There is great expectation as the Gate Theatre prepares for the Stephen Berkoff production of Oscar Wilde's Salome, not seen in the Gate since 1988. Neil Jordan is in attendance with his partner Brenda Rawn, and admits it is his first Salome.
The director of the Gate, Michael Colgan, says he is certainly excited about the production but more so about "a very young girl playing the part of Salome who dropped out of heaven".
The reaction to Fiona O'Shaughnessy is, indeed, almost biblical. Actress Susan Fitzgerald is impressed by her physique: "What a body and how she uses it." She reckons the men in the audience must have been chewing on their knuckles.
D.J. Hamilton, who is part of a US touring theatre currently visiting Ireland, has his sights on different things. "I'd go for 10 per cent of what she's going to get. There must be agents queuing outside her house already."
One of the stars of the show, Alan Stan- ford, emerges from the dressing rooms to join everyone else battling to the bar after a two-hour play with no interval. Others sinking a few quick ones before heading off include actor Risteard Cooper and his wife Suzanne; Roger Doyle, who composed the music for the play, his wife Mary Doyle, and actor Stephen Brennan.
But both actors and audience are seeking the head on a plate of the mobile-phone carrier whose gadget went off at the opening of the production when the eerie atmosphere was being set. It seems all the tut-tutting in the audience which followed the trill of the phone put the cast off even more than offending noise.