An improbable success in Poland: Improbable Frequency is a clever, funny piece of theatre, and very, very Irish.
So when Rough Magic took the show - a rhyming musical comedy set in Ireland during the Emergency, featuring the unlikely combination of Myles na gCopaleen, John Betjeman, spies and code-breakers - to the Kontakt festival in Poland this month you had to wonder what the locals would make of it.
The show was translated into both Polish and Russian - and the translators were reportedly amazing, with about 90 per cent of the lines rhyming in Polish. The translators were distraught at how difficult the text was to translate, says Rough Magic producer Loughlin Deegan. The translation was related by one person into the audience's earphones; with such a dense text this may have been quite demanding on the audience.
There was press speculation before the show that it would shock the audience - in Poland it's still impossible to be satirical about the second World War and difficult times in the nation's history. In the event, the show apparently went well, with a very warm response, great respect for the text and many people congratulating Arthur Riordan afterwards for its complexity and ingenuity.
At the post-show discussion there was a lot of talk about Ireland's behaviour during the war and why Rough Magic had decided to address this subject now. Rough Magic is also taking the show to the Traverse for the four weeks of the Edinburgh Festival, so presumably there'll be another interesting reaction from our neighbour who went to war while we had an, em, Emergency.
Deegan said this week that they would never have been able to consider bringing a show of this size to tour Eastern Europe without the help of Culture Ireland, "which is genuinely making an enormous impact of the scale and type of work that can tour internationally".
Opera fringe hatches plans
The Opera Fringe in Co Down has had a busy year, hatching out both a new producing company, Fringe Performances, and a clutch of spring chicks to adorn another programme of perky and quirky operatic delights, writes Jane Coyle.
While Castleward Opera continues to draw the mainstream opera set, with their champers and posh frocks, to the shores of Strangford Lough (this year with La Bohème and Michael Balfe's rarely performed The Bohemian Girl), Opera Fringe has grown from being its subversive offspring into an established annual event, bringing off-piste music and song to the Georgian town of Downpatrick a few miles away.
Former Opera Northern Ireland artistic director Stephen Barlow conducted the Ulster Orchestra and Opera Theatre Company's Young Associate Artists in the opening gala concert last night in the Great Hall of the Downshire Estate.
Welsh mezzo soprano Buddug Verona James makes a welcome return with her madcap one-woman show A Knife at the Opera and the dramatic "Fire Poet" Philip Wells will also appear. Spontaneous and unpredictable Impropera come back for a second visit; there is an evening of Midsummer Mozart among the ruins of Inch Abbey; English Touring Opera presents a concert version of Pagliacci; and on the final night on June 24th, Morag McLaren will serenade diners at Denvir's Hotel with her distinctive brand of high-energy opera cabaret. www.operafringe.com
Galway festival showdown
This year's Galway Arts Festival announced its programme (July 17th to 30th) this week in Dublin and Galway (see OnTheTown, above), with a really impressive and exciting line-up from first time artistic director Paul Fahy. With a raft of world and Irish premieres and a huge number of national and international artists involved, two of the highlights must be King Ubu and the Hughie O'Donoghue exhibition, which is one of more than 20 visual art shows at the festival, along with a plethora of theatre premieres and music in the Big Top at Fisheries Field.
Not to step on their buzz, or maybe precisely to do that, Project '06 is today launching its own programme festival in Galway, in opposition to the GAF, though opposition isn't a word they'd use. "Fringe" isn't what they call it either, preferring "alternative" or "complementary", and describing it as "indicative of the extraordinary quantity and variety of untapped artistic endeavour in Galway". The programme isn't curated, but managed by Ollie Jennings, Páraic Breathnach and Mike Diskin, who are adamant that this is a once-off festival and not the beginnings of a fringe, and it seems from the outside to be designed more to influence the direction of GAF, and get some influence on its board.
Project '06 arose from some local artists' dissatisfaction and they've got together a programme of 167 events, projects, shows and exhibitions. Their programme details problems they see with the GAF, and on the back some suggestions for the festival: more street events; an enlarged Galway Showcase; a €25,000 seed fund to develop Galway arts groups, an advisory group, a full-time local PRO; and an enlarged board, from seven to 10-12 people, to serve a maximum of four years.
Some of their suggestions have merit, and indeed some may see fruit, but organising a whole new festival seems like an extreme way to make a point. Still, it means Galway at festival time will be livelier than ever.
Large sections of the Irish theatre community are likely to be missing from their usual venues next Thursday and Friday, but may be found in Limerick, where more than 150 delegates from the arts sector will attend Theatre Forum's annual conference at the University of Limerick. Tagged "A Vital Stage", and curated by former Galway Arts Festival artistic director Rose Parkinson, it will be opened by the visionary international director Peter Sellars, who will give a keynote address, Art as Moral Action.
Stewart Lee (Jerry Springer: The Opera); Janet Steel, director of Behzti, and Neal Foster of the Birmingham Stage Company will discuss Censorship and Artistic Freedom, and playwright Tom Murphy will be in conversation with Fiach MacConghail. Bookings at 01-8746582, theatreforum@ireland.com
•The Everyman Palace Theatre in Cork must feel it can claim some right to bask in the glory reflected from the number of Irish nominations for this year's Tony Awards, now that its commissioned production of Wrecks by Neil LaBute is to open in New York in early October, writes Mary Leland. And off-Broadway in September, Everyman's production of Sisters by Declan Hasset returns Anna Manahan to the city where she won the Tony Award in 1998 for her performance in The Beauty Queen of Leenane. Like Sisters, Wrecks is written for a single character, in this case a successful motor-salesman played by Ed Harris. When the play premiered in Cork during the city's year as European Capital of Culture in 2005 Harris hadn't performed live on stage for nine years, yet carried the apparently easygoing characterisation with ease and conviction. Directed by LaBute himself, Wrecks gets its American premiere at New York's Public Theatre. Writer, film-maker and theatre director LaBute is best known for his often controversial films, which include In the Company of Men, Nurse Betty and Possession, and his list of 17 plays includes Autobahn and This is How it Goes. The script of Wrecks is to be published later this year by Faber and Faber.
Meanwhile Sisters, which returns to the Everyman on Monday after a national tour, will be staged at 59E59, on Manhattan's 59th Street, directed by Michael Scott and designed by Stuart Marshall.
•Former EU commissioner David Byrne SC has been appointed chairman of the new National Concert Hall board, which will steer the NCH through what is sure to be an exciting time as plans take shape for the expanded concert hall at Earlsfort Terrace. He takes over as chairman from Dermot Egan, who remains on the board. The other new appointees are Cathal Goan, Rachel Holstead, Ite O'Donovan, Karan Thompson, Dorothea Dowling, Paddy Moloney, Mark Ryan, Niall Ó Donnchú and David Byers. Seán Braiden, Fionnuala Hunt, Carmel Ryan and Patricia Slavin have been reappointed, and the board will serve until May 2011. Minister for Arts John O'Donoghue has "every confidence that the board will play its part in bringing this historic decision [ to expand the concert hall] to fruition".
