"It's great to be 40," announced Ms Eithne Healy, chairwoman of the Dublin Theatre Festival, when this year's programme was announced at the Coach House in Dublin Castle yesterday. It runs from October 6th to the 18th.
Ms Healy emphasised that the two elements which underpinned the 40th programme remained the promotion of new Irish theatre and bringing in renowned international theatre.
Attendances reached an all-time high of 80 per cent at the 1996 festival, and Ms Healy hoped that this year's would exceed that.
Headlining this year's festival is Cirque Plume, a theatrical extravaganza which boasts high-wire artistes and clowns, the biggest tent in France and the biggest freight nightmare of the festival. Nine 40foot containers and over 40 caravans will have to be transported from France to the RDS show-jumping arena.
After the sell-out success of Silviu Purcarete's Les Danaides in the National Basketball Stadium last year, there will undoubtedly be many fans waiting for his two shows, Phaedra and Titus Andronicus, in the SFX centre.
The other big extravaganza of the festival is Elsinore, Quebecois director Robert Lepage's version of Hamlet. It has only one actor but 15 stage crew, so complex are the special effects.
For many, the festival will be the first chance to see Martin McDonogh's critically-acclaimed The Leenane Trilogy, which will be brought to the Olympia theatre by Galway's Druid Theatre Company together with London's Royal Court Theatre.
The Abbey Theatre will host a new play written by Thomas Kilroy and directed by Patrick Mason, The Secret Fall of Con- stance Wilde, while the Gate theatre is offering The Weeping of Angels by Joseph O'Connor. Oscar award-winning actress Brenda Fricker will star as a nun, alongside John Kavanagh, in a production directed by Alan Stanford.
Other highlights in the programme are French-born director Stephane Braunschweig's production of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, which was a critical success at this year's Edinburgh Festival, and first plays by Declan Lynch and Alex Johnston.
Lynch's work, Massive Damages, is directed by Passion Machine's Gerard Stembridge and can be seen at the Tivoli Theatre. Johnston's Melonfarmer will be directed by Jimmy Fay at the Peacock.