A distinctive new era opens up at the Gate
Selina Cartmell has launched an exciting new season of plays
The long-promised new era at the Gate was launched this week by the new artistic director Selina Cartmell, and her distinctive, feisty stamp is all over it. It comes as a series of six plays extending from July until June next year, under the general heading of The Outsider.
First up is a production of The Great Gatsby (July 6), like no other staging you’ve ever encountered, adapted and directed by Alexander Wright. You’ll no longer come in looking for your seat – there won’t be any. The theatre will become the Gatsby mansion, chandeliers will be lowered, and the audience will swan in as guests of the social-climbing outsider Jay Gatsby at one of his decadent parties. You’re being positively encouraged to dress in the style of the twenties. Backstage and other areas of the theatre will be opened up. It’s unlikely to be your average theatrical evening.
The final play in the series (June 2018) will be far removed from the glitz of Long Island in the 1920s – the Northside’s fictional Barrytown in the 1980s, in fact – a dramatisation of Roddy Doyle’s raucous The Snapper. In between those, Cartmell will be directing two plays herself – an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Red Shoes as this year’s Christmas show, and the musical Assassins by Stephen Sondheim. Assassins (April 2018), about the nine people who either assassinated or tried to assassinate US presidents, is a look at the great American dream when it doesn’t go according to plan.
In September we get Tribes, by Nina Raine, also transposed from England to Ireland, in which a deaf boy has to cope with being the only deaf boy in a family.
Another interesting revival is Look Back in Anger, the John Osborne play that created such a rumpus in theatre-land in the fifties (February 2018).
And the Shakespeare production will not be one of the plays, but an adaptation of the poem The Rape of Lucrece (March 2018), first produced by The Royal Shakespeare Company.
The Gate has often been accused of playing it safe. But it has shown with festivals of Beckett and Pinter in recent times that it can handle the difficult stuff too. This programme will stretch the audience while providing plays that are attractive. I’ll be surprised if it doesn’t deliver the goods.