KILKENNY ARTS FESTIVAL:Their was something to suit all palettes in Kilkenny, from politically charged theatre to an exploration of Eugene O'Neill's life and work, writes Peter Crawley
EVERY STORY HAS A beginning, just as every tree, no matter how its branches twist or its seeds scatter, has its roots. That is the case not only for the life and work of Eugene O'Neill, as Fintan O'Toole argued in a probing biographical lecture on the US's foremost dramatist, but perhaps for the psychological theatre of his nation too.
O'Toole's lecture, Long Night's Journey into Day: Eugene O'Neill and Kilkenny, opened with a revealing white lie told by the dramatist's father.
Compelled to say he was born in 1847, rather than 1845, in a magazine interview, the famous actor James O'Neill was motivated by something more than vanity. The fudge, O'Toole pointed out, concealed a childhood that coincided with the beginning of the Famine, rather than its end, while by revising his place of birth from Tinerany, Co Kilkenny to Kilkenny city, O'Neill was masking an intolerable truth: life on a tenant farm in the worst time of Ireland's history.
Untangling that lie to unravel the psychology of hunger, O'Toole traced its effect on James O'Neill's personality and behaviour: the debasing of his talents for the sake of lucrative melodramas, his astonishing and fearful parsimony, his distortion of the past. "Eugene O'Neill remembered the origins his father tried to forget," O'Toole contended, tracing the son's initially cruel response, and eventually tender reconciliation with his father's past through the development of his writing. This extended to the shaping of the US drama and the chronicling of the nation's driving needs in the face of extreme options: feast or famine. This persuasive and fresh analysis of O'Neill's work fitted neatly into an overall project that Colm Tóibín introduced as "a secret history of how Ireland has mattered to the world". But what made it unusual in the context of this year's Kilkenny Arts Festival was how few events seemed similarly intent to forge connections between the locality and the world beyond.
In this year's theatre programme, curated by Tom Creed, Gare St Lazare Players provided another example of an Irish influence superimposed on another nation with the premiere of The End, a performed recital of Beckett's early novella. Written first in English (as The Suite), but concluded in French at the beginning of Beckett's francophone career, The Endis a disoriented tale made more so by the apparent blurring of Dublin and Paris. This makes Conor Lovett's performance, under Judy Hegarty Lovett's direction, as much an act of navigation as interpretation, pursuing the circuitous routes through Beckett's prose and mapping an intriguingly illusory place with the amusing, startling words of his character's addled mind.
Dominating the theatre programme, however, were the first displays in Ireland of the stridently political work of Belarus Free Theatre. Banned under the dictatorship of Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus Free Theatre stage their works in secret - under threat of harassment and arrest - in apartments and forests around Minsk, while their home audiences understand that they might have to pay for their attendance with their liberty.
Championed internationally by Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard and Vaclav Havel, among others, the company's example is undoubtedly stirring, but it is their existence rather than their work that draws most applause. Watching Nikolai Khalezin's Generation Jeanswithin the comforts of a jaded democracy, its simple rallying cry to fight for our freedom brought an unexpected response: a creeping sense of guilt for my blithely untreasured, unfought-for liberty.
Although there was a noticeable development of theatrical form across the successive nights of Belarus Free Theatre's residency - with choreographed movement and moments of inspired spectacle accentuating the political thrust of Vladimir Scherban's Being Harold Pinterand Zone of Silence- it seemed enough for the modest attendance at each performance to celebrate the fact that the company existed at all.
There's quite a gap between the necessary economy of Belarus Free Theatre and the compulsive clutter of Priscilla Robinson's comedy confessional KuddelMuddel. A slide-show-assisted performance that piles up the bric-a-brac of her life - from growing up a Northern Irish Baptist in the Republic to a seemingly ceaseless search for a good therapist - Robinson's show is nothing if not charmingly eccentric. Therapy, she explains, is where you pay someone to let you "sit down and talk about yourself for about an hour". For all its wicked gags, you suspect KuddelMuddelprovides her with much the same opportunity - only the transaction is reversed. Performed in Oxfam, for which Robinson auctions off some of her accumulated tat, the show manages to be both inwardly obsessed and outwardly charitable: self-centred, but for a good cause.
WHILE THE REST OF the country slipped deeper underwater, Kilkenny was spared the worst of the deluge. The only inconveniences of a steadily soggy August came for street-theatre acts. Family-friendly breakdance crew Physical Jerks had to rain check on the grounds of Kilkenny Castle, but didn't let the drizzle dampen their spirits, while multi-talented Baladeu'x stayed indoors, the Belgian duo excelling not only at juggling, clowning and acrobatics but also proving dab hands on the accordion. Still, the inclement weather made it possible to spend the weekend guiltlessly indoors and in the dark, witnessing the filmic legacy of Donal McCann or 3epkano's live scoring of classics movies of the silent era.
Where the memories of theatre audiences preserve performances with a warm fuzzy glow, elevating Olivier's Hamlet, Siobhán McKenna's Mommo or indeed Donal McCann's Frank Hardy to almost mythical proportions, film is an unforgiving medium for an actor. That's why people can wax lyrical about Michéal MacLiammóir on stage, but anyone who discovers him hamming it up in Orson Welles's King Learwill feel conned. It's a relief, then, to see what a fluent and subtle command of the medium Donal McCann had in December Brideand The Dead, or to encounter the wit and candour he displays in Bob Quinn's illuminating documentary, It Must Be Done Right.
It is also reassuring, for anyone who worries that silent films carry the pall of a museum, that FW Murnau's Sunrisenot only willingly accommodates the fluid post-rock accompaniment of 3epkano, but also finds room in its fevered morality tale for moments that are consolingly, even touchingly naff. 3epkano might take the film more seriously than it takes itself - no movie that gives a significant cameo role to a drunken piglet seems to require so much solemnity. But from the gradual development of delicate guitar motifs, through the restraint and drive of their rhythm section and the well-warranted surge of strings, 3epkano remain beautifully in service to the film. So much so, in fact, they are almost comically diffident when receiving applause.
They could perhaps take lessons from John Williams, whose face was a picture of concentration during his masterful guitar recital in St Canice's Cathedral, but thawed into a warm smile with each gust of applause. Or from the Ireland Asturias Project, a double bill in which the Armagh trad outfit Buille were paired with Spain's Tejedor, in Gerry Godley's reliably invigorating music programme, in the hope of demonstrating "creative exchange". Actually, that exchange already seemed a done deal, the energy of Cormac Breathnach's low whistle and the echo of Celtic cadence in José Manuel Tejedor's Asturian pipes suggesting that the boundaries of traditional music are forever porous.
Likewise, British jazz saxophonist Soweto Kinch seemed entirely at home fronting a newborn trio, with US bassist Michael Janisch and Belfast drummer David Lyttle attacking compositions by each musician with heedless verve and exhilarating results.
Arriving late to St Canice's Cathedral from the cowing national statistics of Belarus Free Theatre's final play, Numbers, to hear just the dying notes of Spiritualized in a beautifully-lit space (performing, aptly enough, Lord Can You Hear Me) was enough to inspire a gluttonous desire for more.
The thought mingled with memories of driving hunger: not just the horror rumbling quietly in the gut and mind of Eugene O'Neill's America, but in a defiant theatre company's insatiable appetite for liberty, or a musician's craving for new ideas, or an audience's ravenous enthusiasm for new experiences. As the last note died, the festival ended, its feast for the senses sating every appetite.
