It's hard to gauge what impact the Belfast Festival has made on the city in general this year, what with the general, busy opening out of the place's culture and nightlife; with the Waterfront and the Grand Opera House dominating the event horizon, so to speak - whether you're talking about drama, big musical spectaculars or the big orchestral events which traditionally provide one main spine of the festival's programme.
The PR seems generally quite low-key, considering the high-risk nature of this year's festival, with its budget doubled to £1.26 million, aided by a £290,000 Lottery windfall, substantial increases from the main sponsors, and a canny use of partnership schemes. The spend has been much larger across the board, particularly for the headline acts, such as the injection of £60,000 into augmenting the Ulster Orchestra with over 50 musicians for Mahler's Second.
As a result, the higher box-office targets this year (built hopefully into the overall budget figure) have caused some jittery nerves as the advance bookings dawned very slowly indeed. Some put it down to the lack of popular stars in the line-up; others, more accurately, to a lack of aggressive promotion in a busier market. But in the main, the audiences have turned out on the night and things are beginning to pay off, although with a week to go, fingers are still tightly crossed.
While there was no problem booking out dramas like Druid's A Skull In Connemara and Corcadorca's Disco Pigs, there were worries about whether Belfast would have an audience for foreign-language contemporary work like Silviu Purcarete's Phaedra (filling 80 per cent of the 300seater BT Studio), but things look good for the American choreographer Merce Cunningham's show next week, having sold 800 seats each night in a 1,400-seat arrangement of the Waterfront's main auditorium.
Last weekend, there was another sell-out in Robert Wilson's Saints And Singing, a show which demanded three weeks of expensive preparation to rig out the Mayfield Leisure Centre, and caused another heart-stopping moment when one actor had a leg injury (he played on, in a reduced physical role).
Contrary to Wilson's reputation, it was a snappy 100-minute setting of Gertrude Stein texts; an elegant choreographed dramatic game with young Italian and German actors, played to Hans Peter Kuhn's eclectic musical pastiches, which contributed much to the continuity. Fine stuff, although for me, the relentless clowning or cheesy grins made it seem more like a kind of highbrow circus (capped off by the final scene, with the entire cast imitating bullfrogs) than anything of major consequence.
There were other interesting staging ideas for a curious audience. The Royal National's Srebernica was a chilly piece of almost photorealist theatre: a reenactment of the transcripts of the UN trial of General Mladic of the Bosnian Serb army for the massacre of Muslim civilians two years ago - although one suspects the show's passionate advocacy is somewhat hidebound by the limited penetration of theatre into popular culture.
Another English troupe, based in Derry, Ridiculusmus, turned up last week (as part of the Lyric's mini-fest) with a clever piece, The Exhibitionists. Set in a modern art gallery, it concerns the malevolent mischief of a pair of bored gallery attendants - the piece almost entirely played in a taut, enforced silence. They're a smart bunch, although they deserve to move on from the pub venues and the undergraduate revue feel - maybe a director could beat shape onto their wilder improvisations.
Another home-grown show, Rebellion, was mounted by Dock Ward, one of a number of community ventures which ballooned under the festival banner in recent years. Considerable professional resources were shipped in for this one - musical direction (Mark Dougherty), sets, costumes and battle-happy lighting - in a show which owes a lot to Rough Magic's Northern Star by Stewart Parker. It's a kind of Celtified, vernacularised Lloyd Webber musical of the 1798 United Irishmen, through the hero narrative of the martyrdom of Henry Joy McCracken. For all the palaver about McCracken being a symbol of inclusion - as a leader of a rising that united "Catholic, Prod and Dissenter", this was one deepgreen production. As one character says of the burgeoning secret societies of the time, "there are so many writers' and artists' groups in Belfast now, it's more like a cultural than a political revolution!" But since when isn't culture political - particularly in Belfast?
On the musical side of things, the big orchestral shows have done well so far (Britten's War Requiem nearly filling the Waterfront at 2,000 capacity), while there have been the usual smattering of chamber gigs, like the exquisite gem of I Fagiolini, an early music choral group from Oxford, who have which has expanded their repertoire into 20th-century music.
From their hard knowledge of early baroque - and the hilariously personable introductions of their director Robert Hollingworth - they served up a deeply eccentric selection of sacred and secular music. This varied from the virtually avant garde chanson La Chasse by Clement Janequin, with its use of the sounds and exclamations of the hunt which provided great fun alongside the deeply chromatic Strania Armonia (Strange Harmonies), an aching 1620s madrigal by Sigismondo d'India. An excellent evening, which proved the old adage that the voice really is the most powerful instrument.
Queen's Film Theatre's own mini-fest served up the usual mixum-gatherum of arthouse circuit fare and some early-release American movies, but most heartening was the screening of the Belfast Shorts, this year with a properly funded (£18,000 per film from a Northern Ireland Film Commission competition) and excellently made series of films. They were predominantly comedies, apart from the disturbing Gort na Cnamh, a gut-wrenching no-laughs piece about incest and infanticide in the dirt of a potato field.
Far more chucklesome was Flying Saucer Rock'n'Roll, a black-and-white white-trash alien B-movie, directed with great irony by Enda Walsh, whose trash-aesthetic The Eliminator caused such a stir last year. Another howler was the serial-murder road-movie, When The Dust Settles, written by Gail Duncan; and Charming Celia, a comedy rather slight in content, but superb in execution, particularly its narrative and dramatic editing.
One general eye-opener in the festival is the large, curiously nonarts audience which turned out in strength for the hugely expanded literary programme, but sadly, other than Bill Viola's The Messenger and the Hans Peter Kuhn sound installation in the Klondyke building, the visual arts programme seems to chug along with the galleries doing what they might be doing anyway: the Ormeau Baths, as festival partners, are the busiest of all.
But there have been a number of visible key developments within this "transitional year" of the festival. In a new consultative post as programme director, Sean Doran has pushed the emphasis in a number of new directions. Talking to me over the weekend, he said, "Six weeks ago, I was very, very worried with the slowness of the bookings. Three weeks ago, I was worried. But at this stage, I'm actually quite confident that we're going to meet our targets, or at least come very close to it."
If that is the case, the Festival's big gambles have paid off. The Cunningham and the Wilson will have earned the festival international kudos. But the full post-mortem on the box-office accounts won't be known until mid-December.
The Belfast Festival continues until Sunday. Remaining highlights include the Tyrone Guthrie Centre Big Day In with readings by E. Annie Proulx, Roy Foster, Michael Longley, Dermot Healy and many others at the Elmwood Hall on Saturday; the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment at the Ulster Hall at 8 p.m.; and Ocean by Merce Cunningham Company at the Waterfront Hall on Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 7.45 p.m.; Altan on Friday at the Whitla Hall at 8 p.m. and Donal Lunny at the Ulster Hall at 7.45 p.m. on Saturday; and the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Beckett's short plays, which run until Saturday, at the Tower Street Theatre, various times. Booking information on: Belfast 665577.
