Gunning for good drama

`There are these jolts, when the public responds, and you think - `Oh my God, I really want to get this right!' "

Fergus Linehan (30), deputy director of this year's festival, takes over as festival director on the first day of the next millennium, when Tony O Dalaigh retires. But his influence on the festival has been growing in the seven years he has been working on it, and O Dalaigh says that this year's festival "bears his stamp".

Since he started circling the globe in search of buried theatrical treasure, his life, he says, has been "a virtual world, of reading plays and going to Zurich to see things in opera houses. You can lose sight of the huge privilege you have. We're the only ones in this state whose objective it is to present the big guns in theatre."

Irish theatre's isolation makes his responsibility doubly onerous: "I think I might be the only person from here who hits the main festivals. I mention names like Peter Stein or Peter Zadek and Irish theatre people might have seen nothing by them. It's a bit like a contemporary composer not having heard of Philip Glass."

But don't we still have wonderful theatre? "Yes, but that comes from the literary side, which is relatively cheap. It is a case of hunkering down and spinning a yarn." That isn't enough on its own to sustain Irish theatre, he intimates. However, he adds, it is the Irish part of the programme which makes the festival different and unique. "In other international festivals there can be one tokenistic thing, where you can see they thought they had to do something with the locals. Our relationship with the Irish shows was passive for so long, but last year we co-presented Paul Mercier's Dublin trilogy. I hope we're going to do more of that."

He cautions against being programmatic about what future festivals will contain, however: "Someone like Conor Mc Pherson comes out of the blue." "Out of the Fringe," I respond, and he laughs. The Fringe was his idea in 1995, but it was developed by Jimmy Fay and the current director, Ali Curran, and was, he says, "like a flame hitting a torch." The existence of the Fringe has allowed O Dalaigh and Linehan to present the festival in its current form, reduced down to a small, meaty, nourishing dish. In the context of a buzzing Dublin, they have concentrated on what we don't see otherwise: the major international shows, "the big guns". Linehan will continue in this vein, doing in-depth international research. He would like to see top international directors working with Irish theatre people when they are here, but not in some prescriptive way, such as "a north-south Romeo and Juliet, which would be easy to get funding for."

He expects the Eircom sponsorship to last three festivals at least, and Moya Doherty is committed to remaining as chairperson for that length of time: "It will take at least that long to see if this branding of an arts event at a national level - which has never been tried before - works," he says, and he will certainly stay that long. There will be an all-out effort to reposition the event as a "destination festival" for visitors. In plain words, he sets himself the task of "getting better shows, and getting more and more people into them."