Dublin Theatre Festival

The Dublin Theatre Festival went into its thirty-first year this season, with a condensed programme of over thirty-five productions spanning a three, rather than a two, week run. There is a considerably larger imput this year from Irish writers and companies, with over fifteen new home-grown works premiering at the Festival. Among them is the haunting Carthaginians by Frank McGuinness, a tale of tales of Derry and Derry people. McGuinness is of recent years, one of the more prolific contributors to the Festival, as this year also sees the first staging of his version of Peer Gynt at the Gate.

International contributions to the Festival have become progressively more frequent since 1981, with over ten major shows from Europe, Australia, South Africa and Japan highlighting this year's season. Included amongst those are Simon Fanshawe and Jenny Lecoat, two of London's most popular and controversial comic performers; Amampondo, the South African dance/music/singing group who perform a shattering explosion of African culture on stage in the Olympia, and the Torokko Puppet Theatre giving a short run in the Mansion House.

Reviewed below are some events of particular interest to GCN readers. A number of plays are running to the end of the month if you haven't seen them.

STONEPICKERS

Pickers of stone. Gatherers of hardness, of remains, of harshness, of solid realities. Five men thrown together on a labouring site, bound by rituals of masculinity, and each seeking a way out the trap in which he finds himself. Each confronting the reality of his enslaved condition and all ultimately discovering a certain sameness in their lot.

These are the bones which Peter Gowen's play strips bare. It shaves through the thin lint which divides helpless violence and abject submission, scraping away the flesh of steadfast ritual and hierarchical control, and finding strangely weak and quivering creatures behind them. Ostensibly the play concerns the interactions of these five workers and their supervisor, exploring their diversities and their similarities and finally drawing them together as a force to defeat the oppressive injustice of their boss. It succeeds quite brilliantly in portraying the modes of control and the levels of communication that exist among the group, where rules of behaviour are ironly imposed and where alliances are forged and broken in rapid alternation.