Vivid festival brings us back to the well

IN THE closing minutes of Propeller theatre company’s visiting production of Henry V, which marked the first professional performance of Shakespeare’s history play in Ireland since 1906, there came a moment which might have caused a riot in 1916, a murmur of unrest in 1938 and more than a ripple of discomfort in 1972, but last week prompted a roar of laughter instead.

“England is thine,” the victorious Henry tells Katherine, his intended, offering joint custody of his dominion. France, too, “is thine”. But we can hear another spoil coming. “Ireland,” Dugald Bruce-Lockhart’s conqueror begins, then throws the auditorium a placating, bear-with-me gesture. It brought the house down.

That simple concession spoke volumes about our history-addled context and – in Edward Hall’s alert production – the capacity for theatre to address the living moment without inhibition or apology. It was a resonant and winning move. Propeller, the audience is thine.

It also seemed to define the invitation and connections of this year’s Galway Arts Festival, which proposed in its theatre, visual art and music, to let us see ourselves within greater narratives of history, folk, religion or myth.

The festival’s centrepiece production, DruidMurphy, stunningly conceived by director Garry Hynes and mesmerizingly performed by Druid’s ensemble, presented three Tom Murphy plays and suggested a narrative of emigration, unrest and embedded memory with deep roots.

On a much smaller scale, Fishamble Theatre Company in a co-production with the festival, sought to ask similar questions about the source of a new national starvation in Julian Gough’s satirical piece, The Great Goat Bubble. Amusingly and cleverly conceived, Gough’s work became a play, it seemed, because it had already become almost everything else – a short story, a radio drama, the chapter of a novel – but the elaborations for Mikel Murfi’s stage version dulled its edge, with Gough losing sight of drama and finally bleating out his meanings – “proper tea” – like a rash of panic-selling driving down the allegory index.

Return visitor the National Theatre of Scotland afforded its characters more generosity and its audience more faith, with David Greig’s wicked verses in The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart plunging a folk academic into her own myths and making the audience a constant ally to the show’s creation.

It’s a deft and enlivening effect: in folk tales, every person can be a protagonist.

In 2007’s Love and Other Disguises by Colm Maher, a site-responsive “theatre dance” piece staged in St Nicholas’ Church from Catastrophe Theatre and Chrysalis Dance, an imposter priest is dragged into conducting a wedding service for a deeply-divided family. In this year’s Last Shot Redemption by the same writer and players, an imposter priest is hauled into conducting a baptism for two deeply-divided families. That vague similarity persists through the setup, structure, performance, music (Mundy recordings) and resolution of the work. As with its predecessor, dance and dialogue rarely work in unison here, moving instead in a tag-team sequence, which may be the only trick that director Paul Hayes and choreographer Judith Sibley do miss.

For sturdy structure and emotive substance, Bruce Graham’s The Outgoing Tide, in a co-production from Northlight Theatre in association with Galway Arts Festival seemed to radiate its bona fides. Straight out of the Arthur Miller school of American naturalism (flashbacks, mental disintegration), with a soupçon of Eugene O’Neill (destructive father-son issues) and a garnish of Ibsen’s symbolism (squawking geese), its most impressive feature was a terrific performance from John Mahoney as a tormented man struggling to stay in control.

Its plotting, though, runs away from that considered mode, asking for a family’s quick complicity in a devastating action which required a much darker depiction than either Graham or director BJ Jones wished to supply.

As with the shiver of imperialism in Henry V, the living legacy of hunger and spiritual impoverishment in DruidMurphy, the boom-to-bust trajectory of Julian Gough’s fictitious goat market, this was a performance about dispossession, of a noble mind overthrown. Paradoxically, there’s such richness in a festival that has such vivid and thorough examinations of loss.

Ireland is thine, Henry tells his future queen. Emerging from Gough’s barbed satire you might have told her she can have it. Yet this year the imaginative display of Galway Arts Festival found a way to return the country’s soul to us.

First Fringe director earns her stripes

ON A RARE dry summer’s evening in a restored Georgian townhouse above Galway’s salmon weir, there is scarcely a whisper as Traolach Ó Conghaíle sings sean-nós, of sorrow and loss.

Over the river, three witches are brewing up a Shakespearean storm and borrowing from Friel and Beckett, just several hours after the fictional citizens of Ballyganruaile have colonised the same squash court-turned-theatre space.

Welcome to Galway’s first official Fringe festival . . . For director Claire Keegan it’s been an infectious success. Would she do it again? No question about it, she says, with several first nights and a weekend of events still to come.

The established arts festival’s theatre programme was almost completely booked out within several days of its opening: there had never been a better time for an alternative. And the fact that Keegan also secured the aforementioned event’s blessing meant there had never been a better “first Fringe” director.

Keegan has no “baggage”: no history with Project ’06, the parallel drama, music and performance event which caused such friction within the city’s arts community six years ago. From Galway originally, Keegan spent time with Punchbag Theatre Company, with Deirdre O’Connell in Dublin’s Focus, and in Edinburgh, before returning home.

Working with her were a team of interns and volunteers, many from NUI Galway, while she also enlisted experienced hands such as technical manager Darach Ó Ruairc and production manager Oisín Clarke. Venues were secured at no charge: the event’s biggest expense was the cost of the printed programme, and the hire of lighting and sound equipment.

Whereas the Galway Arts Festival is a curated event, the Fringe invited submissions – ranging from comedy, drama and dance to cabaret, music and workshops. It adopted a policy of low ticket pricing (from €5-€15) and offered free sessions, such as the nightly Airnéal na Coiribe music and storytelling evening in English and Irish, hosted by Gráinne Ní Fhoighil in the Corrib Tea Rooms.

Writer Mick Donnellan, whose play Velvet Revolution was staged by Truman Theatre over 10 lunchtimes in the Townhouse bar, believes the extensive and often experimental programme proved its worth. Some of the companies are heading “on tour” – for instance, his own work will run in the New Theatre, Temple Bar, Dublin from August 20th to 27th.

“I was initially quite sceptical, but was very pleasantly surprised,” Maria Tivnan admits. Tivnan was involved in Project ’06, with a children’s show in NUIG. “We held it in what was a squash court and is now the Cube Theatre, and we had so many kids who wanted to go . . . it was one of the best summers of my life,” she recalls.

Now artistic director with Fregoli Theatre Company, she registered Raymond Scannell’s Breathing Water with Keegan. The play has already been staged in Dublin’s Focus and secured five stars at the Edinburgh Fringe.

“We were a bit nervous, thinking everyone in Galway would have seen it already, but we were delighted to find our audiences comprised random punters and visitors,” Tivnan says. “And the alternative programme created its own atmosphere, in that there was something on every street corner.”

It also generated its own sense of adventure, for both audiences and participants. Fregoli’s “wooah” moment occurred when someone found the button for the disco ball in their upstairs venue in Kelly’s bar.

"We introduced it at a poignant moment in the play," Tivnan laughs. "It was such an unexpected, but brilliant, prop to have!" – Lorna Siggins

See galwayfringe.ie

Some highlights

The post-show discussions

Particularly enjoyable were Eileen Walsh, Marie Mullen and Garrett Lombard after Conversations on a Homecoming at the Town Hall Theatre. As the women removed their wigs, Lombard revealed that actor Rory Nolan drinks seven pints during the play – 14 on the day they also performed in Neachtain’s. That drew gasps.

David Mach’s Precious Light

The obsessively detailed collages in this biblical exhibition seemed sharp but fussy, as though desperate for an iconic source of spectacle, but the frozen performance in his charred matchstick sculptures and the massive crucifixions of figures created from coat hangers were awe-inspiring for almost the same reason.

The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart

Involving, infectious and restlessly entertaining, David Greig’s work gave mythic echoes to the most unlikely utterances. Thanks to the National Theatre of Scotland, we may never hear Kylie Minogue in quite the same way again.