All the world's his stage

Going supersize in a contracting world: Sydney-bound Fergus Linehan talks to Peter Crawley as he puts his last Dublin Theatre Festival together.

Fergus Linehan is thinking big again. "I don't know if I should say this," the outgoing director of the Dublin Theatre Festival begins, "but I had this bonkers idea that I never really acted on, which is that the St Patrick's Day Festival, the Dublin Theatre Festival, the Fringe, the Dance Festival and the Writers' Festival - and preferably the piano competition - should all take place in the same month." He laughs that quick machine-gun laugh of his.

"This is the sort of thing you can say on your way out the door." I tentatively suggest that the St Patrick's Day Festival may be inflexible about the date, but it's clear that this is more than just a passing fancy.

"There's no major spring festival in all of Europe," says Linehan, and his voice grows serious. "If you put the lot side by side and developed a big marketing strategy it could work. I don't think that the Dublin Theatre Festival has touched its limits yet. Dublin could definitely go further, but it's a question of whether those in power agree."

Fergus Linehan, a difficult man to read, has an occasional habit of curling the most assertive statements along the contours of a question mark. When he considers the achievements of his four previous festivals, he first reaches for Robert Wilson's stunning contribution in 2001. "Woyzeck was really important," he says, with a rising inflection that makes him sound almost uncertain: Woyzeck was important? "Up to that point, nothing of that scale had been done before," he says, now with utmost certainty. "It actually made people look at the festival in a slightly different way because [it proved] you can do work like that and find an audience that will sustain it as a 1,000-seat house." Bigger, though, is not always better. In 2000, Linehan's first programme as director bombarded Dublin with towering productions: Calixto Bieito's The Barbaric Comedies; the National Theatre's Hamlet; the Kronos Quartet and Philip Glass; Macnas transformed the Mansion House ("very expensive", Linehan whispers); the première of Theatre de Complicite's Light; an Argentinean season. It was extraordinary. It was overkill.

"We thought they'd go: 'Oh my God!'" he admits, sinking into his chair. "We realised that with something as ingrained as the Dublin Theatre Festival, you just don't wow people." After a fundraising scurry the festival broke even and the following year's approach - Peter Brook's Le Costume, Edward Hall's Rose Rage, Wilson's Woyzeck - was still ambitious, but more considered.

This year's festival will be Linehan's last, having bowed out of his contract a year early to become artistic director of the prestigious Sydney Festival. "I think one of the pities is that Dublin has a way to go. I think in really crude terms the festival is probably too small. It doesn't fully meet all the demand that's there. Dublin could actually go a lot bigger."

With a three-week multi-arts event in Sydney that incorporates dance, theatre, visual arts, opera and music with a budget of $12 million (between an Arts Council grant, box office and sponsorship the two-week DTF amasses about €2 million), Linehan is about to go supersize. One can imagine he won't do anything as silly as trying to wow people again with his first Australian programme.

"Well . . ." he trails. (Good God, he's actually considering it.) "I suppose it's different because in Dublin I'd been sitting there in the wings for some time. In Sydney I'm certainly not going to potter around - I'm only doing three \ so you want to make a go of it - just to leave things in better nick than when you find them." Which prompts the question, in what state has he left Dublin? In 1999, right in the eye of the boom, a 30-year-old Fergus enthused to The Irish Times that it was wonderful to take over the directorship as the new millennium dawned. The city was so "buzzy", he said, and there was a new name sponsor, Eircom.

"Things have changed," he concedes. "It's extraordinary how much they have." Back then, theatres were springing up around the M50, there was a broad optimism about rebuilding the Abbey, people even suggested building an opera house and nobody laughed.

"To be honest," he says, "I think Dublin has become more settled with itself. In the festival we ended up doubling back far more into the work itself and became far less high concept about it and realised that it comes down to trying to do the very best work you can and trying to get as large an audience as possible to engage with that." Under Linehan's stewardship, some of the best work of the festival has also been self-produced. In 2000, Enda Walsh's Bedbound initiated a component that was repeated in following years with productions of work by Gavin Friday, Donal O'Kelly and, most recently, Michael Keegan Dolan's extraordinary Giselle - which has toured internationally and will soon move to London's Barbican theatre.

"There's definitely a group of artists who just don't fit," says Linehan. "They don't fit in the current structure: setting up a company and doing a show in the Project - that particular paradigm doesn't work for them. They need something with a bit of institutional security, but that is also flexible enough [to carry on] if nothing comes of it." Sadly, nothing seems to have come of this year's in-house production attempt. "There was a lot more that could have been done with that, but you see it now in other festivals.

"There's a question I'd pose about festivals," he continues, "which are so ephemeral and so flighty; is there a way in which they can become more institutionally strong? Because they're growing - they're becoming the favourite way of going to see things for the public. The public likes doing things in bulk now." In a sense, so does Fergus Linehan, and lately this has led to some problems. Not all festivals are growing and, for those that are, there's barely enough bulk to go round. Linehan counts off the English-speaking theatre festivals that have shut their doors recently: Chicago, Harbour Front in Toronto, Mayfest in Glasgow. All theatre festivals; all big; all gone.

Furthermore, fewer theatre artists are still working on the same scale as the monumental standard set by Robert Wilson, Peter Brook and Pina Bausch in the 1980s. This, Linehan anticipates, will be a bigger problem in Sydney than in Dublin, where this year's festival has Italian "total theatre" artist Romeo Castellucci's Tragedia Endogonidia, Belgian choreographer Jan Lauwers's No Comment and two Shakespeare plays, Othello and Twelfth Night, directed by Cheek By Jowl's Declan Donnellan, to fill out the spaces.

Linehan can still sound concerned. "You say, where's the wildly exotic piece on the main stages? To a large degree they don't exist any more. It's a bit of a problem for festivals, because obviously the whole notion of festivals is to bring large gangs of people together." One can imagine how Linehan might shiver when some of the most captivating Irish performance events are now taking place in toilets (Semper Fi), bedrooms (CoisCéim) or through a pair of headphones (The Performance Corporation).

One can also understand his affinity for those artists on the 2004 festival programme, whom he calls "major organisations firing on all cylinders": Garry Hynes's Druid continues its epic Synge cycle with The Well of the Saints and The Tinker's Wedding; Rough Magic's 20th ambitious anniversary production is Improbable Frequency, a satirical musical by Arthur Riordan and Bell Helicopter; and Joe Dowling's Guthrie Theatre presents Arthur Miller's naturalistic classic, Death of a Salesman.

"It's probably the most popular programme I've done," says Linehan of the impending festival. The brochure suggests "a mood of reflection and ambition" for international theatre, but the line could be summing up its director, described by the Australian press as "an old head on young shoulders".

"The festival hasn't gone out to reflect that," Linehan explains. "It just does by its very nature. When you travel around and see something that is absolutely sublime you want to show it to people. In a way, Death of a Salesman might seem to be quite a conservative choice - and it probably is - but I bet you there will be all sorts of people who don't go to the theatre at all but who go to that . . . I can guarantee it."

There's a joke among theatre festival directors, who fly across the world to see international productions of often sharply varying standards: "I go to this crap so that you don't have to." And though Linehan will reel off, rather poignantly, all the shows that have slipped through his fingers, sounding like a director who has loved and lost, it's that awareness of an audience that drives and sometimes haunts him.

"If you show a thousand people an awful show for two and a half hours, you've wasted two and a half thousand hours of people's time," he laughs. "That's a whole lifetime. You could have gone out and killed somebody!" The Dublin Theatre Festival runs from September 27th to October 9th. Vast and potentially vibrant, it will be Fergus Linehan's last attempt to wow you.