William Galinsky is hoping to turn Cork into a 'cultural theme park' during the Midsummer Festival, he tells Mary Leland
William Galinsky's shredded appearance has nothing to do with his position as director of the Cork Midsummer Festival, where he replaced Ali Robertson early in January. His appointment came in the middle of the festival's preparations, with much of the programme already in place, proposals to be considered, arrangements to be confirmed and gaps to be filled.
He also has to tackle the task of finding a new candidate for the remainder of manager Dyane Hanrahan's maternity leave. But this is the hand Galinsky accepted and he's playing it very cagily; reluctant, he says, to let a cat out of the bag. All anybody wants to know at this stage - the festival runs from June 19 to 30 - is that there are a few cats to be let out.
One of them at least is already acknowledged. Corcadorca has become something of a stalwart of the festival agenda and this year the company's production of Georg Büchner's Woyzeckhas already whetted the public's appetite by building on the mystery surrounding its eventual open-air location. This has been confirmed as Haulbowline's Naval Base in Cork Harbour, where some of the buildings date from the early 19th century, more or less architecturally in tune with the play. Composer Mel Mercier is collaborating on the promenade production, which will be directed by Pat Kiernan and designed by Paul Keogan. Catching up with the rhythm of preparations such as these is keeping Galinsky busy - he is diligent about turning up at local performances, exhibitions, concerts and meetings - but he doesn't pretend that this year his involvement will be much more than a waiting and learning period.
All the same, there is the immediate boost of a major increase in the Arts Council grant for the festival - up by nearly 80 per cent to €187,000. "That's a great arrival gift, but really it's a terrific compliment to what Ali and Dyane and their team have achieved," says Galinsky. Despite the tensions of a new job in a strange city and the strain of selling his London home, the frayed cuffs and lapels are a designer statement rather than an attempt to redefine the notion of "casual". "This is French Connection," he insists, opening his jacket to show the label. "It comes frayed." The T-shirt is Willie Wonka, and what with the glasses and the head of black curls it's easy to forget that this is a man of 34 with a wide-ranging curriculum vitae. He is also a personification of the idea that an immigrant background can make the world one's oyster. His antecedents arrived in England as refugees from pogroms in Lithuania and Poland; travelling at the turn of the last century they believed, as so many others seem to have done on similar voyages, that they had reached New York when in fact they were only in Hull.
"The best things come from chaos and misunderstanding," says Galinsky, explaining that his choice of Slavonic studies at Oxford made sense to a boy from Leeds with a background in the United Synagogue. At college he had acted "badly, but with great joy", and from there went on to study both acting and directing at the Moscow Art Theatre School and later at the Maly Theatre in St Petersburg, as well as at London's Drama Centre. His Russian experience brought him into contact with the lingering living traces of the country's most famous theatrical traditions - his voice teacher in Moscow had been one of Stanislavsky's assistant directors and young Galinsky, the first student from an English-speaking country to take an acting course in Russia (this was in 1993), found himself working with one of the last surviving people from that almost legendary era.
Growing up in Leeds kept him in respectful contact with an amateur theatre presenting European avant-garde while the professional touring companies were still offering Agatha Christie. It also gave him a taste for the kind of thing he could do during, for example, his engagement with the Northern Stage company in Newcastle, where he worked with participatory groups united by a common background - in this case mining - or with "disadvantaged" players (he mimes the quotation marks) using dodgem-car locations as an emphasis for community conductivity.
His later list, however, works up to include teaching at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art in the past seven years, and his time as assistant director with Adrian Noble on the Royal Shakespeare Company's (RSC) production of The Seagullin 1999, followed by his work on Season of Migration to the North(based on the novel by Tayeb Salih) for the RSC 2005 New Work Festival. Touring a Japanese account of The Winter's Talefor the Hayu-Za Theatre from Tokyo through France, Romania and Russia while working as associate artist with London's Arcola Theatre has kept his international profile at a level that suggests he may be able to bring great things to Cork, and he admits, with some modesty, that this is one of the reasons he's here.
"For a long time my ambition has been to create a solid body of work and to build a relationship with an audience, a kind of expectation," Galinsky says. "I think Ali and Dyane have already achieved something quite extraordinary for Cork, by nurturing home-grown or emerging artists while encouraging the audience's enjoyment of unusual work. This festival has had things happening which are not the norm, it has shown a real taste for the adventurous. Although I'm working now to a vicarious portfolio, because I can't have seen much, or any, of what has gone before, I'm interested in seeing where we can take that spirit of adventure."
LISTENING TO GALINSKY talk about the future - albeit in cautious terms given that this is a period of transition - it is easy to forget that he is a man with a passionate identification with his own heritage, even if he might not describe it in those terms. He was born William Glynne, for example, a name which he feels had been adopted as a means of hiding something which no longer needs to be a secret; with Hebrew as the language of his religion and educated in a Church of England school, he describes himself as a child of dual beliefs, a background which he believes is "incredibly healthy". The invited complexities of his life are framed, more or less, by his decision to return to his grandfather's name six or seven years ago, and by his marriage to the writer Eimear McBride, who was born in Liverpool but reared in Sligo and Mayo and is now preparing to join him in Cork.
His new colleagues in Cork are looking to something of this personal and professional portfolio to strengthen the international flavour of the festival, and Galinsky seems to be thinking that way too. "You bring your professional relationships into any new roles you take up. I come in with a number of things I want to do. I've inherited a few items for this year which are not set in stone but my immediate priority is consolidation and continuity, especially as local practitioners have such a big stake in this event. I believe a festival should feel something like a cultural theme park, with the eradication of the division between what I see as highbrow and lowbrow, so that things can be fun while not unserious. But above all, the city will have to wake up to the sense that something is going on, that something important is happening."
Promising to have learned a lot by next year, so that, as he says, "2008 will be a different kettle of fish", William Galinsky isn't letting a cat out of the bag when he remarks that this year the Cork Midsummer Festival promises to be the biggest yet, with a really diverse and exciting programme across all the art forms, or, as he says, "what a festival should be like".
The Cork Midsummer Festival runs from June 19 to 30 www.corkfestival.com
