Galway International Arts Festival 2024 unveils line-up led by Mark O’Rowe world premiere

Galway International Arts Festival has announced its programme for 2024, including seven world premieres, a new visual-arts commission and its biggest music line-up.

Among the highlights of this year’s event, which runs from Monday, July 15th, to Sunday, July 28th, is the world premiere of Reunion, a new play by Mark O’Rowe, “who turns his laser focus on the deep currents of family life with biting humour and insight”. Featuring Ian-Lloyd Anderson, Cathy Belton, Venetia Bowe, Stephen Brennan, Robert Sheehan and Catherine Walker, it is a festival coproduction with Landmark Productions.

Other premieres include Unspeakable Conversations by Christian O’Reilly, starring the Olivier winner Liz Carr and her fellow disabled actor Mat Fraser, staged by the festival and Once Off Productions; The Map of Argentina, by Marina Carr, which “tunnels deeply into the complicated contours of family dynamics” under the direction of Andrew Flynn of Decadent Theatre; and a new immersive-theatre installation, Dining Room, as part of the series created by the playwright Enda Walsh and the festival’s artistic director, Paul Fahy.

Garry Hynes is directing a new Druid production of Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame, with Aaron Monaghan and Rory Nolan; the Australian circus troupe Circa presents the European premiere of Duck Pond, its reimagining of Swan Lake; and the Lebanese artist Tania El Khoury stages Cultural Exchange Rate, her immersive installation about the never-ending story of migration.

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In visual arts, the Australian sculptor Patricia Piccinini will showcase her body of work We Travel Together, including a site-specific installation commissioned by the festival. This strand also includes works by Bernadette Kiely, Miriam de Búrca, Brian Bourke, Karen Cox, Brian Ballard, Yvonne McGuinness, Cecilia Danell and Katerina Gribkoff, Seán O’Riordan and Peter Bradley, as well as When We Cease to Understand the World, a site-specific group show by seven women artists at the Interface studio in Lough Inagh Valley.

The music programme includes The Saw Doctors, Annie Mac, Passenger, Leftfield, Stewart Copeland, Gavin James, Jess Glynne, Kettama, Kneecap and Block Rockin Beats at the Heineken Big Top.

Topics for the festival’s First Thought Talks series include the US presidential election, the world after climate transition, the rise of machines, the possibilities and disadvantages of a united Ireland, and how close we are to a nuclear catastrophe; the discussions will feature the journalists Marion McKeone and, from The Irish Times, Fintan O’Toole; the novelists Colm Tóibín, Andrew O’Hagan, Mike McCormack and Elaine Feeney; the academics and authors Diarmaid Ferriter and Pankaj Mishra; the philosopher Susan Neiman; the actor and activist Liz Carr; the tech expert Elaine Burke; the climate-change adviser Marie Donnelly; the barrister Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh; the playwright Marina Carr and the psychiatrist Brendan Kelly, among others.

The free street-art programme include the French company Planète Vapeur and its giant winged-horse, Pegasus; Guru Dudu’s silent-disco walking tours; and Les P’Tits Bras’ new aerial-acrobatics show, West Wind.

“We are thrilled to work with such an extraordinary number of artists and colleagues from Galway, Ireland and around the world to deliver this programme,” Fahy says. “It is very exciting to produce and host such exciting world, Irish and European premieres as part of one our most ambitious festival programmes to date. There is simply nowhere quite like Galway during the festival. We look forward to welcoming our audiences this July to share and enjoy two wonderful weeks of great art and performance.”

Booking opens on Wednesday, May 15th; full details are on the festival website