When night falls on Bois de Vincennes park, on the edge of Paris, you can see the golden lights of La Cartoucherie, a theatre inhabiting a former munitions factory, between the trees. Many make the journey here to see the sprawling productions of the director Ariane Mnouchkine, which recombine the rattling, brash machinery of 18th-century spectacle – wheeled stages, gigantic stage cloths – into experiences as fluid as a dream. Visiting La Cartoucherie is sometimes described as like walking into a different world.
Willie White stepped across its threshold around the turn of the century. A theatre producer entering his 30s, he began travelling to see plays with the director Jason Byrne, with whom he founded the company Loose Canon. Byrne was curious about mid-century avant-garde theatre. “I was following Jason’s lead and trying to imagine his Poland in the 1960s,” says White.
Return visits to Paris and Brussels established a rhythm for White, who has needed to keep a finger on the pulse of international theatre, as artistic director first of Project, Dublin’s contemporary-arts venue, for nearly a decade and then of Dublin Theatre Festival, a post from which he has announced his departure after 13 years. This year’s edition will be his last.
The festival’s importance as a conduit for international theatre hasn’t diminished. “We’re cut off largely from artistic conversations happening on continental Europe,” he says. “We have a self-reference to our theatre culture, which is very substantial and worth celebrating, but there are so many artists that will never be seen here, that are not part of our understanding of the possibilities of theatre.”
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For his first festival, in 2012, he leveraged his Project connections to secure a play by the pioneering UK company Forced Entertainment – the first of its three appearances during his directorship, which culminate with Signal to Noise, a large ensemble play, at this year’s festival.
With a decades-old company such as Forced Entertainment you’re unlikely to see the work they’re known for – in their case a stretch of deliriously surreal marathon plays, lasting anywhere between six and 24 hours, that premiered between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s.
To catch an artist during a moment that possibly defines them requires a whole other instinct. In 2008 White programmed the Belgian visual artist Miet Warlop to present a diptych of absurdist performances at Project after seeing her work in Ghent. In 2012 he brought Warlop’s near-hallucinatory Mystery Magnet to his first festival. Looking back, it resembles a kind of backdoor into some of the best Europe has to offer. (Warlop has three acclaimed shows touring as many continents until the end of 2024.)
Mystery Magnet feels like the kind of international Dublin Theatre Festival offering that a fan hopes for: something that opens up possibilities for artmaking at home. It’s tempting to draw a connection between Warlop’s spectacle – a shocking, psychedelic attack on a sterile-white art gallery – and the Irish company Dead Centre, who took glee in demolishing the world of their production Chekhov’s First Play, even hauling out a jackhammer and wrecking ball, or the choreographer Emma Martin, whose dances started becoming inhabited by otherworldly figures in thready costumes, with a duet partner swallowed by tinsel in Girl Song.
White is hesitant to comment on those artists’ inspirations. “We could violate GDPR and see if they booked a ticket for it,” he says, jokingly. He provided festivalgoers with opportunities to follow Warlop’s work, subsequently programming Fruits of Labour and One Song, both larger, somehow more miraculous spectacles, inhabited by near-mythic bands and their roadies, and playing to bigger venues each time.
Over the 13 years White’s own references expanded. Shortly into his time working at the festival, he was invited to partner with a European network of festival directors called NXTSTP, or Next Step. One recurring subject of conversation was the Portuguese artist Tiago Rodrigues, by whom White secured three appearances.
Rodrigues’s plays are fluent in ingenious metaphors, and tend to be about the medium itself: an incomplete history of Portuguese theatre blighted by censorship in Three Fingers Below the Knee; an act of audience participation that reunites a blind woman with her favourite Shakespeare sonnet in By Heart; and a stage manager’s memoir of four decades at Portugal’s national theatre, in Sopro. White had got hold of Rodrigues during a defining decade: in 2021 he was appointed director of the prestigious Avignon Festival, in France.
Some might be tempted to characterise White’s directorship as not international enough. Before he took over, 43 per cent of Dublin Theatre Festival’s programming consisted of international productions. This year it’s 28 per cent. “Empirically, it’s true,” he says. “We put on as much international work as we can afford.” Back then the festival had more resources; during White’s tenure the Arts Council has criticised the absence of a title sponsor, although it’s difficult to point to any Irish arts organisation that has secured such patronage.
One venue that tells the story of the change is the Gaiety Theatre. Before White took over, big productions by British playhouses tended to be programmed there. Those opportunities dwindled, he says, making the festival reliant on Irish companies to fill the venue. This year it is hosting Druid’s anticipated revival of The House, Tom Murphy’s last great play.
“It has to do with the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre existing,” says White. That venue’s ascent overlaps with his directorship. Early in the role he explored securing War Horse, the British National Theatre’s hit adaptation of the war novel by Michael Morpurgo, for the Gaiety slot. “I believed we could maybe invite a production for a week, but when they can do a longer run in the Bord Gáis, we can’t compete with that,” he says. War Horse went on to play at the docklands venue for a month in 2013 (and is returning there, for a much briefer run, early in 2025).
White also found that Dublin venues weren’t equipped to host productions from abroad. When he saw I Look You In the Eyes, the invigorating solo play by the German director René Pollesch, at the Volksbühne in Berlin it seemed feasible to bring it to Ireland – except for a gigantic LED disco ball that descended from the ceiling with its performer gripping on to it. “There wasn’t enough flying space to take it up in the roof of any of our buildings,” he says.
For the 2022 festival, he adds, he shoehorned Farm Fatale, the French director Philippe Quisne’s post-disaster spectacle set in an absurdist farmyard, into Project Arts Centre. The question of whether Dublin Theatre Festival is international enough seems a distraction; the festival has become a measure of the city’s fledgling infrastructure.
“There is more investment in the arts but less infrastructure for that to meet a public,” says White. An urgent problem is the absence of mid-sized venues since the loss of the Tivoli Theatre, the SFX centre and others. As a member of Dublin City Council’s strategic policy committee on culture, he tabled a motion for a feasibility study assessing a new 500-seat theatre.
“I’ve been in lots of venues in Europe that were repurposed industrial spaces. Unfortunately, what’s happening in Dublin is they’re repurposed as apartments or offices. You need something that people aren’t looking to realise the need for a commercial return on, that’s more pro-social and civic.”
Inevitably, some artists got away from White. He really wanted to programme work by the young French innovator Julien Gosselin, who had a significant decade, including a 10-hour epic carving three Don DeLillo novels into one extraordinary, highly visual production, at the Avignon Festival. Gosselin is now director of Paris’s prestigious Odéon theatre. It seems White’s hunch was right.
In this year’s festival he’s excited about Benji Reid, a black British theatre pioneer who took a break from the medium a decade ago to delve into photography. Reid was persuaded into making Find Your Eyes, a biographical performance that positions personal struggles with addiction and depression side by side with a photographer’s ceaseless eye for beauty.
“I think it will appeal to people who are younger, who are from the global majority, and who are not necessarily regular theatregoers, as well as our seasoned audiences,” says White.
Like Warlop and Rodrigues, Reid is somebody who, past the early phase of his career, seems to be breaking beyond the limits of what had seemed possible. White describes programming decisions as leaps of faith. For a festival director, it’s a hunch. For an audience, it’s a risk. What’s on the line is possibly the best theatre in Europe.
Dublin Theatre Festival runs from Thursday, September 26th, to Sunday, October 13th
