raw talent that was, well—so raw that it could have benefitted from more seasoning. A highly touted piece called Dodgems was put on by the CoisCeim Dance striders. The play opened with simulated sex between a Romany woman and a man with no legs that ended with a bang. Some of the sketches were funny—such as one where a Dublin taxi driver got a couple of Muslim fares to admit they might modify their non-pork diet in extreme circumstances—and showed what might have been. But most of the numbers left the audience scratching its collective head as to what they were all about.

Off the Book

And in keeping with the Festival’s “off the book theme” there was a 7.5 hour adaption—yes, it really ran more than 7 hours—of The Great Gatsby. It was called Gatz and was staged by Elevator Repair Services, a New York theater company based in Brooklyn. The presentation started at 3 in the afternoon and continued past 10 at night. However, since my behind and bladder gave out long before the play ended, I was not able to last until it was over.

The play was literally an onstage reading of the Scott Fitzgerald novel—with some scenes from the book played out by actors. In the play, an actor came into an office and could not get his computer to boot up. Rummaging around for something to do, he found a copy of The Great Gatsby stuffed into a rolodex on his desk. After flipping through the pages, he began to read aloud. Other office workers appeared and went about their day’s work, ignoring the reader. Then, as the narrator continued to speak they began role playing characters and scenes. They recited actual lines from the pages just as Fitzgerald penned them and the interplay between them and the narrator was for the narrator to interpose “he said” or “she said” before or after they spoke. The production was innovative and interesting at first, but grew wearisome—at least for me—long before its official end.

Quartiere Bloom

A challenge for out of town theater goers was finding some play venues, since some productions were held in hard to find places. One particular challenge was getting to You Are Here in the Quartiere Bloom. For a long time I found that I really wasn’t there. The program instructions said for playgoers to assemble at the “Last Supper Mural north of the Millennium Bridge.” A problem was that the festival map did not list the location of the bridge or the mural and no one I asked knew the Quartiere Bloom. So much for Dubliners keeping up with their changing city!

After wandering up and down the Liffey-front like a latter-day Leopold Bloom, I finally located the mural on an inner ally wall. Then, there was another problem. No one in the trendy sidewalk cafes knew anything about a play. But I hung around and eventually Hugh and Asling from the festival showed up. Asling told me that the play was actually being put on in someone’s apartment, which was the reason for the secrecy and the audience being limited to 15.

After having a colored band placed on our wrists, all 15 of us filed after Asling along city streets and eventually up the stairs into a regular apartment. There, we stood, squished flat along the walls of various rooms, and watched as four actors depicted slices of life in modern Ireland. One couple traced the arc of an affair between a well-to-do businessman and his mistress. This stretched from sexual infatuation in the bedroom at the beginning to eventual indifference and break-up in the kitchen/living room at the close. I did not get to see much of what was going on with the other couple because my colored wrist band permitted me to see just one half of Irish life. If I wanted the other half, I had to get another ticket and return for a separate performance. Was the play any good? That’s hard to say. It depicted modern Ireland like a window peeper might view it. But, as a theatergoer from Germany who had come especially to Dublin for the festival commented, “it was superficial and shallow.” I was inclined to agree.

Life in London

Another fanciful production was England written and played by Tim Crouch which was performed at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Parnell Square. In the play, Crouch and Hannah Ringham his co-performer, played the parts of art gallery docents. They recited separate but parallel lines about where they lived in England, their free-loving lifestyles and their medical challenges as though they were guiding a group through an art gallery. But as far as I could see, they connected neither with each other nor the audience. The production had all the drama of two bus passengers going into prolonged harangues about their unhappy lives to the perturbation of everyone within earshot.