As Ireland's biggest arts festival drew to a close, the potential for next year was already being discussed, writes Rosita Boland
The most anticipated theatre show in the latter part of the Galway Arts Festival was the Irish premiere of Get Your War Onin the Town Hall Theatre by Texas-based theatre collective, Rude Mechanicals. The play was adapted by David Rees from his satirical political cartoon of the same name and, rather like the Reduced Shakespeare Company, the cast of five gave us the reduced Bush regime, from anthrax through the Patriot Act to the ongoing war on terror.
For a show that started at 10.30pm, audiences were expecting a lot more bite for their buck, especially as simply by turning up, they were already demonstrating support for Rude Mechanicals' take on politics.
The depressing fact is that it's become increasingly difficult to parody the Bush government, which already has enough unintentional slapstick moments regularly airing on prime-time news. While the presentation was clever, with the five actors facilitating a visual strip-cartoon via overhead projectors, the spoken content didn't match. What you will smile ruefully over for a minute or two in a printed cartoon - the original genesis of this show - doesn't necessarily sustain over 75 minutes, no matter how swift the change of image on the projector. Get Your War Ondoubtless provokes more controversy in American audiences, but not so this side of the more Bush-weary pond.
Only very occasionally did the material teeter on an edge before swiftly returning from it. About the only collective intake of breath was when the "persistent vegetative state" of the late Terri Schiavo, who was controversially removed from her feeding tube in 2005, was compared to "the Christian far right".
At Nun's Island, Galway Youth Theatre (GYT) presented Brian Friel's Philadelphia, Here I Come!sensitively directed by Andrew Flynn. (GYT also presented Neil LaBute's Autobahnduring the festival.) Owen MacCarthaigh's ambitious two-storied set was a strikingly successful visual parallel to the central twin roles of Gar Public and Gar Private. Cathal Finnerty and Sean O'Meallaigh, as Gar Public and Gar Private respectively, played a blinder.
Together, they created an enormously impressive and compelling performance, memorably teasing out the famously conflicting emotions of these two roles with subtlety, humour and depth. The night belonged to the pair of them, but Ciara Delaney as Madge Mulhern - eerily convincing as a woman several decades older than herself - also gave an excellent, nuanced performance.
Galway-based Cups and Crowns Educational Theatre Company had a change of venue for their show to the Aula Maxima, which necessitated covering virtually all of the graphic war photographs temporarily displayed there, since A Hedge Called Hogwas an interactive children's show.
This was a two-hander with Jason Ryan and Gillian Kelly, directed by Fiona McDonagh. A simple pen-pushing man in an office - although he could just be a child doing his homework - looks for diversion and colour to enrich his life, while battling the pedantic visits of the office cleaning lady. He finds it by using his imagination, and drawing imaginary friends on the bare walls, one of them a shark. "Draw a hammer-headed shark," shouted one very small boy, thus proving that Galway audiences grow up knowing their marine biology from an early age.
Folk singer Laura Veirs, who played the Róisín Dubh on Friday night, was sleepless from Seattle, having just got off a plane from there. She looked a parody of a classic indie hippie chick: guitar in hand, barefoot, wearing NHS-type glasses and a flowered vintage cotton frock, but gave a slickly professional set. A bit too slick - the set barely lasted an hour, maybe because, as she told us several times, she was leaving for another plane and festival at 6.30am. "Well, you're in Galway now, and I've paid good money for my tickets," one audience member finally countered.
Performing without her usual back-up band, she sang several songs from her new album, Saltbreakers. Her bittersweet, catchy lyrics delivered with haunting knowingness in a surreally ethereal voice were like a quirky, modern version of Suzanne Vega.
'WHY WOULD SO MANY people want to decapitate a dead goose?" asked writer Paddy Woodworth, who gave a fascinating reading on Saturday from his forthcoming book, The Basque Country, A Cultural History, which is part of the Landscapes of the Imagination series. He was talking about one of the Basque country's truly strange regional customs, that of "fly and dunk": inebriated teams in boats pass under a wire with a dead goose attached to it. Each team gets one chance to reach for the goose, to keep holding it when being dunked repeatedly in the sea, and all the while attempting to separate goose head from goose body. Not so long ago, the goose used to be alive at the beginning. By examining the ownership of this and other local rituals, and how they have been re-invented over time, Woodworth showed how cultural customs in the Basque area have acted as an essential escape from fiercely opposed national political views.
Not on the programme, but advertised in the festival box office, was the packed album launch of trad singer Róisín Elsafty's Má Bhíonn Tú Liom Bí Liom, at Cuba on Saturday afternoon. With famous friends Dónal Lunny, MáirtíO'Connor, Ronan Browne and Graham Henderson supporting her, this was a shining gem of a gig - and free to boot. Lunny and Browne played six instruments between them, changing from bouzouki, guitar, and bodhrán to whistle, flute and uilleann pipes with the fluent skill of master jugglers.
Sean-nós dancer Joe Steve Ó Neachtain made his own tunes with his feet, and when Elsafty sang the charming lullaby Pota Mor Fatai, her own baby squealed loudly in recognition.
ARTIST AIDEEN BARRY'S performance installation, Asphyxia, in the basement of the Radisson, created with Cathal Murphy and Tanya McCrory, was only 15 minutes long, but made an impact much more lasting. The audience stood in the dark around a square of lit flooring, where prone dancer McCrory moved against a series of changing backgrounds, as Barry's images were projected downwards.
She started out on a bed, and then, dreaming or drowning, the charcoal drawings invoked oceans, roofs, fields, the Burren, the Galway Fisheries Tower, waves, skies and wild weather, as some vital interior journey was tracked, all to the accompaniment of cello, violin, kettledrums and crotales. This beautiful, haunting piece had the audience lingering afterwards, still staring at the piece of now-blank floor where the images had been.
By Saturday night, festival director Paul Fahy was predicting that ticket sales would bring in the €500,000 he had been hoping for.
"Adrenaline is keeping me going at this stage," he admitted. The high-profile cancellation of historian Simon Schama's appearance at the festival, will, he says, be amended by inviting him again next year. The festival is currently in talks with various potential sponsors for next year, since Guinness's five-year involvement is now over, but there is as yet no solid offer.
One of the most rewarding things to come out of the festival this year was the presence of its box office and own temporary exhibition space in the former Instore shop on Merchant's Road. This large, light, bright city-centre space would be perfect as the permanent gallery space Galway lacks. It's on sale for €20 million.
Paul Fahy hopes we might be seeing it in use again next year, but this time in permanent use as an arts venue. Hear, hear to that working out, in Ireland's biggest arts festival's 30th year.
