One down, one to go

In the first week of Galway Arts Festival, Deirdre Falvey sampled some solo shows and enjoyed this year's strong comic thread

Heather Woodbury, the writer and performer who first made an impact at the 2002 festival, with her four-night odyssey What Ever, returned to Galway this year to première a work in progress, Tale Of Two Cities, which took place over three consecutive nights. It deals with two stories on separate US coasts; one is set against New York's 1957 loss of the Brooklyn Dodgers and a Mexican-American community's eviction to make way for the new Dodgers stadium in Los Angeles. The contemporary story told in parallel is of another loss: 9/11 and the bewilderment and confusion of its fallout for a range of New York people.

Woodbury's skill is in creating a world of interlinked characters and building up a narrative in which she plays every part, complete with physical and facial tics and voice contortions. Her work is epic in all senses; in fact the first night was reportedly a bum-numbing three and a half hours long. But dropping in on what she describes as an American joyride on multiple tracks on Saturday, the middle night, involved a much more manageable 55 minutes. The project's breadth of vision was as wide as the continent, though the result was a little rough at some edges. There's no indication of what's gone on before in the story, so you just have to step on the ride and see where it gets you. It was admirable for its scale, the feat of memory (with the odd shake), Woodbury's skill in multiple characterisation and the intelligent portrayal of a world where certainties are tumbling, and how individuals function within that disintegration. The book isn't closed on it yet, but overall I found it a tad underwhelming, and less exhilarating than her show two years ago.

Prince Of Denmark was a three-handed spoof of Hamlet from the inventive local company Electric Bridget. The eponymous Prince is a run-down hotel, Claudia is the scheming sister-in-law of widowed Trudie, and daft poet Teddy Jr attempts to avenge his father's murder with the help of a chorus of two cleaning women, between mooning after the unattractive, nose-picking waitress Olivia, whose handywoman mother, Pauline, and dim brother Larry complete the cast.

These gloriously drawn characters are played with gusto by Helen Gregg, Carmel Stephens and Fred McCloskey, and the convoluted romp has a lovely light touch. Eileen Gibbons and Gregg, who created the previous Electric Bridget shows, wrote the totally silly and very funny script, which Gibbons directed. Very enjoyable, though it could do with being 15 minutes shorter.

The evening after Francis Wheen spoke about How Mumbo-jumbo Conquered The World, John Lahr, the New Yorker drama critic and theatre veteran (and son of comedian and Wizard Of Oz Cowardly Lion Bert Lahr), discussed comedy as revenge at the Town Hall Theatre. His thesis was that comedy was a way for the lowliest in society to get revenge on a world that would have otherwise have excluded them.

Speaking partially from personal experience - as well as having examined the lives and careers of many comedians, he once carried Buster Keaton's ukelele - he said the characteristic of great clowns such as Chaplin, Keaton, his father, Groucho Marx and W. C. Fields is to be in touch with and express the infantile; our violent expression of infantile feelings must be repressed to live in society, and therefore we pay people to express them on stage.

His argument incorporated the comic work of Barry Humphries, Joe Orton, Roseanne Barr and what he called the "phallic fun in great comedy", using their personalities as a sort of comic attack.

Laughter was again to the fore in Barry Murphy's Comedy Circus on Sunday night after the parade; rather than picking up on any of the performers or happenings from the festival, a gang of Irish veterans of the comedy-club scene - Kevin Gildea, Sue Collins, Dermot Carmody and Ian Coppinger - were joined by the top British visual clowns Men In Coats and, delightfully, Aenghus McAnally, a figure of fun to some, who demonstrated that he's in on the joke and can operate as a stand-up raconteur with the best of them.

The show was sometimes ragged, and a few routines weren't thought through sufficiently, but there were plenty of solid laughs, with the timeless physical antics of Men in Coats the high point.

The appearance of the US cajun band Beausoleil was one of the first shows to sell out at the festival, although the gig in the event was a bit flat and undynamic. There was a mix of musical styles - Tex-Mex, country, blues - from the veteran six-piece; the venue, at the Radisson SAS Hotel, was not ideal for what is essentially dance music, and it took a while to get going.

At the other end of the performance spectrum was the Beijing Dance Academy, a troupe of about 40 graceful and vigorous dancers whose myriad styles encompassed traditional, ceremonial Chinese dance, classical (barefoot) ballet and contemporary dance. They brought the house down on their two sell-out shows.

The Australian Strange Fruit were to bring an outdoor spectacle called The Spheres, but the vagaries of international couriers conspired to lose the actual spheres, so at short notice they devised new costumes overnight to re-create a previous show. They performed high above the audience on giant flexible poles: four men and four women in formal wedding gear, gently and mesmerisingly swaying in the night air, against the backdrop of a darkening sky and the Spanish Arch. A dance sequence here, a comic turn or pratfall there, to a muted soundtrack and to hypnotic effect.

Dramatically, the Bush Theatre's The Glee Club and the festival production of Mark Doherty's first play, Trad, were generally seen as hits of the first week. Expectation was high for La Veillée des Abysses from Compagnie du Hanneton and James Thiérrée this week; his Junebug Symphony from two years ago is still talked about with awe.

The festival being what it is, as well as the formal programme there are opportunities for spontaneity on the streets; a foursome of young black acrobats on Shop Street on Saturday night was spectacular and highly skilled - good enough to be on a stage somewhere. And then you can happen upon Umbrella events on the periphery - such as a mixed grill of midnight performances from Enso at Ard Bia restaurant, one of which involved a guy in boxer shorts steadily coring a mound of apples, eating the cores and stacking the apples in the fireplace. All part of the fun.

Galway Arts Festival continues until July 26th