From unsettling plays to megaphone satire, there are plenty of thought-provoking performances at the Galway Arts Festival, writes Peter Crawley
SELF-PORTRAITURE in art is nothing new. Botticelli and Michelangelo both tucked themselves into the margins of their works, Rembrandt immortalised his visage throughout his life, while Picasso would splinter himself into shards and shapes full of psychological meaning.
Authors and film-makers have repeated the trick, but it's hard to think of any theatrical equivalents. With Gentrification though, the first of Druid's two short one-act plays by Enda Walsh, we have one rare example. A character called Enda, a successful writer in London with a wife and a young daughter, stews in his own witticisms, idiosyncrasies, personal and professional achievements while dogged by a constant, gnawing sense of terror.
Is the central figure of Thomas Conway's economical but significant production meant to be the real Enda Walsh? It's hard to say. Ronan Leahy's gripping performance wisely refrains from impersonation. But, interrogated by Niall Buggy's marvellous Henry - a menacingly absurd East End Londoner who might have popped straight into Enda's home from a nearby Pinter play - the playwright seems a prisoner of his own play, either defending his work or fighting for his life.
Moving beyond a portrait of the artist as a young neurotic though,Gentrification offers an unsettling picture of an ominous world. It may course with good jokes and bon mots, it may begin and end with snatches of Beethoven, but the play's true music is something more subversive and disquieting: an Ode to Dread.
Lynndie's Gotta Gun, a splenetic short piece inspired by the infamous abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, could also take Pinter as its starting point, but forsakes the torturous control of One For The Road for blurted absurdity. Sarah Lynch's energetic staging, with Catherine Walsh and Mikel Murfi, doesn't quite disguise the hollow polemic of a sketch clearly written in anger. It startles, but only momentarily, like a burst balloon.
Megaphone satire might be a good way of describing A Lock of Fierce Roars, the second of three rehearsed readings that comprise a new season of Druid Debuts. John McManus's first stage play, directed by Garry Hynes, is a frothing tale of money, greed and a directionless nation. Set in Cavan in the last days before the euro change over, it allows McManus much knowing ironic humour: one character has built his dreams on seeing Roy Keane play for Ireland in the 2002 World Cup, for instance. That tang of incipient betrayal may explain this play's roughened farce, populated by venal grotesques, but McManus's state of the nation satire becomes so vituperative and overstated, it's hard to imagine it in a full staging. Then again, you might have felt the same way at a rehearsed reading for Martin McDonagh or Alfred Jarry.
MARIA ELNER'S Those Yellow Boots, given a lively reading by director Rachel West, might make for a reasonably decent soap opera, but doesn't yet display much comfort on a stage. Set in present-day Russia (Elner is a Russian living in Ireland), its central characters plumb a communist past, while yearning to escape gaudy materialism and criminal underworlds.
Too frequently, though, its plot contrivances and dialogue could have come straight from the Russian equivalent of The Bold and The Beautiful: "Your stupid shopaholic wife just bought herself a lover, with your money," soliloquises one character, and it was all Karen Ardiff could do not to pout and wait for her close-up.
Speaking of which . . . the pleasures of Nouvelle Vague, to which I had previously found myself largely immune, proved to be at least as visual as aural. In no small part, this comes down to Nadeah Miranda and Marianne Elise, the latest recruits in the French outfit's seemingly never-ending rotation of female singers, whose voices and - oh my - movements on the small stage in the Róisín Dubh turned polite Brazilian pop renditions of new wave classics into something edgy and bracing. Love Will Tear Us Apart and Too Drunk to F*** come off well amid the sinuous rhythms and coquettish gyrations, but a mellow reading of God Save The Queen suggests there is little left in the concept to sustain an imminently threatened third album.
That concept, as everybody must know by now, is based on a linguistic coincidence: Nouvelle Vague means New Wave in English and Bossa Nova in Portuguese, a pleasing discrepancy between literal meanings and competing identities.
Where Brian Friel stands on the dancefloor is anyone's guess, but his play Translations anticipated such dichotomies nicely. "Where there's ambiguity they'll be anglicised," says Owen of slippery definitions in Ouroboros's new touring production, a considered and well- performed show, hamstrung by the incommodious venue of Oranmore Castle.
Anglicisation is not an option in Fíbín's brisk Irish-language treatment of 11,000 years of Irish history, authoritatively titled Stair na hÉireann - Cinnáil. The company's aesthetic involves lively performers, glib historical satire (can the arc of Irish history, from the Ice Age to the Celts to the Normans to the Vikings to the Famine to the Rising to the Troubles to the Celtic Tiger to the Lisbon Treaty, really be reduced to a series of internecine pie-fights? You betcha!), while fuzzy puppets jostle with non-negotiable audience participation.
Hauled from the audience to play Setanta, my experience of being forcibly involved in Fíbín's bawdy production was a bit like being ruthlessly kidnapped by The Muppet Show on TG4. But like much of this year's Galway Arts Festival, it provided a unique experience and a useful lesson: you can put a playwright on the stage with exhilarating results, but critics are best left in the aisles.
Galway Arts Festival continues until Sun
