The programme for the 2011 Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival can be overwhelming at first glance. So how can you best parse the magnitude of this year’s offerings, keep score of how Ireland is engaging with the world, identify the brochure's most frequently used superlatives and appreciate just how hard Anu Productions are working? Why, in stats, of course. Here ITM spells it out for you.
Number of days: 20
Number of Productions: 28
Number of Performances: 564
Number of Performances by ANU Productions: 240
Number of International productions: 12
Number of Irish productions: 16
Number of those Irish productions with international co-producers: 3 (Juno and the Paycock, The Blue Boy, Rian)
Biggest number of international co-producers: 6 (with support from two more organisations) for Brokentalkers’ The Blue Boy
Number of site-specific performances: 6
Number of Irish works created by former participants of The Next Stage: 6
Number of productions carrying audience warnings: 7 (See Below)
Oddest warning: “This event is of a participatory nature.”
Words that leap out at you once you laboriously feed all the brochure blurb into an online word cloud generator: “World”, “Theatre” and one enormous “Festival”.
Number of productions inspired by Chekhov or Shakespeare: 4
Number of productions of the actual work of Chekhov or Shakespeare: 0