Day two, and the energy levels are flagging; we're not sure if Oxegen is a music festival or some kind of endurance test created by organisers MCD to punish people.
Either way, there's so much to see/hear and so little time, so in between rushing breakfast, forgetting lunch and seeing so much mud that it puts you off dinner, here are dispatches from the Punchestown trenches.
The early birds are greeted with low-key sets from London's latest vernacular singer Remi Nicole and former Ash guitarist Charlotte Hatherley. Nicole's songs are in a similar vein but slightly different from the kind you hear from Kate Nash and Jack Penate - spiky, spritely lyrics accompanied by sparse, almost naive instrumentation. Her set in the Green Room tent was short and sweet and not without charm, but she needs a smaller space to weave the kind of spell that can capture an audience. Hatherley, on the other hand, seems to be well on the way to carving out a bona fide solo career; her music is a steely hybrid of atmosphere and substance, and it is with reluctance that we leave to catch The Blizzards on the Main Stage.
But wait - what's this? A genuine good time band from Mullingar with songs that can repair the walking wounded and wake up the living dead? The Blizzards have some very fine punk/pop songs in their arsenal and they use them as bullets to kill the weariness that seems to be enveloping some sections of the crowd. By the time The Thrills play the NME Stage in mid-afternoon, interest has perked up, but what surprises is how they start off with a barely there crowd and gradually pull thousands of them onto their side. Wisely sticking closely to their summery-sounding hits, but also playing the occasional tune from their forthcoming album, Teenager, The Thrills needed the enthusiastic reception almost as most as the crowd needed shaking up. A result, then, for everyone.
Come late afternoon, and Sinead O'Connor ambles onto the Pet Sounds stage and delivers an immensely strong sequence of songs that typifies her resilience and resourcefulness; material from her recent album, Theology, is mixed in with hits such as Mandinka and Nothing Compares 2 U, and the result is an invigorating experience that is topped only by Arcade Fire's performance on the Main Stage.
Best witnessed perhaps in the confines of a roofed and walled venue, there is nonetheless something inspiring about Arcade Fire al fresco; for a start, the music seems to literally breathe, the main achievement of which is to further engage with an audience that still manages to (just about) remain on its feet. The overrated Razorlight and the highly efficient Killers rounded off the day, the weekend, the event, the mudfest. And then it was time to go home. Sweet home. - Tony Clayton-Lea
Making History - Charles Fort, Kinsale
For a sublimely odd experience, little compares to the sensation of attending a historical drama - if Brian Friel's engrossing Making History can be called such without complication - and being able to nip out during the interval to verify one of its facts.
"It can't be Kinsale," warns Harry Hoveden, at an early juncture in the play, when plans are announced to land a Spanish armada in the bay. Peering over the battlements of Charles Fort, where Ouroboros's expansive new tour began its campaign, you are inclined to agree. If the natural enclosure doesn't make a Catholic insurgency vulnerable, the transfixing beauty of the sunset probably will.
Then again, Making History is not a play about historical veracity. It is a beautifully balanced exploration of how the messiness of life is tidied up and parsed for the record. When the Catholic archbishop and amateur historian Peter Lombard (Martin Lucey) is asked how he will reconcile the complexities of Red Hugh O'Neill - the Irish-born, English-educated, serial polygamist, proto-nationalist and expedient idealist - he insists that his responsibility is to construct "the best possible narrative". In other words, he won't let the truth get in the way of a good story.
Historical scrupulousness, however, brings consequences for Friel's drama. Trying to honour human complexity comes at the expense of a satisfying best possible narrative. This is why we see such riveting and ambiguous characters as Denis Conway's conflicted Hugh O'Neill or Conan Sweeney's hotheaded Hugh O'Donnell, who succumbs unexpectedly to raw emotion. It is also why we seem to end with an anti-climax in Hugh's lingering, inebriated exile in Rome and not with a romanticised vision of the Flight of the Earls.
Interestingly, that stirring little emblem of Catholic retreat, though thoroughly destabilised by the play, is celebrated with less detectable irony by this 400th anniversary tour. "You make it sound like a victory lap," spits a defeated and jaded Conway at the minting of the phrase, but it's a good description of this travelling production.
The question is whether the venues visited - from Kinsale to Strabane, Paris to Rome - actually add anything to Making History as a theatrical experience. Charlesfort, though undoubtedly atmospheric and leaking rainwater in gloomy sympathy with the unsuccessful rebels, was never designed with a theatre audience in mind; its troublesome sightlines and lack of rigging ensuring a very economical staging.
"Don't embalm me in piety," says Hugh when the sad comedy of his defeat becomes something threateningly serious, measured as he is for the mantle of a hero. If the solemn pilgrimage of this tour threatens to do precisely that - if not to Hugh, then perhaps to Friel's play - there is something still rewardingly complex in the characters it constructs, served by this production's uniformly excellent cast. In that achievement it shrugs off such sanctimony, ignites debate and keeps history compellingly, infuriatingly alive. - Peter Crawley
Tour continues throughout Ireland until Sept 13. www.ouroboros.ie
