The Dublin Gay Theatre Festival is now in its fifth year - following its inception in 2004, to mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of Oscar Wilde in Dublin.

The festival lasts over two weeks in May each year, with a broad remit that includes works by gay writers, works that have a gay relevance or theme, or works that include either performance or another artistic contribution by gay people. Non-gay theatre professionals are welcome to participate, provided there is one of these links to the gay community.

Homosexuality was only decriminalised in the Republic of Ireland in the early 1990s, a mere decade and a half ago, and the festival shows how far the gay community in Dublin - and attitudes in society - have come since that time.

This year's festival has almost thirty shows across 16 venues all over the city. They range from 'Corpus Christi', an Edinburgh Fringe 2007 hit about a gay Jesus living in Texas, to 'Short Shorts and Very Shorts', a collection of six short plays from Ireland and the US, many of them being performed for the first time.

Productions and production companies are vetted before they are accepted onto the festival. The applicants will have been assessed in performance, at international festivals, or by submitting scripts and accreditation information and references.

While in the early years local Irish productions made up a large part of the festival, more than half of the 2008 productions are from outside Ireland, including the UK, the US, Canada, the Netherlands, South Africa and Italy.

Developing international contacts is a stated aim of the organisers, along with promoting new writing, developing channels of communication to both the gay community and the wider community, promoting youth integration and participation and developing script and casting libraries.

The festival is run by an executive committee of a dozen members. The artistic director (and managing director) is Brian Merriman, a theatre director, producer and actor. Its administrative director is John H Pickering, a businessman and promoter.

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Colman Higgins 16 May 08

Fringe Report (c) Fringe Report 2002-2012

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