Seamus Heaney's new version of poems by the Czech poet Kalda, set to music by Janacek, is the production likely to cause the most excitement at October's Dublin Theatre Festival. The world premiere of The Diary of One Who Vanished is an English National Opera production, directed by the acclaimed director, Deborah Warner, and starring the tenor Ian Bostridge. It will run at the Gaiety Theatre.
This is an extraordinary coup for the Dublin Theatre Festival. The production was thought up by Bostridge and Warner, and they then approached Seamus Heaney to write a new English version of the work. He agreed immediately, although he had never before written for the musical stage.
The poems concern Kalda's inner turmoil as he debates whether to leave his family and farm to run away with a beautiful gypsy. In the end he does decide to follow her, leaving the poems behind to be discovered after his disappearance. This production is perhaps the main course in a feast of international theatre. Another production which will be eagerly anticipated is The Village by Joshua Sobol, produced by the Russian-Israeli Gesher Theatre from Tel Aviv, and nostalgically set in a pluralist Palestine before the foundation of the Israeli state.
Another highlight is Cloudstreet from Australia at the SFX, an adaptation of Tim Winton's epic saga of the same name.
The five-hour show tells the story of 20 years in the lives of two families brought together by post-war poverty in a rambling old Perth mansion. Adaptations from literary works play a major part in the festival. Arabian Nights, a version of the famous series of stories presented by the Young Vic Theatre Company will play at the Olympia. An American company will bring an adaptation of J.M. Barrie's Peter and Wendy to the Tivoli, while a British company will present Jane Eyre at the Gaiety. This is the first theatre festival for which the Civic Theatre, Tallaght, will be available. A company which is devoted entirely to the work of the British playwright, Howard Barker, will present his Scenes From An Execution.
New Irish writing will also be extremely well served by the festival. The Abbey will present a new play by Frank McGuinness, Dolly West's Kitchen. Set in Donegal during the second World War, the play tells the story of how one family's lives are transformed with the arrival of the allied troops across the Border.
The play will be directed by the outgoing artistic director of the Abbey, Patrick Mason. The rival producing house, the Gate, will field a new Bernard Farrell play, The Spirit of Annie Ross, a comic ghost story, directed by the Abbey's artistic director-designate, Ben Barnes.
Another exciting element of the programme is Rough Magic's production of Boomtown, a new play by Pom Boyd, Declan Hughes and Arthur Riordan, lampooning the goldrush Dublin of today. It is set in Temple Bar and will play, on location, in a specially-designed venue in Meetinghouse Square.
Fishamble will perform a new play by writer/actor Pat Kinevane at the Tivoli. The Wall of Cloud, the new chamber opera by the Irish composer, Raymond Deane, which the Opera Theatre Company will present at the Samuel Beckett Centre, represents a new departure into new opera for the festival.