Channing to play Bracknell in Dublin

ARTSCAPE:STOCKARD CHANNING, the US star of screen and stage, is heading to Dublin to play Lady Bracknell in a Rough Magic show – a new production of The Importance of Being Earnest. Channing, smart and sassy, is widely known as Betty Rizzo in the film Grease, and later in the film, Broadway and West End productions of Six Degrees of Separation. But for many she's best known as the real American First Lady - for her role as Abigail Bartlet to Martin Sheen's president Jed Bartlet in NBC's The West Wing. Rough Magic just confirmed the high profile, and intriguing, casting on Thursday evening, for the run at Dublin's Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, from June 2nd, writes DEIRDRE FALVEY

Director Lynne Parker (currently directing Louis Lovett in The Girl who Forgot to Sing Badlyat the Ark) promises this Earnestwill be faithful to the original and take no conceptual liberties (not an all-male cast again, then). "We live in an age of surfaces," Parker quotes Wilde, saying how apposite that remark is for the age we live in, where people play games and get away with it. "The truth is rarely pure and never simple."

Real life may be providing plenty of drama these days, but dramatic art is also getting into gear for the early part of the year. Earnestis only part of it; the Gaiety's programme for the first half of 2010 includes more straight theatre than has figured in its line-up for years. The popular stage version of The Shawshank Redemption, directed by Peter Sheridan, retuns to the theatre in May, and after Edna O'Brien's Haunted(with Brenda Blethyn) at the Gaiety from next week, Noel Pearson has a new production of Brian Friel's Philadelphia, Here I Come!in March. Its 1964 production at the same theatre during that year's Dublin Theatre Festival is seen as hugely significant in Irish theatre, establishing Friel as the leading Irish playwright of his generation, and was the first Irish production to go on to international acclaim. (It was directed by Hilton Edwards from the Gate, which next week sees a return of Faith Healerwith Owen Roe.) Pearson's cast – Brid Brennan, Alan Devlin, Gerry McSorley, Barry McGovern, Marion O'Dwyer, Tom Vaughan Lawlor, and Ciaran O'Brien – features many associated with Friel's work, including in Pearson's original 1991 Dancing at Lughnasa.It's directed by Shakespeare's Globe Theatre artistic director Dominic Dromgoole.

What will presumably be Opera Ireland's last ever Gaiety season (Feb 27th-Mar 7th) is a production of Gounod's Roméo et Julietteand a concert performance of Bellini's I Capuleti e i Montecchi. In the face of Minister Cullen's announcement of a new national opera company in place of Opera Ireland and Opera Theatre Company, but in the absence of firm plans, Gaiety MD John Costigan says he wrote to the minister to let him know he has held Opera Ireland's autumn dates at the Gaiety open, though only till the end of March.

And while speculation about the Abbey's possible future at the GPO continues, more immediately there's a new Thomas Kilroy play to look forward to on Abbey St, when Christ Deliver Us!opens next month, following Conor McPherson's The Seafarer(Elaine Murphy's award-winning Little Gemis at the Peacock, fresh from its New York run). The Abbey's second premiere sees another welcome return of a playwright to the Abbey after a pause, when Bernard Farrell's Bookworms– a farce set around a book club, directed by Jim Culleton – opens on June 1st. This is Farrell's 11th Abbey premiere.

Dates are unconfirmed for the Abbey's annual Shakespeare (Macbeth, directed by Jimmy Fay, with Aidan Kelly and Eileen Walsh) and its new production of Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars,directed by Wayne Jordan. The choice from the canon is appropriate, says the Abbey - "an historic play for a new audience at a time of national crisis, when the principles and ideals of the Proclamation and founding of the Republic are, more than ever, under consideration".

For obvious reasons, smaller scale productions, prominent in the nominations for The Irish TimesTheatre Awards, may feature even more strongly in Ireland this year. Witness Karl Shiels and Paul Walker's new venture, Theatre Upstairs @ The Plough, which opened this week (opposite the Abbey on Middle Abbey Street) with lunchtime and teatime theatre (the 1pm menu is Paul Walker's Decked, with soup and a show for a tenner, and at 6pm Peter McKenna's Missing Football, with pint and a play also for a tenner - with lots of new writing promised). Check out the Facebook page on Theatre Upstairs @ The Plough.

- As predictedin these pages by Michael Dervan last November, the 2010 Wexford Festival Opera will include performances of Peter Ash's new opera The Golden Ticket, based on Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The festival has been expanded to 15 days and will open and close on Saturdays (October 16th-30th). The other operas are Mercadante's Virginia and Smetana's The Kiss(previously done at Wexford in English in 1984, but to be sung in the original Czech this year).