Any arts festival is a celebration of performance; it's also a showcase. It's about community, it's about sharing, it's about informing, engaging. There's an element of showing off, a suspension of normal routine. It is also, in our commercial age, blatant cultural tourism, as well as being carefully non-Θlitist Θlitism. It is most certainly about business - perhaps too much about business, about breaking even and keeping the sponsors happy with as much media coverage as may be reasonably secured.
The Kilkenny Arts Festival, as with most arts festivals, is many things to many people, at least to those interested in such matters. And also, as with many other festivals, it has become bigger, more intense, less personal - bigger may or may not mean better. Utterly absent is that cosy sense of shared interest that used to define the literary summer schools, that unspoken quality of "we're here because of a shared interest in Synge or Yeats or Joyce". The Kilkenny programme is now pitched at diversity; geared for the all, or at least, the many. Is it too much or not quite enough?
This is a major general festival that both grew out of, and outgrew, its origin: that of a particular, specialist music festival with a superb tradition, drawing largely on a greater tradition, the European Baroque repertoire. There are those, myself included, who lament, if not quite the loss, certainly the apparent overshadowing of the classical music content, which nevertheless remains vital to the festival, with a programme devised by French cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras. The privileged few (an admittedly capacity crowd in a small venue) who experienced Queyras's beautiful performance of two of Bach's glorious cello suites - No 2 & No 6 - on Wednesday in a lunchtime recital at the Parade Tower delighted in true artistry. His subtle, sensitive playing expressed the emotional warmth, range and pervasive humanity of Bach's music. In an ideal programme, this cellist would have performed all six suites at a larger venue during the course of the festival, the demand and desire is certainly there.
Kilkenny - Ireland's Medieval City - is proud of its heritage, its history, its architecture, its survival. Tourists arrive here throughout the year, particularly in the summer, to wonder at the ancient beauty while noting the ugly planning mistakes that challenge that beauty. The Kilkenny Design Centre remains the symbol of the emergence of new Irish design.
Commerce meets culture, and the design centre, begun in the stables of the city's great castle, dominates the terrace that faces the massive fortress.
The castle, along with the splendid Tudor merchant survivor, Rothe House, dating from 1594, acts as Kilkenny's central witness.
Festival time or not, Kilkenny is a busy place. The shoppers and the cars, the pushchairs, the bored toddlers and the people who live here the rest of the year push on, through the rain, despite the heightened arts presence.
The main bookshop's window proclaims, in turn, the visiting writers, such as former Booker winners Michael Ondaatje and Graham Swift. Images of Eoin McNamee and Mary Morrissy, and their books, act as a smiling reminder for tonight's event in the Venue Bar. McNamee and Morrissy are a sophisticated pairing, they share a reflective voice. McNamee's mesmeric and evocative telling of the murder of Patricia Curran, a doomed and maligned siren, dazzles as an uneasy mystery, but also through the choreographed, chilling grace of the prose. Also in the window is the photograph of IMPAC winner and Canadian master story-teller, Alistair MacLeod, long established as a writer's writer, who appears tomorrow night. Always among the most successful outcomes of a festival reading are the book sales.
Not even a driven festival management team that has pursued publicity like a host of Furies can guarantee good weather, or parking. The citizens note the queues, indeed many of them are part of those patient lines waiting to gain access. It always seems the same; tense faces of the festival staff invariably telling each arrival, "The show's booked out, you may not get in". Booking office and numbers don't concern the ordinary festival-goer, who arrives here with or without tickets with an understandably selfish personal agenda - to see as many shows, events or concerts as logistically possible.
The people, it seems, are divided by curiosity and interest, with expectation playing a part. Included in the festival atmosphere are commercial initiatives. People see a chance to make money. There are victims. It was disturbing to see a pair of magnificent Indian Eagle owls, larger versions of the Scops owl, tethered on perches outside the Tholsel in Parliament Street. Their owner was charging £3 a picture for poses with them. Demand seemed high. Stupid adults tentatively jabbed fingers in the owls' faces, and squealed, preparing to be pecked. The birds, huge amber yellow eyes staring unblinking at us, looked humiliated and also, particularly the female, rather outraged.
If you are a tourist whose arrival coincides with the festival, so much the better. Or worse, that is, should you want to take that defining photograph of one of Ireland's great castles and find it obscured by the massive, football pitch-size images by Gottfried Helnwein, whose work you may or may not like. "I don't give a damn what the hell it's supposed to be saying," announced an exasperated North American with a complicated-looking camera to the tiny woman at his side, "who in their right could justify poster art on an historic building smack dab in the tourist season or at any goddamn time." Some people appear to like the pictures of the local children. For others, the images are dismissed as "variations of Benetton-style advertising". Some women disapprove of the fact that the young girl's eyes are wearing eye make-up. A couple weren't happy about the children having their eyes closed, "It's, um, suggestive." Michael White (15) from Kilkenny and a student at Clongowes College had thought about the pictures and didn't like any of them. "They're completely unnecessary and seem to feel they're saying something. They're not. Someone is trying to make a point or make art? Hmm. It's just a media spectacle draped on public buildings, and overshadowing what should be the real meaning of an arts festival. I think they just spoil the view."
As for Helnwein's heavy-handed and obvious Nazi-themed Epiphany series, outside the castle and in the design yard, does he seriously think he is delivering a moral argument we all haven't figured out a long time ago?
Theatre, literary events, street extravaganzas such as parades and the surreal comics Men in Coats, jazz, traditional, the visual arts, children's shows and the somewhat more subdued, perhaps, but still magnificent festival heart - the classical music programme jostle for attention. Pride of place of the festival so far, with the weekend yet to run, is Conor Lovett's superlative performance of the Beckett Trilogy. Directed by his wife, Judith Hegarty, the Gare St Lazare team consolidates last year's Kilkenny triumph. Such was the demand, an extra performance was needed to facilitate audiences. The seamless renditions of the texts are in themselves, a huge achievement.
But Lovett's astonishingly effortless performance of the respective characters Molloy, Malone and The Unnamable, each evoking the distinct personality of the speakers, culminating in the bizarre courage of the closing sequence, is world class. This is more than "acting" or reciting - it is both a response to and understanding of Beckett's intention. Lovett is thinking and testing the texts. If, on his opening night, he had to contend with a jazz band in the street, on Sunday he was presented with a bell tolling loudly and he brilliantly incorporated the intrusive sound into The Unnamable.
Considering the awesome quality of the three-hour Trilogy as performed by Lovett, it is all the more difficult to justify Conall Morrison's production of Steven Berkoff's hectic comedy Kvetch as the festival theatre showpiece. As a play it is little more than a good joke that relentlessly goes on and on and on. The opening rant about fear and dread as a way of life, delivered by Philip Judge, is hilarious; the ensemble playing of all (particularly Peter Hanly - whose face is a mobile picture show all of its own - and Sean Kearns) conveys tremendous energy, as does Morrison's direction.
But the direction and performances flatter a thin script. Surely a major arts festival could have fronted a stronger main theatre offering? Far more interesting, if beset by problems, is the Gare St Lazare Players' ambitious handling of Raymond Carver's story So Much Water So Close to Home.
Confined in the small space of Nero's, a nightclub on Kieran Street, the company brings imagination and flair to what is, in essence, a monologue.
Elizabeth Corbett convinces as Claire, the already disturbed wife shocked by her husband's callous attitude when refusing to allow the discovery of a dead girl floating in the river upset his weekend's fishing.
Opening night, marred by some stilted playing, had its setbacks for the company, but toughest of all is the fact Carver's voice is reflective, introspective, delivered in the muted light of a television set or the refrigerator. It was never intended for the stage. Several of Corbett's most intense sequences appeared cluttered by other devices, although in general the use of off-stage voices and voice-over worked well.
The festival coup was the appearance of writer Graham Swift, a consistently fascinating novelist whose fiction asks questions without presuming to answer them. Reading from his 1996 Booker winner Last Orders, Swift reiterated the authentic south London voices of a multi-narrative telling, among many things, the story of four men bringing their dead mate's ashes down to Margate Pier. Tipped for the 1983 Booker Prize with Waterland (it was won by J.M. Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K), Swift agrees his career was overshadowed by Waterland, his third novel. A layered, philosophical questioning of history and the past, it remains one the great post-war English novels. Yet he is well aware another of his novels, Ever After (1992), is still the one that got away. "I'd like to see that book have another life," he says. In it, a widower looks at his own life, and also that of a Victorian ancestor caught in the mid 19th-century English debate of God versus science.
Proving a fine reader, Swift, who looks very intense, yet seems relaxed in conversation, is honest when asked about writing. "It's what I always wanted to do." A woman in the audience told him how much she loved one of his books, and Swift retained a kindly tone when replying, "I hate to have to say this, but I didn't write that book." The Venue bar, more suited to late-night music sessions, is not a good venue for a reading. Still, Graham Swift at Kilkenny was a festival highlight for those who attended and a tribute to the insight of the organisers.
Away from the city is the pottery arts centre Grennan Mill in Thomastown. It is a lovely setting approached via a leafy avenue. Master Printmakers exhibition features Louis le Brocquy, Tony O'Malley, Leon Kossoff and the exciting, colourful work of Albert Irvin. Meanwhile, Duiske Abbey in Graiguenamanagh, established for the Cistercians by William Marshall in 1207, provides an atmospheric setting for another superb recital. Malcolm Proud gives a wonderful performance of Handel's Suite No 8 in F minor for harpsichord. The recital is one of the Baroque Lunchtime series.
The Duiske Abbey programme also featured CPE Bach, Vivaldi, Muffat and Telemann. Proud, Maya Homburger on baroque violin, oboist Marcel Ponseele and cellist Gesine Queyras are at ease in the church space with its ideal acoustic. Telemann's Trio Sonata in G minor is particularly impressive. A further Baroque recital takes place on Sunday in the Parade Tower at noon.
With notable children's events still to go, including writers Benjamin Zephaniah and Eoin Colfer; and visual comic Jim Jackson's Art Guffaw, the younger people are doing well. Best of what we've seen was Martin Bridle's The Emperor's New Clothes, always a valuable story, particularly in the context of assessing art forms. Bridle is a resourceful performer capable of placing new slants on a well known tale. He is also an original puppeteer. Less successful was The History of Tom Thumb. "It was for babies, really small ones," said Nadia (6), "the puppets were clumsy." I see.
The festival continues until Sunday. Booking at 056-52175
