Dublin Theatre Festival 2012 - likes and dislikes

Boulevardier

I will be beginning my annual 2-week theatregoing splurge tonight (Friday) with a visit to Dubliners at the Gaiety as part of the DTF which I join every year as a Friend (to show all my mates how cultured I am!)

I am not a fan of the Gaiety where audience management is very poor, but I am looking forward to Dubliners.

Mind you, Joyce could have said if he wanted Dubliners to be a play he would have written a play but i will park that point for the moment.

Boulevardier

"Dubliners" is very much a thing of 2 halves. At the interval, I felt it was headed onto the rocks. The first half was, for the most part, mercilessly hammed-up, which was partly justified by the tone of some of the earlier stories, and might have been semi-OK had a large section of the Gaiety audience not laughed inanely in all the wrong places. Sorry, but the net effect was cringe-making.

The second part was vastly superior. I felt the later Dubliners stories were handled much more sensitively and the result was very impressive.

The second part of Dubliners would get ***** from me, but the earlier part brings the average down to ****.

Boulevardier

I'm noticing a difference between this Festival and others before - a couple of years ago, there was a tendency to put on acts of about 70 minutes' duration with no intervals. Now, for the same money, I am getting longer dramas, which therefore have intervals.

I went to The Select - The Sun also rises at yesterday's (Sunday) Matinee. It was an enjoyable 3-hour immersion in Hemingway's macho, hard-partying world, but having seen "Midnight in Paris" a few months ago, I was almost expecting a Woody Allen character to appear and make some anachronistic wisecrack!

Actually, the main intrusions were caused by mistimed sound effects which visibly embarrassed the cast.

The dialogue was richly decadent, the drunken rant of the character Frances being a tour de force. Drink was constantly present (not something Roisin Shortall would approve of) and and the bar-room set was very cleverly used, but the dance sequences to my mind did not really convince. The bullfight atmosphere in the second part was on the other hand very successfully conveyed, thanks not least to putting up the volume.

That is my second of 2 reasonably successful book-dramatisations. The Select gets a *** from me.

lukegriffen

Have I No Mouth has been the highlight for me so far. I didn't know anything about this about before I went in, but it's autobiographical-style theatre which I've never seen before - mother, son & their shrink were on stage, talking about their husband/father who died 10 years previously.

I made the mistake of booking 2 shows on Sunday, not realising how long The Select was, and at the interval I couldn't face another 2 hours of it & then have to go straight to King lear. Now I wish I had stayed at The Select and skipped King Lear , it was far too cryptic for me, don't know what it was about.

I really enjoyed Dubliners, yes it could have been a little better (but not much), and yes they hammed it up in parts, but I thought it was a special occasion

Dubliners was packed to the rafters, but there were lots of free seats in The Select & Have I no mouth.

observe

I loved Everyone Is King Lear In His Home. On a completely literal level, yes of course it is hard to follow, jumping as it does from the King Lear text to every day banalities. Did I understand everything? No not at all. But for me that is so unimportant. I watched this show and felt many emotions. Surely, that is what happens when you witness good theatre.
The performances from both actors were totally committed and in the moment. Highly recommended.

Boulevardier

I went last night (Friday) to Talk of the town. It worked well as a portrait of the central character, the Irish New Yorker journalist Maeve Brennan and her personal milieu, which I suppose is the main job of the play, but I found the thing ultimately disappointing.

The thinking behind the set was similar to that in The Select, namely a bar-room/hotel (Algonquin?) background which is focussed and de-focussed as each scene requires, but unlike the Select version it did not bring the subject alive. I simply did not feel that the world of 1940s-50s New York was going on around them.

The scenes set in Maeve's childhood home of Ranelagh were not just trite set-pieces of oirish kitchen drama. They were probably total fiction. Maeve's father was a comfortably-off diplomat for much of her youth, and so her mother would not have been the sort of skivvy she is portrayed as being. This sub-plot plays to Emma Donoghue's message of women imprisoned in a male culture, but not, I suspect, to historical reality.

Still, fair play to Catherine Walker - a bravura performance in what must be a demanding role.

I give Talk of the town ***.

Boulevardier

The last 2 plays I attended at this year's DTF were both Tom Mirphy plays put on by Druid at my least favourite theatre, the Gaiety, where there is clearly noise intrusion, during performances, coming from a nearby pub or music venue.

I thought Famine was workmanlike and professionally done, but not much more. In Famine, Murphy portrays the exile figure, who has taken the soup and now also takes the boat to Canada, as a winner, or success story, in contrast to the brutal and hopeless denial of reality of those who stick with their community and remain behind.

In Conversations on a homecoming, the returned exile is a more ambiguous figure, but I felt that this production, more than one I saw some years ago was very much dominated by the bitterly disillusioned non-exile, the teacher Tom, who came across as nothing short of malignant.

Overall, I found this year's DTF the least exciting of the 8 or so I have attended. My best: Dubliner's (2nd half) and The select/Sun also rises. Least impressive: Talk of the town.