Dublin Theatre Festival 2023: The best shows to book, and how to get bargain tickets

Dublin Theatre Festival’s programme for 2023 is all over the place – in theme and concerns, origin, style and location, as well as in blurring boundaries between theatre, cinema, installation, dance, documentary and virtual reality.

All over the place, firstly, takes us to Brazil. When we sit to chat about this year’s festival, Willie White, its artistic director, whips opens his laptop. “Look at this,” he says, showing me a video he’s just received. It’s a clip of the colourful, exhilarating-looking Zona Franca, by the Brazilian choreographer Alice Ripoll. It premiered this month at Marseilles Festival and will open this year’s Dublin Theatre Festival.

White mentions Ireland’s many Brazilians, who queued here to vote in their home country’s presidential election last autumn, and about the way Zona Franca expresses a disinherited generation’s thirst for life and desire for freedom. A vibrantly political urban dance show, it incorporates passinho, vogueing, samba, hip hop and folk dance.

White is particularly interested in Brazil – to the extent of learning Portuguese during lockdown – and hopes Irish audiences will also be interested in After the Silence, from Christiane Jatahy, which follows three women’s struggle for their community, land, freedom and culture. “It’s about contemporary politics but also historical roots of racism and exploitation and the transatlantic slave trade to South America,” White says.

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All over the place also extends to Belgium. Miet Warlop’s One Song, a ritual about life, death, hope and resurrection, mashes together rock music, sport and ecstatic states. White reckons the show – basically an hour-long song – will be a brilliant festival closer. “As we near the finish line, this is going to be amazing. It was rapturously received on its premiere at Avignon Festival last year and will, hopefully, resonate with audiences long after the festival is over. One of the things I’m interested in doing is showing work, not just international for its own sake, but work of scale and, quite simply, what can be achieved in theatre.”

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Also from Belgium is Out of the Blue, a piece of documentary theatre about deep-sea mining and Kate McIntosh’s Lake Life, “about play, trust, fun. It’s a collaborative game where adults get to interact with children in a safe way.” Also sounding like a lot of fun, from Flanders, is Do the Calimero, a celebration of sin, an ode to drinking, flirting, dancing and fighting, with carnival as a metaphor for the human condition.

The festival also has a belting range of strong Irish work, a lot of it premiering, from Luke Casserly’s Distillation, a scent-based lecture-performance, or Dead Centre’s To Be a Machine 2.0, which melds VR and IRL, to Shaun Dunne’s This Solution, documentary-theatre inspired by a young Irish man’s experience of the UK gay-porn industry, or Janet Moran’s Quake, a year in the life of a Quaker meeting house. There are new plays at the Abbey (by Nancy Harris) and the Gate (by Erica Murray, with Rough Magic).

Róisín Stack’s No Woman Is an Island explores solitude and isolation; Karen Egan’s Warrior being a patient; Martin Warde’s The Dead House a Traveller wake. Pan Pan’s The History Play intertwines official, personal and oral histories. Irish National Opera has two wildly contrasting shows: Faust, at the Gaiety, and Breathwork, an immersive installation about red tape. Junk Ensemble’s Powerful Trouble (part of its wider Witch Project) sees a several Irish women artists explore “the witch”. Luke Murphy’s award-winning dance-thriller-series Volcano arrives after its current run at Galway International Arts Festival. There are three children’s shows at the Ark (two international and one from Branar) and another at Axis Ballymun

White is unapologetic about the wide span. “There’s huge variety in our theatre festival. You can go from very familiar formulas, solo performance or plays” to more experimental forms. “It’s great. Maybe some other festivals are narrowing their focus but we’re expansive. I’m asked, what’s the festival about? It proposes that theatre is a contemporary art form. That’s what we’re trying to do: to look at abortion rights in Poland, racism in Brazil, neoliberalism in Brazil, Brazilians in Dublin – all of the subjects that preoccupy us now – and artists investigating using theatre, and an audience there with them, experiencing it.” He pauses. “There is light and shade as well.” There’s a slight twinkle. “Sometimes I feel I can seem a bit earnest but, of course, I like to laugh too.”

It’s a big programme; 36 shows – 38 if you count Mikel Murfi’s trilogy day at the Pavilion Theatre in Dún Laoghaire (The Man in the Woman’s Shoes and I Hear You and Rejoice, alongside his new Dublin Theatre Festival show, The Mysterious Case of Kitsy Rainey).

“We are not doing all the extending, it’s our partners being ambitious,” White says. “The four suburban venues [Axis; the Pavilion; the Civic, in Tallaght; and Draíocht, in Blanchardstown] are being really ambitious about the work, doing more than ever before. So, Dublin is not a city centre and periphery. Dublin is everything that’s in the four boroughs and the people who come to see the work there. It’s recognising how Dublin has settled at the moment, rather than us losing the run of ourselves.”

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Among work on the outskirts are Deirdre Kinahan’s The Saviour, staged by Landmark in a production at the Pavilion freed from its pandemic screen format. At the Civic are Falling to Earth: My Summer with Bowie, by Eugene O’Brien, and Isla, Tim Price’s inquiry into artificial intelligence, staged by Verdant Productions. At Draíocht are Fishamble’s In Two Minds, by Joanne Ryan, about the charms and challenges of living with bipolar disorder; and The Boy Who Talked to Dogs, for ages 12-plus, adapted by Amy Conroy from Martin McKenna’s book, and staged by Australia’s Slingsby and State Theatre Co.

Last year’s “10 for 10″ – 10 per cent of tickets for €10, available to the under-30s, the unwaged, freelance artists and arts workers – was hugely successful. Theatre is attracting younger audiences. “We had a really good take-up among under-30s,” with terrific feedback, according to White. The festival sold more than 1,100 €10 tickets, forfeiting perhaps €15,000 of box-office revenue but “it’s well worth it,” he says. “We’re kicking ourselves we didn’t try it earlier. It’s cheaper than the movies.”

Dublin Theatre Festival runs from Thursday, September 28th, until Sunday, October 15th