A battered Cortina sweeps across the lawns of Kilkenny Castle, halting in front of the wooden parapet in the courtyard. Out leaps a group of triumphant combatants, fresh from the scene of battle: Claudio, Benedick, Don Pedro and Don John enjoy a hero's welcome from the ladies after their victory over . . . the Tipperary hurling team?
This is Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing - a comedy of two pairs of aristocratic lovers and two sets of misapprehensions - given a distinctly local twist in a new open-air co-production between Bickerstaffe Theatre and Kilkenny Arts Week. Set in that period much favoured by hindsight, the 1950s, on the day of an All-Ireland final between Kilkenny and Tipperary, the Irish context is fleshed out by rural policemen on bicycles and the authentic thumping of a wedding showband.
Following the success of Bickerstaffe's Macbeth, directed by Conall Morrison four years ago, the Kilkenny Arts Week organisers aim to make the open-air staging of Shakespeare an annual event. With its enlarged budget, this year's festival is celebrating its 25th birthday by expanding from its traditional bases of classical music and visual arts, to include more theatre, as well as comedy, film and literature.
Previewing today and opening tomorrow, Much Ado is co-directed by actor and director, Maeliosa Stafford, and Australian director, John O'Hare. "John is doing the real work, in fact. I'm his assistant," says Stafford, who has spent the past few weeks commuting between Kilkenny and Galway, where he has been performing nightly as the murderous brother, Coleman, in Druid's fine production of Martin McDonagh's The Lonesome West, which closes tonight.
Permanently based in Sydney, where he directs mainly Irish plays for O'Punksy's Theatre, which he runs with John O'Hare, Stafford likes to return to work in Ireland at least once a year. Although he loves Australia, where he is married with three children, the former artistic director of Druid misses Ireland, "especially Galway", but has no plans to move back in the immediate future.
The challenge of staging Irish work in a multi-cultural context ensures that he keeps "learning and developing", both as an actor and director, and he is also involved in devising work and developing scripts, as he has successfully done in the past, notably Vincent Woods's At The Black Pig's Dyke and Song Of The Yellow Bittern for Druid.
Much Ado was chosen as the centrepiece of this year's Kilkenny Arts Week, because "it's light, and fun, with lots of scope to change it to an Irish context". With much of the comic sub-plots cut out, the emphasis in this production is on clarity and simplicity of story-telling, on spectacle and general accessibility. "We're not looking on it as Shakespeare at all," Stafford says, pronouncing the word as if it might be an infectious disease. "It's a drama about truth and lies, which is timeless, because the human heart doesn't change."
Highlights of Kilkenny Arts Week include: a literary cabaret with Patrick McCabe and Jack Lukeman; readings by Bernard McLaverty and Peter Fallon; recitals by pianist Max Levinson, violinist Cora Venus Lunny, the Swedish contemporary music group, Ensemble Son, and the New Helsinki Quartet; Rolf Hanson's paintings in St Mary's Lane; the mellow English folk/rocker, John Martyn, and a mini-festival of film at the city's new cineplex. (Further information and booking from: 056-52175.)